America's Paths to Personalism

Since 2015, Trump’s opposition have feared that he had authoritarian aspirations. Every action he took after losing in 2020 certainly vindicated those fears. Another through line of Trump’s career in and out of politics, however, is his intense focus on personal loyalty. Installing loyalists in key positions of power is, of course, a classic way to pave the way for establishing yourself as a dictator.

But it is also an important move in establishing a personalist system, whether authoritarian or not. The risk of personalism is distinct, but not unrelated to, the risk of authoritarianism. As the political scientist Xavier Márquez explains in his recent paper on the topic:

The personalization of power is the process through which the relative authority of the ruler and the political elite, and hence the relationships of “horizontal” accountability between them, shifts in favour of the ruler. This process is conceptually distinct from autocratization, the loss of “vertical” accountability that results in ruling elites becoming less accountable to the populations over which they rule.[1]

It is quite possible that over the next four years Trump will fail to surmount the status quo of term limits and competitive elections, but succeed in converting the federal executive branch into a more complete system of personal rule by the president. The status quo of the “imperial presidency” already allows Trump to do quite a lot of substantively bad things without changing a single thing about the institutional arrangement. But any process of making things worse—whether to pursue mass deportation or to take the first steps towards authoritarianism—is almost guaranteed to pass through personalization first. If we can successfully mitigate the risks of personalization, we will likely mitigate a number of other things a personalist Trump presidency would do with his expanded power as well.

Márquez has elsewhere described personalism as an inversion of the principal-agent relationship.

In institutionally constrained systems of rule, the ruler is the agent, and some other organization is the principal, which ‘uses’ the ruler to achieve its own goals. Agents (rulers) may cheat and attempt to act in their own interests, but the organization can still hold them to account in a reasonably effective way. In ‘personal’ systems of rule, by contrast, the ruler is the principal, and the organization is the agent; the ruler ‘uses’ the organization to achieve his goals, rather than vice versa.[2]

I can think of no better description of the relationship that Trump has established between himself and the Republican Party. American parties are extremely weak and porous; their manifestations in the Senate, House, and White House rarely form a harmonious whole, never mind the relationship between their offices in federal and state governments. Yet somehow Trump has transformed the sprawling, decentralized, frankly dysfunctional apparatus of nominating and promoting Republican candidates into a system of personal fealty. We saw signs of this early on, when a wave of boring and ordinary Republicans retired from Congress and the rest took the Lindsey Graham path.

Drawing on Max Weber, Márquez discusses three broad strategies by which individuals establish personal rule: the mobilization of charisma, of legality or formal authority, and of informal authority.

The mobilization of charisma draws on the emotional attachments between a leader and a group of followers to expand the reach of norms of allegiance to his person; the mobilization of formal authority exploits rational discourses of justification to expand the scope of formal executive powers; and the mobilization of informal authority takes advantage of the ruler’s position in a network of interests to grow patronage networks that undermine other forms of authority.[3]

In what follows, I will discuss the risks of the second Trump term chiefly through the lens of these paths to personalization.

The federal executive branch

Most Americans have a sense that the president is in charge of everything in the federal executive branch, that he’s the big boss of the whole apparatus. Indeed, the notion that there are members of the federal executive bureaucracy who do not answer to the president is invoked frequently and with scorn. These “unelected bureaucrats” form a “deep state” that subverts the will of the democratically elected president. Let us set aside for the moment the question of just how democratic our process for picking presidents is. If what we want is a system of democracy and rule of law, rather than one where we elect officials empowered to do whatever they please, then what we want is something like legislative supremacy.

Legislative bodies are far more democratic than presidents, because much finer subdivisions of the population have someone representing them in the legislative process. Of course, legislators do not implement their own legislation; it is up to the executive branch to execute the law. But in order for that execution to be democratic, it must actually be in accordance with those laws passed by (at least a majority of) the democratically elected legislators.

