Alan Zendell, November 20, 2025

I recently had an opportunity to hear a couple of political historians speak about autocratic-leaning leaders and how to deal with them. After studying the rise and fall of autocrats, they found that autocrats inevitably failed, and they all committed the same basic errors that led to their undoing. One can argue that the Internet, influencer bots, and an environment that allows anyone to say anything they want to without fear of retribution might yield a different result, today, but they concluded that Donald Trump is committing every error that destroyed people like him in the past.

Chief among them is the need to be surrounded by sycophants, and its dangerous corollary, a tendency to shoot messengers who deliver bad news. A close second is treating loyalty as a one-way street: autocrats who turn on supporters and colleagues at the first hint of disloyalty, creating a black and white world of allies and enemies. In the autocrat’s eyes, no one else exists. Anyone who does not consistently deliver unquestioned loyalty is an enemy.

The idea of wannabe dictators surrounding themselves with advisors who are terrified of telling them anything they don’t want to hear has long been a component of conventional wisdom, but that doesn’t seem to prevent them from making the same error again and again. They forget that people whose loyalty depends on a reign of terror are not their friends. That Trump behaves this way without exception is one of his most predictable and unpopular attributes. Even his loyal supporters cringe at the obvious, constant lies, distortions, fantasies, and slander that issue from his mouth and keyboard.

It has been reliably reported ever since Trump took power again, that the appearance of unified, unbreakable support was an illusion held together by threats and innuendos. We hear from journalists and insiders that Trump is roundly despised and viewed as crazy and irresponsible by a significant majority of Congress and foreign leaders. A situation like that is unstable, one in which resentment, anger, and frustration fester and grow. It’s worsened by the success of Trump’s divide-and-conquer politics, and an insider network that detects every hint of disloyalty, which is defined as anything that doesn’t follow the party line of talking points verbatim. Pressure builds, with the ranks of the disgruntled ever increasing, with secret pockets of resistance waiting to pounce at the first sign of a crack the leader’s invincibility.

Another typical failure is tone-deafness. Trump is hardly a new phenomenon. All wannabe autocrats are insufferably narcissistic, which is another way of saying they are sociopaths incapable of feeling empathy. No matter how clever and charismatic they are, their failure to understand how other people feel, and their need to see every decision as binary (you’re either with us or against us, as George W. Bush told the Arab world after nine-eleven,) invariably blinds them to what ultimately takes them down.

We’re seeing that happening before our eyes, today. What looked like a solid wall of rabid followers and supporters is fracturing, because Trump is incapable of understanding what he’s doing wrong, and his advisors, who have tied their own political futures to him, won’t tell him the truth. Do you wonder, why his loyalists defend his lies, accept his support of genocide in Gaza and buy his false notion that he has any influence over Vladimir Putin when it’s obvious that Putin mocks and manipulates him? Do you wonder why they allow him to pursue his racist, misogynist policies and destroy the lives of immigrants families whether they are American citizens or illegals fleeing from oppression, but somehow the Epstein files scandal completely changed the narrative?

The explanation is simple, so obvious it’s shocking that Trump and his advisors didn’t see it until it was too late. Trump panders to everyone, which means he’s lying to most of them. One of his most effective political weapons was pandering to evangelists and other Christians with the promise to end abortion. That was so crucial to their support they were willing to overlook his lack of moral center, his disgusting behavior, and his obvious greed-driven lust for power. But once Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court reversed Rowe v. Wade, there was no longer a single unifying issue that guaranteed their support.

However we might feel about Trump’s base, a large portion of them are devout Christians. What Trump missed is that of all the despicable things he does and supports, the one thing that group will never tolerate is pedophilia. That’s what the Epstein crisis is about, and Trump made another potentially fatal error. I am not suggesting that Trump is guilty of having sex with underage girls. But Trump believes that if there’s no clear evidence of that in the Epstein files, or if there is, that Pam Bondi will find a way to redact it, and therefore, he’s in the clear, but he’s completely missing the point.

Whether Trump is guilty or  not, it’s obvious that his claim that he had no idea what Epstein was doing is a lie. Of course he knew. He knew that Epstein was responsible for a vile network of despicable sex crimes involving children and he did nothing to stop it. A man with Trump’s ego who feels as powerful as he does cannot claim impotence in such matters. He was an influencer, someone people listened to, but he chose to remain silent and God only knows what else. It’s equally obvious that his basic misogyny deafens him to the cries of the victims who demand justice.

These are things for which much of his loyal base will never forgive him once it’s clear that he had a unique opportunity to speak out or report what he knew to law enforcement. When his Christian base asks why he looked the other way, he won’t have an answer.