Putin and Trump – from bad to worse  

In February 2024, Russia’s military finally captured Avdiivka, one of Ukraine’s most heavily fortified cities. Russian President Vladimir Putin had coveted Avdiivka since he launched his attack on Ukraine two years ago, and if it required 47,000 Russian soldiers to be killed or injured, so be it. 

Alexei Navalny’s death in a Siberian jail was equally unsurprising. Putin despised, and feared, his most personally conspicuous and politically dangerous opponent, and for over a decade had been tightening the noose around Navalny’s neck. 

Donald Trump recently reiterated that if he wins a second presidential term, he will either abandon NATO or relegate it to an alliance of relative unimportance. No surprise there either. Onetime national security adviser to President Trump John Bolton quoted his former boss as saying, “I don’t give a s- about NATO.” And Trump himself has long made clear that whatever the conflicts in Europe, they “are not worth American lives.” 

In recent months, Trump’s enablers — acolytes who do what they must to stay in the GOP kingmaker’s good graces — have become more compliant than ever. This was also, based on past patterns, entirely predictable. Beginning even during Trump’s presidency, Republican members of Congress, nearly all other Republican elected officials, and Republican administrators, advisers and appointees have become increasingly submissive and even obedient. 

If Trump loses the election in November, we can predict with near certainty what will happen. Given what the former president attempted the last time – from the end of November 2020 until Jan. 6, 2021, he escalated his efforts to overturn the presidential election, asking the governor of Georgia to call a special legislative session; veritably begging state officials to “find” votes; and shamelessly pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject electors — we can count on his doing as much or more to upend unfavorable electoral results. 

As an expert at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership who has long studied bad leaders, I know that Putin’s recent actions, and Trump’s, fit the usual pattern: bad leaders nearly always get worse. 

They get worse in four phases, each more ominous and compounding than the one before. The progression usually starts slowly — perceptible, perhaps, but unremarkable. Then it picks up steam. Finally, if leaders are left to their own devices, their bad behaviors metamorphose from insignificant to significant, and finally to malignant and malevolent. 

This raises the question: can worse leadership be stopped?  

The answer is yes, it can. Though there is a cardinal rule: The earlier it’s stopped the better, and the easier. 

More than two years into Putin’s war on Ukraine, it’s important to recall the sequence of events that characterized his more than two decades in office. During nearly the entirety of his tenure he has demonstrated an insatiable appetite for wealth and power. But he has remained unchecked both by those inside Russia and by those outside.  

The West, for example, did nothing as he bombed Chechnya’s capital city, Grozny, to smithereens in 2000, and nothing again as he imposed his will, militarily, on the independent state of Georgia in 2008. When Russia summarily invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014, again the West did nothing. 

Nor since he unleashed the war in Ukraine has Putin been otherwise idle. He has fortified the Russian economy and the Russian military. And he has expanded his relationships globally, aligning Russia with, for example, a country singularly antipathetic to the United States: Iran. 

Winston Churchill knew that unless it was stopped, worse leadership was nearly certain to follow bad. In 1938 he warned of “the German Dictator,” Adolf Hitler, that “his appetite may grow with eating.” 

If the United States fails to provide strong support to Ukraine during the third year of its war against Russia, and if the American people don’t vote decisively against Trump winning a second presidential term, it will all but guarantee a rather bleak future. 

Barbara Kellerman is a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she was previously founding executive director. She’s the author of “Leadership from Bad to Worse,” published by Oxford University Press.