Donald Trump and the Great Man Theory of History
As with Napoleon Bonaparte, one cannot confidently state that if Trump had never been born, someone like him would have done what he did.
The US presidential election cycle is a spectacle of carefully cultivated suspense. Yet despite this, elections have mostly followed a remarkably predictable pattern from the mid-twentieth century until now: the two major parties exchange control of the White House every eight years. It wasn’t always this way; in the past, there have been long stretches of one-party dominance. During the seven decades between Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 and Herbert Hoover’s defeat in 1932, Republicans won nearly every presidential election. Only two Democrats were victorious during this period: Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson—and the latter won only because Teddy Roosevelt’s third-party run split the Republican vote in 1912. Then, during the New Deal era, Democrats held the White House for two straight decades under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
But once Truman left office, the eight-year pattern took hold and, for all the vagaries of American politics, it remained surprisingly durable for the next seven decades. Eight years of Dwight D. Eisenhower were followed by eight years of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, which were followed by eight years of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Every two terms, like clockwork, the party controlling the White House switched. The one major exception to this was the Reagan-Bush era, when the Republican Party managed to hold the White House for three terms in a row, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s victory over the incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980. But that was an anomaly; after Bill Clinton won in 1992, the parties returned to the eight-year trade-off. In fact, one could say that during this entire period, there was only one anomalous election: that of 1980. If the eight-year pattern had held firm, Carter would have won reelection, and been replaced in 1984 by a Republican, who would have governed through 1992. The last two terms of the Reagan-Bush era were already baked in; the first was an unexpected gift to Republicans, and the only deviation from the pattern.
That is, until 2020. For the first time since Jimmy Carter, one of the two major parties only managed to hold the White House for a single term. Had all gone according to schedule, Donald Trump would be finishing his second term now, and a Democrat would be waiting to take his place. We all know what happened instead: a one-term Trump was followed by a one-term Joe Biden, who will now be followed, even more improbably, by a second Trump term.
Trump’s request to the American voters in 2024—that they reelect a former president who lost a prior reelection bid—would normally have been a long shot. In parliamentary systems, prime ministers regularly step in and out of power, but only one American president, the abovementioned Grover Cleveland, has hitherto managed to serve non-consecutive terms. And Trump’s success is all the more surprising in that he was not well-situated to follow in Cleveland’s footsteps. In his first, failed 1888 reelection bid, Cleveland actually won the popular vote and only narrowly lost the Electoral College, and he remained highly popular with the general public after leaving office for the first time. There was a clear path for Cleveland to run again, and win, in 1892. The path was not so clear for Trump, who did not win the popular vote in either 2016 or 2020, and who was unpopular with a majority of voters during his first term.
Trump’s second victory throws the outcome of all future elections into doubt. If the old eight-year pattern had held, Democrats could have expected to control the presidency from 2025 through 2032. If Trump had lost this year, 2020 would be classed as an anomaly akin to 1980, with Trump playing the role of the Republican Jimmy Carter, and the Biden-Harris era could have been the Democrats’ own Reagan-Bush era—especially since, if elected, President Kamala Harris would have had an incumbency advantage in the 2028 election and could therefore have stretched the Democrats’ run in the White House to 12 years.
Now, however, it is unclear whether the postwar pattern has been thoroughly destroyed, or whether it will fall back into place after a few election cycles. We will not have a definitive answer to this question for at least a decade or two. If the balance of power created by the eight-year pattern, which gave both parties equal access to the presidency, has been eradicated, then we may well be in for another long stretch of one-party dominance—although which party will have the upper hand remains to be seen.
To be sure, the presidency is not everything. A party that lacks control over one branch of government can still exert significant power elsewhere. In the four decades between 1954 and 1994, although the presidency switched back and forth between Democrats and Republicans, the House of Representatives maintained a continuous Democratic majority. This did not stop Republican presidents and congresspeople from implementing their desired policies on the national level. Nor did it stop Republican governors and legislators from doing so on the state level.
Yet the symbolic power of the presidency is paramount. We speak of the 1980s as the Reagan Era and the 1990s as the Clinton Era, not the “Tip O’Neill Era” or the “Newt Gingrich Era.” The presidency represents control over the federal government, and ultimately over the spirit and the direction of the nation. It is the highest political prize, and a party consistently denied the presidency will not remain a satisfied player in the system, even if they achieve political success on other meaningful fronts. This is dangerous in a nation where mutual assent is a prerequisite for the smooth functioning of a free and fair electoral system.
Trump’s 2024 victory does not feel as shocking as his 2016 victory did. After all, we’ve seen this show before. But 2024 is a more remarkable coup than 2016. Back then, Trump’s victory did not buck the prevailing trend. This time, he won against that trend and shattered the pattern.
Some have argued that Trump’s indomitable force of personality, demonstrated in the way in which he has refashioned American politics in his image over the past decade, vindicates the Great Man Theory of History. For instance, Yair Rosenberg, writing for The Atlantic in 2022, commented that Trump’s “personal idiosyncrasies—and, I would argue, malignancies—altered the course of American history in directions it otherwise would not have gone.” To Rosenberg, this represented a turn for the worse, but many of Trump’s supporters would say the same, while casting it in a more positive light. As with Napoleon Bonaparte, one cannot confidently state that if Trump had never been born, someone like him would have done what he did.