In a parliamentary system, the ministers are voted in by the legislature to act as its agents in running the executive branch. In the American system, congressional committees oversee executive bodies in a number of ways. Budgets and appropriations must also pass through Congress, a lever that that body does not fail to use in order to influence the character of the executive bureaucracy. As Josh Chafetz explains, appropriations bills:

Are generally “accompanied by detailed committee reports giving the specific amounts the department or agency should spend on each program within the budget account.” Given that the appropriations committees retain the power to specify detailed spending levels in the statutory language itself—and given that they retain the power to drastically cut those spending levels in future years or to attach unpleasant riders—the departments and agencies “treat those committee reports as the equivalent of legislation. As Democratic representative (and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee) David Obey put it in 2009, “For any administration to say, well, we will accept the money, but ignore the limitations is to greatly increase the likelihood that they will not get the money.” When agencies do wish to “reprogram” funds (in other words, spend funds in ways that are consistent with the legislation but inconsistent with the committee report), they generally report to the relevant appropriations subcommittee and receive permission to do so.

(. . .)Such pressures seem generally effective: there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that the federal bureaucracy is broadly responsive to congressional preferences. As Morris Fiorina provocatively put it, “Congress controls the bureaucracy, and Congress gives us the kind of bureaucracy it wants."[4]

Strange as it may seem, the best arrangement for having a system that is both democratic and lawful is to vest a representative assembly with the highest institutional authority but to give executive bodies arms-length independence from elected officials. As Chafetz documents, there is plenty of evidence that such independence does not, in practice, mean that the authority of the representative assembly is ignored. What it does mean is that civil servants can be made to understand that their duty is to implement and follow the law, rather than merely to follow orders.

The problem with the president is that, by its nature, it is an office that governs by giving orders. Unlike a prime minister, the president cannot be removed by a simple majority vote from a single chamber of the legislature. Indeed, impeachment has proven too high a bar even when a president has sent a mob which physically threatens members of Congress in their place of business. Moreover, the levers that Congress has to discipline the executive branch must by and large be approved by the president as well, for ultimately budgets and appropriations pass through ordinary legislation. And finally, the president can claim democratic legitimacy that competes with the legitimacy of Congress, rather than complementing it. Separately elected presidents, by their nature, thereby put democratic legitimacy in tension with the rule of law.

Still, America has coped remarkably well with this tension, compared to other presidential systems. Our Congress has remained quite strong compared to any system, and our federal courts have grown stronger and stronger over time. While our tendency to skew in the direction of judicial supremacy is hardly desirable, one thing it does not foster is personalism.

Like many of his predecessors (including his own first term), Donald Trump will seek to cast off the constraints on the powers of the personalist president. Unlike those predecessors, he comes to office with a team of people who have spent time laying the groundwork to succeed at this specific endeavor. He also begins his term with a sycophantic Supreme Court supermajority that was willing to invent a new category of legal immunity just for him while he was out of office. Our system is vast and complex, with many levers available for many actors to resist the powers of the president; Trump may not succeed. But Márquez’s analysis provides a guide to how he is likely to make the attempt.

Prestige and power

Márquez describes the first avenue of attack as follows:

By the “mobilization of charisma” I mean the process by which charismatic attachments with a relatively limited number of followers are mobilized to expand the degree to which the authority of the leader is enforced on groups which may not have charismatic attachments to him. Charismatic authority in modern states typically finds itself hedged by legal norms, and charismatic attachments are difficult to sustain except in conditions of crisis. But leaders can exploit charismatic attachments with limited numbers of followers to weaken or even destroy formal norms that hedge their power, or to introduce new norms that expand their discretion even if charismatic attachments weaken.[5]

One of his examples is the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao leveraged his personal prestige to encourage various groups to attack his rivals within the CCP. So intense was the response that at the peak, the formal head of the Chinese government was subjected to a “struggle session” and beaten by his own staff. Trump’s relationship with his base is as rooted in “charisma” or personal appeal as Mao’s was with his own.

The reason that Trump has been so successful in converting the Republican Party into the party of Trump, despite the decentralized and wide-open nature of American parties, is precisely because he has a mass of extremely loyal supporters to leverage. Though large in absolute terms, it is not a large segment of society overall; Trump won the 2024 primary with 17 million votes. At 76 percent, that is an overwhelming supermajority of primary voters. However, it is only around 5 percent of the roughly 156 million people who voted in the general election, and 5 percent of the overall population. 5 percent of the population is more than enough to achieve Cultural Revolution levels of terror, if they are willing to go that far. Rather than struggle sessions, of course, we are more likely to see events such as January 6 repeated. During the election cycle we saw how the focus on a single town was enough to induce an atmosphere of terror there. In both cases, it is not as though Trump issues explicit orders about what his followers ought to do, but all of them were mobilized by his personal charisma to take aggressive action.

