The Training of America’s Apprentice President: An Explanation of the Crisis in American Pluralism?
American presidents have come from a variety of backgrounds, from military leaders to lawyers and more. Many local politicians have been real estate agents as both involved working with residents and businesses. Arguably, however, Donald Trump has come into his office of the presidency from three careers that might have trained him in ways of leading that are wreaking havoc on the American federal government. Could the experiences of Donald Trump as he moved into being President of the United States (POTUS) created models of governance? Might the unprecedented chaos of his first six months be a consequence in part of the models of governance he applies to his new office? And might he be too old to learn new ways of working with politicians in the US and internationally?
What were these careers that have trained Trump to act as a president?
The most influential might be his life in being in and eventually running a family business. Consider his appointments to his Cabinet and other offices. They are widely seen to prioritize trust over competence, which is exactly a rule of thumb within a family business. Family businesses are run with spouses, sons, and daughters appointed to key positions. And they are not democratic – most often autocratic. To be fair, Trump tried during his first term to appoint qualified and experienced Cabinet members and advisors but he quickly found that these experts disagreed with many of his ideas and actions – to his frustration. Clearly in his second term, he has reverted to his training in running his family business, which he perceives to have been successful, even appointing Steve Witkoff, a friend he trusted from his real estate business in New York, to be his international envoy, such as in talks with Ukraine and Russia and Israel. Trust over competence.
Secondly, he worked in real estate in New York City. He worked for his father’s real estate company from 1968, took it over in 1971, and has remained in real estate ever since – even now. He seems to be scouting for real estate deals during trips to his golf courses in Scotland in 2025. But his career in New York real estate meant that he would have dealt with politicians in one of the most quintessential urban political machines of America in the mid-century, right along with Chicago as the model of machine politics (Banfield 1961), such as Rober Moses of New York City, or Richard Daley and his predecessors in Chicago. These politicians were ‘power brokers’ (Caro 1974). Their political machines ran on transactional deals. Many new immigrants, construction workers, laborers, elevator operators in major urban cities were not interested in big political issues. Those were the focus of suburban voters in the so-called newspaper wards. Not being interested in political races and issues meant that a local bartender or tradesman could give a person the proverbial chicken or turkey or job, the elevator operator. So, when it came time to vote, the machine’s representative could ask the voter a favor, to vote for the machine’s candidates. Why not? While overly simplified, this kind of transactional politics that you see with Donald Trump might be as closely tied to working in an American urban political culture of the past as to working in real estate or business per se.
Finally, and perhaps most obviously, he is an entertainer. Trump co-produced and hosted a TV series called The Apprentice. He played a key role in deciding who was hired or fired and was most often the one to say: “You’re Fired”. His popularity on this TV show made him known across the US. It is often said that American voters tend to vote for someone they think they know, and they began to think they knew Trump. This role is most often cited as a reason is gained popularity, but it also was training in how to gain an audience. And Trump has continued to produce so-called reality-TV shows even as president. During his famous meeting in the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump and his trusted VP and advisors criticized the President of Ukraine, leading Trump to speculate that this will make ‘good television’. But this entertaining spontaneity moves beyond TV to the Internet and his use of his own Internet platform, Truth Social, to make announcements from anywhere at any time about anything with the authority of his office. Move submarines? Nothing is out of the question. He continues to entertain and produce his entertainment even when it tramples over many accepted practices in politics, government, and the White House. He learned this in working on The Apprentice.
I’ll stop there, since I’ve sketched my main points about how this new president learned to behave as he does. You could of course stop here, but let me add one more point: which is how this undermines American politics.
The Federalist Papers and the US Constitution sought to design the American government in ways that would reduce the likelihood of tyranny. Its constitution created a separation of powers across the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, inspired by Montesquieu’s conception of a tripartite system of power in France, consisting of the Monarch (executive), Parliament (legislative), and courts (judiciary). They were designed to be separated – a separation of powers – to diminish the potential for one to dominate all and enable each to hold the other powers more accountable. To this, an independent press was to be a fourth power, also enabled to hold government more accountable by reporting on the work of each branch of government. The Internet and social media are empowering networked individuals, I argue, to become a virtual Fifth Estate. These separation of powers are critical to moderating American politics.
In addition, to the checks and balances, offered by this separation of powers, the US government was designed as a federal system, dividing powers between the central federal government and the governments of the states. Here again, this reduced the potential of any one state or the federal government becoming overwhelmingly powerful. Framers of the constitution saw the most likely sources of radical political movements to be local. Federalism and the design of the legislative branch, particularly to House of Representatives having limited geographical jurisdictions or districts, were hoped to contain any radical political movements to a minority of representatives. Riding on horses was inherently reinforcing localism in political communication versus today’s world of communicating online. But the design federalism was in part aimed at fragmenting and distributing power to limit the potential rise of a tyrannical person or movement across the USA.
This distribution of power was a critical factor shaping the rise of pluralism in US politics. Political power might well be inherently oligarchal (Michels 1962), but from an empirical and pluralist perspective, it tends to be specialized. Those who dominated education policy were unlikely to dominate foreign policy, and so on. Pluralism was a realist’s view of democracy versus a romantic view of the equality of influence across the electorate. But to govern a pluralist system, a plurality of powerful forces needed to compromise and negotiate, thereby reinforcing mechanisms to limit tyrannical forces and enable distributed governance.
These institutional designs were reinforced by a developing political culture in the US once described as a civic culture (Almond and Verba1963). In comparison with four other nations, in the decades since the second world war, the US appeared to be a relatively civil society. As Almond and Verba (1963: 32) put it: “… a balanced political culture in which political activity, involvement, and rationality exist but are balanced by passivity, traditionality, and commitment to parochial values.” Arguably, this civic culture has changed dramatically over the decades since the Almond and Verba study and is increasingly characterized as polarized and politically toxic. As an editorial today put it, “… the world becomes not a place of wide-tent compromise, but of irreconcilable differences” (Malik 2025).
As the President works to reduce checks and balances (e.g., controlling Congress and the Courts), undermining federalism (e.g., sending the military to US cities), and fanning polarization on TV and online, he is seeking to undue all of the work of the framers of the US Constitution and, in the process, undermining the pluralism of American politics. If things sometimes seem chaotic or jaw-droppingly dangerous, then you are seeing the collision of an apprentice in power with the structure of government and traditional system of politics in America. After six months in office, we cannot say “You’re Fired.” But we can try to understand what is happening – that can be empowering.
Those are my thoughts but I welcome your comments and criticisms so I can develop this further, if warranted.
Sources
Almond, G. A., and Verba, S. (1963), The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Banfield, E. C. (1961), Political Influence. Glencoe: The Free Press.
Caro, R. (1974), The Power Broker. New York: Vintage.
Malik, N. (2025), ‘What happens when a party loses its base?’, The Guardian, 25 August: Opinion, p. 3.
Michels, R. (1962), Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, New York: Free Press.
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron e (1748), The Spirit of Laws, N.p.
Snyder, T. (2017), On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. London: The Bodley Head.
