The U.S. Has Its Own ‘Bad Emperor’ Dilemma

Since Chinese President Xi Jinping removed presidential term limits in 2018, foreign commentators have warned of the perils that would sooner or later come about due to something they have called the “bad emperor” dilemma.

In one of his greatest reforms, Deng Xiaoping, the towering figure of China’s post-Mao Zedong generation, devised a system to take out the guesswork and danger inherent to succession in highly authoritarian societies. Under Deng’s innovative arrangement, China’s top leaders would be limited to two five-year terms in power, and crucially, they would be subject to reelection by other senior leaders at the end of their first mandate.

The new system involved other subtleties as well, such as the quasi-public elevation of each future leader into the position of Chinese Communist Party chief-in-waiting five years before he could assume the presidency. This turned that period into a preliminary public audition. The underlying logic was that undemocratic political systems, for their own good, need to limit leaders’ power and remove “bad emperors” before they can inflict too much damage. For China, this was both a corrective to the catastrophic excesses of the long Mao era and a guardrail for the future to prevent the return of suffocating personality cults and the utter domination of the political system by a single individual.

In the still confident and economically exuberant period when Xi undid these reforms, young Chinese people I met often scoffed at my concerns over this development. To them, I was an archetypical foreign naysayer, someone forever searching for reasons to discount their country’s successes and predict future crises. Since then, though, Xi has embarked on a third five-year leadership term and could conceivably rule for life. His personality cult and concentration of power draw ever more comparisons to Mao. Coincidentally or not, during this same time, China’s world-beating growth rates have come back to earth, and more and more seemingly intractable problems, from collapsing fertility rates to a gigantic housing bubble, have begun to threaten the country’s future.

This is admittedly a very long windup for a column that is in fact about the United States. The country that often claims to be the world’s oldest democracy may not have ever had anything akin to an emperor. But recent political developments have made clear that the country is backing itself into a “bad president” problem that could be equally threatening.

Through an unusual confluence of circumstances, U.S. political elites have failed to renew themselves, as democracies are believed to be almost structurally bound to do. Early warning signs of this came long ago but were not heeded. For a few electoral cycles, U.S. politics decayed into a formally democratic but quasi-dynastic pattern. The presidency of George H.W. Bush, a Republican, eventually gave way to the presidency of his son. As if this were not enough, another Bush ran for president in 2016 and was briefly considered a favorite, until the breathtaking rise of Donald Trump, the eventual victor.

On the Democratic Party side of the ledger, the presidency of Bill Clinton very nearly eventually gave way to an administration led by his wife, Hillary Clinton. The surprise victory of a lightly experienced and relatively unknown Black man named Barack Obama, who would be elected to two terms, narrowly averted this but not without the dynastic pattern just described exacting a cost, and it has been a terrible one.

The Democrats’ failure to cultivate and promote fresh talent after Obama is what opened the door to the presidency of Joe Biden, Obama’s former vice president. In the 2008 election, Biden balanced Obama’s ticket as an old and familiar politico who Democrats believed could appeal to white, centrist voters. By 2020, when Biden became the oldest person ever elected president, though, he was already unmistakably well past his prime.

The Republicans’ failure of renewal, meanwhile, led to the Blitzkrieg-like rise of Trump, whose wildly anti-immigrant rhetoric, TV billionaire braggadocio, and demagogic anti-globalization stance—all tinged with racism—helped him sweep the field of Republican rivals and, eventually, Hillary Clinton. With no other proven or well-established option available, it was left to Biden to see off Trump after a single term, which he somehow did.

Now the world finds itself on the precipice of another U.S. election featuring these same two enormously flawed characters. Last week’s first debate between them has fed deep confusion over the stakes of the election because it fundamentally distracted Americans from the many disturbing things that Trump has to say. That is due in roughly equal measure to Biden’s halting performance and to his debate strategy, which seemed intended to reduce the race to a personality contest. Biden’s shakiness—the raspy voice, the cruise-to-nowhere sentences, the dazed look on his face—alarmed and hypnotized the commentariat. According to opinion polls, that is true of viewers as well.

For all of Biden’s woes, how could so few have registered that Trump was far worse? Although Trump supporters will dismiss this as a partisan comment, it is anything but. The two men are in fact united in many more ways than most people recognize. Their worldviews often seem stuck in the 1970s. This comes across in Trump’s obsessiveness with trade and payments by Washington’s NATO allies. In Biden, one sees it through his fondness for Corvettes and the retrograde conventionality of his foreign policy, most notably toward Israel, which has reduced him to inaction and near-voicelessness in the face of what has plausibly been called a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Trump seems to want to do Biden one better on this front, urging that Israel press its offensive with even more ferocity.

Only one of these two men, however, presents anything like an existential threat to the future of the United States as a relatively open, tolerant, and democratic society that respects women’s rights, supports the inclusion of minority groups, and shows a concern over climate change equal to its crisis. This was all but lost in the breathless commentary that followed Biden’s vacant and frequently confused participation in the debate. What this left me fearing is that Americans, including elite journalists, are so addicted to performance—which is here akin to entertainment—that they have become numb to substance. Even commentators who may prefer Biden politically have largely failed to designate Trump’s penchant for dishonesty and personalized rule as the primary menace on display in the debate and not Biden’s shuffling gait or verbal quicksand.

Whatever one’s politics, over the past three years, Biden has proved that he can preside at least adequately, if not ideally, over a government of capable, qualified, and conventional officials who rarely produce jolting departures from the norms of U.S. politics and governance. Biden and his team offer up programs and platforms whose progress or failures one can debate and measure. Trump disavows platforms and details and just says: Trust me. Like some of the worst demagogues of the 1930s, he equates himself with the solution. Under his leadership, Trump gloats, virtually nothing would be difficult, not even the most complex problems. For example, he claims that he’d be able to settle the crisis over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in one day.

Biden may have had a terrible debate night, but he clearly conveyed one thing that much of the commentator class failed to note in their shallow, sports commentary-like analysis: Trump has the tendencies of a fascist. This is no rhetorical overkill. That was Biden’s point when he spiritedly stated that Trump had applauded a mob in Charlottesville, Virginia, that menacingly chanted white supremacist slogans out of 1930s Germany and hoisted swastikas.

If Biden were elected, he might not survive a four-year term. He might just barely scrape by, heavily dependent on teleprompters and note cards in meetings. The United States will not have resolved its crisis of political renewal, but it would at least remain a partial and imperfect democracy. Nothing could be less certain under Trump, who has boasted about being a dictator for a day, seeking retribution against his political enemies, and going for a constitutionally forbidden third term in office. Furthermore, he has been aided and empowered by a prostrate Republican Party willing to excuse his every move. Worse still, the Supreme Court—three of whose members Trump appointed—seems in on the game, newly granting Trump broad immunity against criminal prosecution even for illegal acts that would have been considered an outrage throughout most of U.S. history. Watergate may one day pale in comparison.

What seems increasingly obvious now is that another Trump presidency would place the United States squarely within the very bad emperor paradigm that the country’s system of democratic checks and balances was intended to avoid.