“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they’ll never sit under.” There’s an inverse to that wisdom. Great societies decline when old men chop down forests meant to provide shade and oxygen for future generations. Donald Trump isn’t making America great again, he’s clear-cutting American values.
Normal
Late last Thursday night, the president posted a video promoting his debunked 2020 election conspiracy theories. The clip includes images of Michelle and Barack Obama as apes. The following morning, the video drew widespread backlash, including from Senator Tim Scott, a Trump ally and the only Black Republican in the Senate, who called it “the most racist” thing he’s seen out of this White House. (Note the implication: Trump has provided other examples of racism for Senator Scott to benchmark against.) Initially, press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the criticism as “fake outrage.” Insisting he hadn’t made a mistake, Trump doubled down, calling the video “very strong in terms of voter fraud,” and adding that he was the “least racist president you’ve had in a long time.”
Trump’s crisis management role model remains Roy Cohn, the lawyer who served as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attack dog. Cohn taught Trump to respond to criticism immediately using asymmetrical force: Admit nothing, deny everything, and always claim victory, no matter the actual outcome. I teach a session on crisis communications in my Brand Strategy course at Stern. The scale of a crisis isn’t a function of the mistake, but how you react to it. The better playbook: Acknowledge the issue in plain language, take responsibility, and don’t just fix the problem, overcorrect with force disproportionate to the mistake.
As criticism of Trump’s video continued to mount, he moved on to other targets, calling an American Olympic skier who criticized his policies a “loser.” Next, he attacked Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance, writing on Truth Social, “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children watching.” Not to worry — Kid Rock performed at an alternate half-time show which felt like watching a Ford Pinto compete at F1 Monaco. Supposedly, the criteria for entrance to Kid Rock’s performance was knowing the purchase limits on Sudafed or wearing an ankle monitor.
Trump’s performative concern over bad role models — won’t someone think of the children? — is rich from a man who appears in the Epstein files 38,000 times. More times than Jesus is mentioned in the Bible; more times than the word “meth” is uttered in all five seasons of Breaking Bad (#awesome). Trump’s depraved behavior is so omnipresent it’s been normalized. Worse, it’s become the cultural context for an entire generation of future civic, business and nonprofit leaders. Trump has been running for president or in office for a decade — if 2024 was the first election you were old enough to vote in, that’s more than half your life. According to a 2018 Quinnipiac poll, 90% of Americans believe it’s important for the president to be a good role model.
Role Models
Sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term “role model” in 1957 while studying the socialization of medical students. Distinguishing between reference groups (the crowd you want to belong to) and role models (individuals you emulate in a specific social role), Merton found that we learn “scripts” from role models that teach us how to behave in a specific status (doctor, leader, parent, etc.). Emulating role models, the med students engaged in “anticipatory socialization,” adopting the professional values and norms of practitioners before officially becoming doctors themselves. Building on Merton’s work, psychologists Thekla Morgenroth, Michelle K. Ryan, and Kim Peters argued in a 2015 paper that role models serve three motivational functions: acting as behavioral models, representing what’s possible, and serving as sources of inspiration.
In her book Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin, historian Pamela Walker Laird argues that access to role models is essential for accumulating social capital and influencing the career paths of American business leaders. According to Laird, Ben Franklin, the prototype for an American inventor/entrepreneur, served as a role model to countless nineteenth-century business leaders, including Thomas Mellon, B.F. Goodrich, and Frederick Weyerhäuser. For a contemporary example of a business role model, see the Steve Jobs “uniform” — black turtlenecks, Levi’s 501s, and New Balance sneakers. Explaining the enduring popularity of Jobs-coded looks on TikTok last year, psychotherapist Eloise Skinner told Fortune, “Zoomers have expressed confusion about what to wear for work, given that many started their careers working from home in their pajamas during the pandemic.” In other words, more than a decade after his death, Jobs continues to provide a script for how aspiring business leaders should carry themselves.
Medical students, aspiring entrepreneurs, and sartorially confused Zoomers don’t choose their role models at random, however. In his 2015 book The Secret of Our Success, Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich argued that what sets humans apart from other species is our capacity for cultural learning. According to Henrich, role models are “storage units” for cultural survival skills, and we’re hardwired to identify high-prestige role models. Explaining a scenario where players had the choice to contribute money (or not) to a community project, Henrich wrote, “When the high-prestige player had the opportunity to contribute money first, he or she tended to contribute to, and thus cooperate in, the joint effort, and then the following low-prestige player usually did as well. So, everyone won.” But when the low-prestige player went first, they tended not to contribute, and then, neither did the high-prestige player. In effect, high-prestige people can initiate/veto collaboration, giving them power to set a group’s agenda, whereas low-prestige people have limited veto power and often follow the lead of … a role model.
