Two big events late Thursday—Trump’s firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s axing of a top military official—demonstrate the deep perils of what political theorists refer to as “personalist” rule. This mode places one charismatic leader’s vainglory and self-enrichment, unbound by procedural neutrality, at the center of all decisionmaking. Flattery, tribute, attunement to the Big Man’s ever-shifting whims, and the effective humiliation of his enemies are what secure one’s place in the highest circles of glory.
For instance, in bringing cases against numerous Trump foes—including Democratic senators like Adam Schiff and Mark Kelly, among others—her handpicked prosecutors twisted the law and Justice Department protocols so badly that the efforts buffoonishly fell apart while prompting resignations from career officials.
Similarly, on Epstein, Bondi argued internally for keeping many of the files buried, per the Journal. That’s also a corrupt act. Yet Trump blamed her for failing to keep the story out of the news, even though his own stonewalling—and the presence of his name all over the files—were the real reasons for the unflagging media attention.
Hegseth’s firing of a top Pentagon official also follows elements of the “personalist” pattern. The New York Times reports that Hegseth removed Gen. Randy George, the chief of staff of the Army, angering many senior officials. George and his allies clashed with Hegseth over the latter’s controversial derailment of the promotion of four officers—two black and two women—potentially due to their race and gender. Hoping to resolve the situation, George asked for a meeting with Hegseth, but it was refused.
Most officials believed George had been doing a good job in modernizing the military in various ways, the congressman said, but George seems to have fallen victim to a “personality clash” with Hegseth. “It seems like Hegseth got into a pissing match with him over blocking promotions,” Smith said, adding that this is “undermining confidence in leadership” right “in the middle of the Iran war fiasco,” which “makes it worse.”
In short, Hegseth will gleefully carry out war crimes at Trump’s direction. Hegseth also regularly threatens the Iranian enemy with a level of bloodlust and sadism that’s plainly designed to minister to Trump’s anger over Iran’s refusal to capitulate to him, which has denied him the rapid, glorious military triumph he is entitled to.
It’s all crying out for more scrutiny, and Smith says that if Democrats control the House next year, the Armed Services Committee will seek testimony from George and other officials fired by Hegseth. The committee will also probe whether George’s objections to Hegseth’s actions against black and female officers played a role. How the defense secretary “manages personnel” is “one of the issues that we’ll want to examine,” Smith told me, which will entail trying to “talk to the people who he’s fired” to “get some insights as to why.”
First, this sort of cultish fealty to Trump is itself a symptom of that deterioration, as political scientist Brendan Nyhan points out. After White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt laughably described Trump on Thursday as “the most well-read person in the room,” Nyhan observed that signaling “loyalty to the leader” by “making obviously false claims in public” about them is a hallmark of “officials in authoritarian regimes.”
Yet as bad as all this appears, these stories also suggest that Trump’s personalist rule, at bottom, is failing him. Trump fired Bondi precisely because he could not prevail on her to corruptly bury the Epstein files or prosecute his opponents successfully. The war on Iran is heinously killing unbearable numbers of innocent civilians, but when it comes to Trump’s grand designs, the bombing is creating large piles of rubble and nothing more. Hegseth’s invasions of U.S. cities, enthusiastically undertaken on Trump’s behalf, have been undone by the courts and have utterly failed to intimidate occupied populations into complicity.
Flattery, slavish loyalty, self-debasement, and a willingness to engage in extraordinary corruption—none of these things can ultimately bend reality to Trump’s will. But his demands upon reality cannot themselves be faulted. They can only be failed by others, and when this happens, it is they who inevitably pay the price for it. Bondi has learned this the hard way. It’s only a matter of time until Hegseth does, too.
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