In the first Trump term, old guard Republicans with a reputation for working with Democrats either retired or completely reinvented themselves into frothing Trump loyalists, as Lindsey Graham most famously did. They did not do this out of the expectation that Trump would reward them for the shift, but out of fear that Trump’s base would be turned against them in their own primaries. Given both Trump’s broader base and the nature of the current Republican staffer class, physical threats to keep people in line are not out of the question.

This is why the GOP has failed to rid itself of Trump for the past nine years. Even when he was a clear electoral loser, and when Trumpist candidates underperformed in 2022, they could not rid themselves of him or his loyalists. Trump is not at the forefront of a broader movement, though “intellectual” conservatives have worked overtime since the beginning to try and build one around him. Instead, Trump’s leadership rests on a foundation of charismatic attachment, something that by its nature is tied to him personally.

It’s a fickle thing that is difficult to measure. By one estimate, roughly one-third of self-identified Republicans define their politics based on their enthusiastic embrace of Trump and his rhetoric specifically. Trump’s personal social network, Truth Social, has about one million active monthly users and five times as many website visitors. That is vanishingly small for a social network, but impressively large for assembling a people for whom the only benefit is being in digital proximity to Trump and fellow Trumpists. It is difficult to say how large the potential pool of mobilized people truly is, especially since Trump overall has never been particularly popular by traditional measures (although disturbingly, he is doing much better lately).

Still, the proof is in the putting; Trump loyalists have frequently shown up, whether it’s on the streets, in the Capitol, on Truth Social, or in purchasing his merchandise. Whatever its current size, the maintenance and cultivation of charismatic attachments requires frequent “campaigns”; the perception during the first Trump term that he was producing gobs of news events a week stems from this imperative to maintain his primary source of strength. Where Hitler expanded his charismatic authority through quick, decisive military victories, Trump maintains his primarily through his “owning the libs” first approach to public communication, constantly feeding his base fresh culture war red meat.

It remains to be seen the extent to which Trump can succeed in mobilizing charisma to engage in “authority destruction” against those arms of the state that limit his power in office.

A spoils system

Márquez describes the most common facet of authoritarian regimes and especially of personalist ones as follows:

Patronage involves the informal authority that emerges in unequal but enduring relations of exchange between a patron and many clients, where the former typically provides economic resources in exchange for political support. (. . .)[Patrimonial] regimes are characterized by high levels of de-institutionalization, where formal authority is no longer a good guide to the location of power.

While it is true that one needn’t be the formal head of state to be the true head of a patrimonial regime, “the informal authority rulers acquire through patronage is typically parasitic on their formal authority,”[6] so it often is one and the same person in both positions. Indeed, the top patron usually leverages their patronage to get the top spot in the government, which they then use to further grow their patronage network. Márquez uses the example of Putin, who developed an extensive patronage network during his first tenure as president, and remained the true center of the patrimonial regime when he hit his term limit and became prime minister in 2008. Everyone understood this at the time. However, there was “a genuine risk for Putin”[7] that his successor Medvedev may have been able to use the presidency to build a patronage network of his own and truly supplant Putin’s personal authority. It worked out for Putin because the groundwork he had laid before stepping down allowed him to get officials to provide a “legal” path to return to the presidency.

Trump’s mode of governance has always been in the mode of a patronage network. He did this even under the extremely high stakes of the early pandemic. The Project 2025 plan for the federal executive branch is more or less a return to the principle of the spoils system, a form of patronage that was openly touted in Jackson’s day. Now he also has Elon Musk as part of his coterie, someone who has already demonstrated his willingness to throw around serious cash for the cause. The more cash and jobs he has to offer to join his patronage network, the larger and more powerful it will become. The more the jobs in question are in the federal government specifically, or the court system, the more Trump’s personal power will expand. Even tariffs, the most seemingly economics-focused policy of Trump’s touted agenda, will undoubtedly be used to reward allies and punish enemies to strengthen Trump’s hold on his patronage network.