Elsewhere in this magazine, I compare Donald Trump to the Mule, a character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories who, with his unique superpower of mind control, manages to undo the entire Seldon Plan which had been designed to direct the future of the galaxy. In Asimov’s fictional social science of psychohistory, humans are compared to molecules within a gas: the path of each individual molecule is unpredictable, but the movement of the gas as a whole can be predicted. But the psychohistorians assume that no one molecule can ever have a significant effect on the whole—and they are mistaken.
Jason Garshfield
Trump is a particle that defies measurement. It is as though Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle applies to him: you can know where he is, or how fast he is going, but never both at the same time. Once you think you have him pinned down to a fixed point in the cosmos, he throws your calculations into chaos. This drives his opponents crazy and imbues his most fervent supporters with a near-messianic belief that he will triumph against any odds.
Social scientists tend to hate the Great Man Theory of History because it renders their work entirely meaningless. No matter how strong certain social forces may be, they can ultimately be dispensed with at any time by unpredictable mighty figures. As a result, the future is frighteningly unknowable. But both Great Man Theory and historical determinism have dire implications. Either individuals are irrelevant, or else we live in an unknowable and irrational universe, which unfolds according to no fixed laws. Neither theory allows rationalism and individualism to coexist.
The durability of the eight-year pattern in American politics seems to provide strong evidence against the Great Man Theory. Many of the leaders and almost-leaders of the United States since 1952 have been outsized personalities, yet the sociological paradigm suggests that their personal charisma had little impact on their success or failure. In this view, neither Barack Obama’s charm nor John McCain and Mitt Romney’s lack of charm radically influenced the outcomes of the 2008 and 2012 elections. It was simply time for a Democrat to win, and McCain and Romney might as well not have run. For that matter, both parties might as well have saved their energy and agreed to simply exchange places every eight years—that is, if we accept historical determinism as the driving factor.
Before Trump, only two other figures in postwar America came close to being Great Men. They were the finalists of the 1980 election: Ronald Reagan, who managed to win against the pattern and usher in twelve straight years of Republican control, and Jimmy Carter, who lost the election he should have won. It is debatable as to whether the 1980 election was more a story of Carter’s weakness or Reagan’s strength, but both undoubtedly played a role. Now Trump has become both Carter and Reagan, the unexpected loser of one election and the unexpected winner of another.
Ralph Leonard
Trump’s victory cannot be entirely ascribed to his character, though. As in 1980, the Democrats ran an astoundingly bad campaign. First they put forward a candidate suffering from obvious cognitive decline and tried to gaslight us into disbelieving the evidence before our very eyes. Once Biden’s problems became too great to ignore, they forced him to drop out three months before the election in an almost unprecedented move, denied their voters the chance of an open primary, and replaced him with a candidate with her own set of glaringly apparent weaknesses. Even the most charismatic Democrat, though, would have had a difficult time defending the administration’s policy record on inflation, crime, open borders, war, and wokeness. In addition, Trump had several unexpected strokes of luck, including an assassination attempt that won over public sympathy and cemented his iconic status.
Given their clown car of chaos, it is no surprise that the Democrats lost. It is a surprise that they lost by so little, that Harris remained a competitive candidate right up to the end and won over 48 percent of the popular vote. If ever a cycle was ripe for Democrats to suffer the sort of resounding defeat that they endured in 1972 and 1984—when Republicans won 49 states and 60 percent of the popular vote—it was this one. The fact that Trump did not manage to pull off this kind of landslide victory is a sign of his own weaknesses as a candidate, and suggests that, even in the glow of victory, Republicans should not overplay their hand.
It is an open question, however, whether larger-than-life figures such as Trump really do shape historical events, or whether they are beholden to broader impersonal sociological forces. One possible explanation for the decay of the eight-year pattern is the generational theory put forward by William Strauss and Neil Howe, also known as the “Fourth Turning.” Howe and Strauss postulate that society is hit by an existential crisis every eighty years, as the generation that lived through the last crisis dies off and the lessons of the past are forgotten. For present-day Americans, the last crisis was World War II. Eighty years before that was the Civil War; roughly eighty years before that was the Revolutionary War; roughly eighty years before that was the Glorious Revolution in England. If this trend holds, we are overdue for a crisis, which, like those before it, will reshape the social order for the next eight decades or so. The eight-year pattern of alternating control over the presidency, and the relative equality between the two parties, may have been vestiges of the postwar social order, and the break with that pattern over the last two election cycles may be a sign that it will be swept away in the coming or current crisis.
Strauss-Howe generational theory is far-fetched, but it does provide a synthesis of Great Man Theory and historical determinism. In a section of The Fourth Turning addressing “accidents and anomalies,” Strauss and Howe write that history cannot account for the existence of specific individuals or events, but it can provide a fertile ground in which certain personalities are more likely to flourish. “History always produces sparks,” they write. “But some sparks flare and then vanish, while others touch off firestorms out of any proportion to the sparks themselves.” Trump and other singular men of this era, such as Elon Musk, may change the course of history through the sheer force of personality—but perhaps only because they are living in an era that allows them to flourish.
The current sense of widespread upheaval may be evidence that Strauss and Howe are correct, at least in the broad strokes, and we now find ourselves in the midst of a society-defining crisis. If so, a singular burden rests on Trump’s shoulders. He is more than just a successful politician; he is an epoch-defining crisis leader, as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill were before him. His every action over the next four years will define the nation for eighty years or more, and he will play a crucial role in determining whether the postwar stability will be replaced with something as durable or whether it will crumble. So far, Trump has shown himself to be a man of thoroughly mixed personal character, at best. Let us hope that he will prove to be a force for good.
