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He might marvel at Donald Trump’s ability to get away with so many lies. Other than that, the president’s behaviour hasn’t really changed since before the pandemic.Trump’s hunger for public affirmation might have worried Machiavelli. Leaders inevitably want to be both feared and loved, but Machiavelli famously warned that if they have to choose, “it is far safer to be feared.”
It’s common to describe ruthless or devious politicians as “Machiavellian.” But rarely in the United States have we seen an embodiment of the traits Machiavelli admired quite like Donald Trump, the president-elect.
To say that Trump displays attributes that Machiavelli deemed necessary in the fractious, perpetually warring states of the 16th century is not to recommend him as a modern leader. Nobody would want a neo-feudal dictator to lead a 21st-century democracy, you might think. But the American public voted Tuesday for Trump, perhaps in part because it shares Machiavelli’s concept of strength, or as he liked to call it, “virtue.”
I came to my interest in Machiavelli in a somewhat unusual way: I wrote the libretto for an opera about him, composed by Mohammed Fairouz, which will premiere in March at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam.
One thing I discovered in the process was that Machiavelli mocked the version of “political correctness” of his day. He thought most advice manuals for princes were nonsense, in calling for saintly goodness rather than strength. For Machiavelli, leadership was about the decisive exercise of power, not about morality. The prince’s task was to create a strong state, not necessarily a “good” one.
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