Formalism and elite persuasion

The final line of attack Márquez describes as follows:

Rulers can expand their formal authority by mobilizing coalitions to change constitutions or other public norms regulating their discretion. While the mobilization of charisma and/or informal authority are typically necessary to the construction of such coalitions, the expansion of formal authority will normally also involve the deployment of persuasive arguments. For example, rulers who face term limits often craft very specific arguments to evade or change them, and such arguments shape how parliamentary coalitions, supreme courts, or the public at large evaluate and react to these proposals. Significant resources are invested in persuading others of the rationality of formal institutional change, rather than simply mobilizing them through emotional appeals or co-opting them with economic resources.[8]

January 6 is the most famous of the “Stop the Steal” efforts the Trump campaign pursued after it lost the 2020 election, but it was by no means where most of its efforts were invested. They filed a large number of lawsuits, they prepared fake electors, and they pressured election officials. The fake elector scheme was supposed to line up with their strategy to have Vice President Pence reject the certification of the election results, after which they would move to have these new electors’ votes take the place of the original ones.

What all of these have in common is the use (and misuse) of formal justifications and existing institutional procedures. Rather than sending a mob to intimidate or do violence, they file a lawsuit. Rather than struggle sessions, they have “creative” readings of existing law that they attempt to get other members of the elite, such as Mike Pence, to throw their support behind. Sometimes the use of institutional procedure and legal interpretation is quite above board; after all, anyone can file a lawsuit and get their day in court. Other times, as in the whole certification and fake elector scheme, what they are doing is plainly at odds with both law and practice, but if the precedent can be set and enough people with institutional authority line up behind it, it will become law and practice. As Márquez puts it, “many moves of dubious legality can increase executive power as long as they cannot be effectively challenged.”[9] The certification scheme failed because Pence was never on board, the Supreme Court likely would not have been either, and enough members of Congress also were not.

Even then, eight Senators and (more significantly) 139 members of the House objected to the certification. Trump’s control over the GOP has only been consolidated further in the interim. There will likely be all manner of “moves of dubious legality” that he calls upon them to support over the next four years, all in the name of expanding his personal power.

Throughout his first term, Trump made extensive use of this tactic. He used emergency powers expansively, he bribed farmers to compensate for the pain they faced from his tariffs without this new line of subsidy going through Congress, and pushed the boundaries in a number of ways.

And the people around Trump have learned practical lessons from their first experience of power, and have not spent the last four years idle. Project 2025 is, essentially, a multimillion dollar effort to devise a plan of action of just this kind. All the detailed procedures and creative interpretations of the law that Trump might need in order to convert the federal executive branch into a tool of personal rule. They wrote it, they published it, it’s freely available to the public. Trump distanced himself from it during his campaign—because it was polling poorly, certainly, but also perhaps because there is a sense in which the whole project is aimed at making him into the agent of a specific agenda rather than the principal. Nevertheless, he is bringing on board plenty of people involved in it. There is no reason to doubt that he and his people are going to try to implement it, and that an important consequence will be the personalization of the federal government.

Now, before he has even returned to office, he is attempting to “introduce new norms” such as that the Senate must recess in order to allow him to appoint whomever he pleases. Formally, a president cannot make this happen (despite Trump’s claims to the contrary). But the risks that come with opposing Trump and facing his base in a primary or in the flesh are no small matter. John Thune, the new Senate majority leader, has made noises that the Republican caucus might go along with this move.

There are reasons for optimism on this front. When Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination for Attorney General, it was apparently Trump himself who told him to do so because he didn’t “have the votes.” This means that contrary to Thune’s cooperative rhetoric, he had made it clear to Trump that there would be a vote, and too few would be willing to support Trump’s choice. Thune’s selection for majority leader itself was at odds with Trump’s own wishes. None of this means that Trump will fail to crush all internal opposition later—Mao, for example, was frustrated by his rivals on many occasions and indeed was typically eclipsed by others in their formal authority, but ultimately created a situation in which none of them dared criticize him. And now Trump has pre-announced that he will be firing the current FBI Director, something for which presidents typically suffer a political cost, yet there seems to be little in the way of a reaction.