One recent example: The “Trump dance” phenomenon. The dance dates to his 2020 campaign — the nadir of Trump’s appeal/prestige. Four years later, after Trump mounted the greatest political comeback in American history, professional athletes, the general public, and two world leaders (Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Argentina’s President Javier Milei) were emulating a septuagenarian’s Village People impression. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it’s good to be the authoritarian.
Cy
Last fall, my Pivot co-host Kara Swisher and I did a live tour. The final stop was Los Angeles, my hometown. It was a full-circle moment for me, as one of my early role models was in the audience. When I was 13, I walked into the Dean Witter office in Westwood with $200 my mother’s boyfriend had given me, with instructions to figure out how to buy stocks or return the money. At Dean Witter, Cy Cerro, a good man with an irrational passion for the well-being of a child who wasn’t his, gave me my first lesson in financial markets. We decided to invest my bounty in 13 shares of Columbia Pictures, ticker CPS, at $15 3/8. Each weekday for the next two years, I’d drop two dimes into a payphone and call Cy to discuss my portfolio. He made time for me. He also made time to call my mom. Not to pitch her for business (we had no money), but to let her know what we discussed in the calls and say nice things about me.
Eventually, I lost touch with Cy and sold the stock to fund a road trip to Ensenada with my UCLA fraternity brothers. But in 2021, I reconnected with my old broker. Our lives had moved along eerily similar paths: UCLA, financial services (both of us at Morgan Stanley, via Dean Witter for Cy); divorce, two kids, and then entrepreneurship. I’ve made a good/great living starting and selling companies. However, the bulk of my wealth is a function of one thing I’ve done since the age of 13 — invest in stocks. Unfortunately, there are three times as many women applying to be Big Sisters in NYC than men applying to be Big Brothers. In sum, we need more Cy Cerros. Note: You don’t need to be a baller or have your own family to mentor a young man. Just a guy trying to lead a virtuous life who has the most important thing to share: your presence.
Weimar
My intellectual sherpas these days are the historians Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Synder. Whenever they’re on my podcast, I’m reminded history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. After reelecting an insurrectionist grifter, America doesn’t yet rhyme with the Third Reich, but the late-stage Weimar Republic. One alarming parallel: rhetoric that dehumanizes political opponents and out-groups. In his speeches, Hitler deployed “vermin” and “parasite” to fearmonger Germans into committing mass murder. Trump calls immigrants “garbage” from “shit-hole countries,” priming (some) Americans to want to throw out their neighbors. Meanwhile, the press is the “enemy of the people,” and dissenters are the “enemy within.” A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that the use of violent words in Trump’s speeches has trended upward since 2015, with an increasing focus on crime. “The growing violence of Trump’s language suggests a strategy aimed at spreading anxiety in order to boost demand for a strong leader who can combat the threats he invokes,” wrote the study’s authors, UCLA political science professors Nikita Savin and Daniel Treisman.
Cloud Cover
Another alarming parallel with Weimar Germany? Business leaders who provide cloud cover with their silence. German industrialists might’ve stopped Hitler but chose silence instead, as they wanted his help crushing labor unions. In public, Fortune 500 CEOs are silent about Trump. They prefer to wait him out, issuing watered-down press releases through trade groups only when absolutely necessary and bending the knee in exchange for tariff relief and favorable regulatory treatment. In other words, they’ve chosen the path of zero resistance, creating a speedway for an authoritarian.
In private, it’s a different story. I’ve heard from several CEOs since we launched Resist and Unsubscribe. Their rap is always the same. Scott, I share your concerns, but my hands are tied … shareholder value. That’s bullshit coming from a cohort with a bipartisan history of criticizing presidents, especially on tax and regulatory policy. America’s CEOs aren’t acting in the interest of shareholders by staying silent about democracy and the rule of law, they’re acting out of fear. My response to them is also the same. “When the people you love are at your side by your deathbed … how will you answer the following: What did you do?” Do those of us lucky enough to have built rewarding lives and companies owe a debt only to shareholders, or to Americans who sacrificed for our rights? Are we willing to do the right thing even when it’s hard? Are we role models?
Life is so rich,
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Obviously the only answer is to raise CEO compensation, since that is the only answer, ever.