Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

In the previous article in this series, “Beyond Mastery: Grounded Human Power,” I tried to frame some key points that act as cornerstones to the concepts of power now in currency. 1) I hoped a particular kind of rationality that is prevalent leaves a bad taste in our mouths – what I have (throughout this blog) called technocratic rationality. 2) I hoped to contrast two modes of decision-making: cooperation and domination. 3) I hoped to briefly bring to your attention Hannah Arendt’s insights on violence and power.

In this brief article, I want to bring these insights to bear on the decision-making style of Donald Trump, and in doing so, understand the real functioning of power.

Donald Trump’s political style offers a striking illustration of Hannah Arendt’s central claim in On Violence: violence appears where power has failed. Arendt did not define violence narrowly as physical force. She understood it more broadly as instrumental coercion including threats, intimidation, spectacle, and domination used to compel obedience … in the absence of legitimacy.

For Arendt, power arises only where people act together toward a shared purpose. It depends on consent and durability. Violence, by contrast, is episodic and substitutive. “Violence can destroy power,” she writes, “but it is utterly incapable of creating it.” On Violence (free download) When leaders rely on force, they reveal not strength but the erosion of authority.

Trump’s leadership has consistently substituted coercion for legitimacy. His rhetoric framed politics as domination rather than persuasion. Opponents were enemies, not conversation partners. Institutions such as the UN Security Council, NATO, the Paris Climate Accord have been understood as obstacles, not partners. Loyalty replaced trust, and spectacle replaced deliberation. These tactics produced attention and fear, but not power in Arendt’s sense.

This dynamic has been visible in Trump’s relationship to institutions. Courts, civil servants, journalists, and even allies are treated instrumentally; they are valued only insofar as they served personal authority. Arendt warned that such instrumentalization isolates the leader. Since violence cannot generate consent, it leaves the wielder increasingly alone.

“Tyranny,” Arendt observed, “is therefore the most violent and least powerful of forms of government.” Trump’s presidency exhibits this paradox. Executive authority expanded rhetorically even as institutional capacity eroded. Governance has become reactive, dependent on loyalty rather than coordination, and brittle under pressure.

Arendt also emphasized the role of truth in sustaining power. Factual truth, she argued, provides a shared ground upon which political action becomes possible. When truth is reduced to an instrument, politics collapses into struggle. Trump’s habitual falsehoods and narrative manipulation exemplify this collapse. Language, for Trump and his administration, has ceased to disclose or express reality and it has unequivocally become a weapon of control.

In this environment, persuasion gives way to intimidation. Public speech was no longer oriented toward building a common world but toward dominating attention. This is violence in Arendt’s sense: language emptied of meaning and repurposed as force.

Crucially, Arendt’s analysis is not partisan. It is structural. She warns that any political movement that cannot generate cooperation will resort to coercion. Trump’s politics mobilized loyalty but not solidarity. Fear but not trust. Spectacle but not shared purpose.

The consequences have been predictable. Institutions weakened and/or destroyed. Norms eroded. Social bonds frayed. What remains is not power but volatility: a politics permanently on the brink of escalation because coercion must constantly intensify to remain effective.

Trump’s legacy, read through Arendt, is therefore not simply one of norm-breaking or incivility. It is a case study in powerlessness masked as strength. It demonstrates what happens when leaders mistake domination for authority and violence for power.

Arendt reminds us that real power is fragile but renewable. It exists only where people act together. Violence is loud, dramatic, and immediate. Power is quiet, durable, and shared.

A politics that cannot cooperate must coerce. And a politics that must coerce has already failed.

Part 1: “Beyond Mastery: Grounded Human Power“

Part 3: “A Letter to Western Canadian Readers: On Power, Separation, and the Cost of Exit“