So long as institutions remain more or less intact, any president is likely to engage in this kind of formalism and proceduralism to some extent. We will certainly need to pay close attention to how the Trump administration does so in pursuit of personalism. But in many ways, the greatest danger comes when even superficial attempts at appearing lawful have been discarded, for “A ruler who can rely on his informal or charismatic authority over others needs to expend less justificatory effort to expand his formal authority.”[10]

In combination

The important point is that these elements are not isolated, but offer individual tactics in an overall strategy of the personalization of power.

Charismatic mobilization makes use of the strong affective attachments of particular groups to a leader to enforce extralegal norms of allegiance to him; the mobilization of formal authority deploys justificatory discourses to enhance the legal-rational affordances of a ruler’s official position; and the mobilization of informal authority colonizes formal structures to bend them to a ruler’s will. Each of these forms of authority also interacts with the others to shape the possibilities for personalization in a given regime; thus, legal authority can be used to strengthen patronage networks, control over patronage can be used to increase a ruler’s formal authority, and control over formal authority can be used to promote a ruler’s charismatic authority.[11]

What makes Trump uniquely dangerous as a figure is that he truly does bring all three together the way no president in recent memory could have. None brazenly made use of patronage the way he does, something for which he has faced no consequences whatsoever, proving that he can continue to do so safely. Only Obama could be said to have had any groups to be mobilized through charisma, and he simply used it for the prosaic purposes of winning elections, nothing more. Most men in the history of the “imperial presidency” made use of formalism to attempt to expand their personal power, but few had a pool of talent quite so dedicated to gaming it out as Trump has, and none of them had the ability to buttress this strategy with the other two.

It is not always true that forewarned is forearmed; there is only so much any of us can do to resist the process of personalization that Trump is about to embark upon. But it is my hope that if we can identify each of these strategies as he deploys them, we stand a better chance to find levers to use against them.

[1] Márquez, Xavier. 2024. “The Mechanisms of Personalization.” Democratization, November, 1–21. doi:10.1080/13510347.2024.2426197. 1.

[2] Márquez, Xavier. Non-democratic politics: Authoritarianism, dictatorship and democratization. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. 65.

[3] Márquez, Xavier. 2024. “The Mechanisms of Personalization.” Democratization, November, 1–21. doi:10.1080/13510347.2024.2426197. 2.

[4] Chafetz, Josh. Congress's Constitution: Legislative authority and the separation of powers. Yale University Press, 2017. 71-72. Chafetz’s citation for the “growing body of evidence” includes:

• Harris, Joseph Pratt. "Congressional control of administration." (1964).
• Kirst, Michael W. Government without passing laws: Congress' nonstatutory techniques for appropriations control. UNC Press Books, 2018.
• Daugirdas, Kristina. "Congress underestimated: The case of the World Bank." American Journal of International Law 107, no. 3 (2013): 517-562.
• Hammond, Thomas H., and Jack H. Knott. "Who controls the bureaucracy?: Presidential power, congressional dominance, legal constraints, and bureaucratic autonomy in a model of multi-institutional policy-making." The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 12, no. 1 (1996): 119-166.
• McCubbins, Mathew D., Roger G. Noll, and Barry R. Weingast. "Administrative procedures as instruments of political control." The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 3, no. 2 (1987): 243-277.
• Weingast, Barry R., and Mark J. Moran. "Bureaucratic discretion or congressional control? Regulatory policymaking by the Federal Trade Commission." Journal of Political Economy 91, no. 5 (1983): 765-800.
• Prakash, Saikrishna B. "INDEPENDENCE, CONGRESSIONAL WEAKNESS, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF APPOINTMENT: THE IMPACT OF COMBINING BUDGETARY."
• Yaver, Miranda. "The Power of the Purse: How Institutional Conflict Yields Congress Assertion of Spending Power Regulatory Authority." In APSA 2012 Annual Meeting Paper. 2012.

[5] Márquez, Xavier. 2024. “The Mechanisms of Personalization.” Democratization, November, 1–21. doi:10.1080/13510347.2024.2426197. 7-8.

[6] Ibid. 14.

[7] Ibid. 15.

[8] Ibid. 12.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid. 13.

[11] Ibid. 12.

Featured image is Mao Zedong Museum in Changsha, Hunan province, China