Few today remember the ancient Roman general Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, but now is as good a time as any to learn a lesson from him about leadership and the proper handling of power.
Facing an imminent military disaster at the hands of the rival Aequians in 458 B.C., desperate senators, unhappy with the Republic’s co-consuls, turned to the former consul for help.
The legend goes that they found him plowing the fields of his rural farm and asked him to put on his toga, the sign of his former office, in order that he might hear their message. As the Roman historian Livy relates, “When he had put it on, after wiping off the dust and sweat, and came forth to the envoys, they hailed him Dictator, congratulated him, and summoned him to the City.”
Cincinnatus accepted the temporary office, assembled his troops, rode out, and defeated the enemy in 15 days—after which he returned power to the elected officials and retired to his farm once more.
Cincinnatus (after whom the city in Ohio is indirectly named) thus became the model for the statesman indifferent to the trappings and perks of office. George Washington was often compared to him. Like Cincinnatus, Washington had been called upon to lead the Continental Army; like Cincinnatus, he won; and, like Cincinnatus, he voluntarily resigned his commission and, after two elected terms, the presidency of the new Republic itself. The great poet, Lord Byron, apostrophized Washington as “the Cincinnatus of the West.”
The latter three groups, united in contempt for Trump and dedicated to his downfall, whether by impeachment and conviction in the Senate (which failed earlier this year) or by his defeat at the ballot box this fall, have never accepted him as a legitimate president and have done everything in their power—even before his first official day in office—to hobble his administration and destroy his reputation.
Trump, however, has confounded expectations and survived the onslaught. A president who was elected in 2016, in part as a roar of protest against the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party and the national media, has gradually won over a sizable portion of the electorate that never suspected he had the smarts, the willpower, or the gumption to actually enact the platform he ran on, and will vote for him enthusiastically this fall, barring a complete meltdown of the economy.
How did he do it? In a word, leadership. Trump, naively, expected to be given the customary honeymoon period during his first 100 days or so, but the knives came out for him even faster than they did for Julius Caesar after he assumed absolute power in the wreckage of the Roman Republic that Cincinnatus had saved. A lesser man might—would—have folded. And many around Trump did.
A weak Jeff Sessions, his misguided pick for attorney general, immediately recused himself as the CIA-media-driven “Russian collusion” hoax got underway. Trump’s first choice for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, made the common mistake of thinking he had more authority than the boss. The president’s choice of Gen. Mike Flynn as national security adviser was immediately torpedoed by the rogue FBI director, James Comey, and the country continues to suffer from the loss of the only Obama administration official (Flynn had been director of the Defense Intelligence Agency between 2012 and 2014) who understood clearly the threat from recrudescent Islam.
Indeed, the Trump White House became a churn factory, provoking much mirth and merriment among the Democrat-Media Complex (in the late Andrew Breitbart’s famous phrase) accustomed to the orderly appointments of the usual Beltway suspects in high government jobs. They saw the turnover as amateurism rather than what it was: experimentation by a novice politician until he finally realized that none of the padded resumes and congenial time-servers were going to give him the results he wanted—and that his voters demanded.
And so, like Cincinnatus, he stepped up. Here’s how he did it:
Reagan’s famous dictum “We win, they lose” is all the policy any leader ever needs.
No one knows how the fight against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus, will end. At the same time, Trump understands that the United States can’t shut down indefinitely and that, at some point soon, the brutal tradeoff between acceptable casualties and America’s economic health will have to be made—and stuck to.
Trump recently termed himself a wartime president; in times of war, every wartime president from Lincoln to Wilson to Roosevelt to George W. Bush has had to make that call. Lincoln and FDR got it right; Wilson got lucky and Bush failed miserably. But make the call Trump will, no doubt to the usual leftist sneers of derision and accusations of heartlessness from the media.
As the saying goes, desperate times demand desperate measures. In this case, however, there’s no need for desperation. Crises demand leaders equal to the task. Not desperate, but calm, cool-headed (in public, at least), capable—and determined to be proven right. Win or lose, that’s what leadership looks like.
Just ask Cincinnatus.
