Where Trump departs from Machiavelli
On redistricting and Iran, the president failed to hedge against risk.
Donald Trump might not have read much of Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” but he certainly agrees with the philosopher’s 16th-century counsel that it’s better for a statesman “to be impulsive than cautious” if he wants to hold power. That impulsiveness was on display last year when the president pushed the Texas state legislature to gerrymander its electoral maps before the midterms in the hope of maintaining Republican control of Congress. And it was on display this year when Trump seized an opportunity to wipe out the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
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These impetuous acts were leaps into the unknown. Mid-decade gerrymandering is aggressive and unusual, but the president’s political operation must have figured that Republicans could squeeze more seats out of red states than Democrats, responding in kind, could out of blue ones. U.S. wars in the Middle East haven’t been political or strategic winners, but the commander in chief probably figured that he was on a roll after the bombing of Iran last June and the raid on Venezuela in January.
Both gambles are failing to pay off, at least so far. Democrats responded to Trump’s redistricting push in Texas with a retaliatory redraw of California’s map. Virginia Democrats proposed an audacious gerrymander that Old Dominion voters approved last week. The net result of Trump’s attempt to consolidate control in the House could well be a loss of Republican seats. The president overestimated his power to force GOP gerrymanders in states such as Indiana and underestimated how ferocious a Democratic response his escalation would provoke.
The adventure in Iran is in limbo for similar reasons. What Trump said would be a four- to six-week war began eight weeks ago and is now frozen in a fragile ceasefire that some of Trump’s allies want to break. Islamist radicals still rule the country, and their missile and drone stockpiles are not destroyed.
Most important for Trump’s political calculus, trade in the Strait of Hormuz is still throttled, raising prices in the United States and eroding his support in opinion polls (his net approval rating, according to RealClearPolitics, has fallen from -11 to -17 since the war began). Once again, the president overestimated his ability to impose his will on a rival. And he failed to adequately anticipate the rival’s course of escalation — in this case, the Iranian regime’s leveraging of Hormuz against the world economy.
Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. Trump’s redistricting power grab could have worked if Republican legislatures proved more willing to gerrymander than Democratic ones. His foreign policy aggression could have been a political winner if the Islamic republic surrendered or collapsed under the American-Israeli onslaught. The second- and third-order effects of most political maneuvers are unknowable. Machiavelli argued that all leaders are at the mercy of fortune.
Where Trump has departed from Machiavelli’s playbook is not his boldness but his failure to hedge. The philosopher compared fortune to a river that sometimes floods uncontrollably, overwhelming everything else. “Still, the fact that a river is like this doesn’t prevent us from preparing for trouble when levels are low,” he wrote, “building banks and dykes, so that when the water rises the next time it can be contained.”
Trump hasn’t built many banks or dykes to hedge against bad fortune. Instead, in his second term he has piled up a series of risky gambits. The gerrymander play would have had a better chance of success if Trump kept up his own approval rating. Yet the president set off a volatile redistricting process and then launched an unpopular war before the midterms.
Virginia voters approved the state’s Democratic gerrymander by only about three percentage points; if Trump were modestly more popular, the referendum might have failed. The blowback from one war of choice (Iran) is compounding the defeat in the other (gerrymandering). Cunning rulers pick their spots.
Boldness and fortune have served Trump well in his extraordinary political career, and they still could. He knows, as Machiavelli did, that statesmen who fail to take aggressive steps can just as easily be undone by their caution.
But the president is looking less blessed by fortune as his second term in office develops. “We’ve all seen how a ruler may be doing well one day and then lose power the next without any apparent change in his character or qualities,” Machiavelli wrote. That happens when he “trusts entirely to luck.”
Put aside whether Trump’s ruthless form of politics is righteous or justified. “The successful ruler is the one who adapts to changing times,” Machiavelli added. The gambler, meanwhile, keeps pulling the same lever, hoping his luck will turn. Time to start building those dykes.