Trump’s business strategy and his authoritarianism are linked — and women are the antidote

Politicians like Trump have found that the corporate playbook works in the political arena the same way that it does in the business sphere.

Donald Trump likes to brag about his business skills. The former president’s detractors view him as an authoritarian.

Trump ran for president in 2016 touting his financial success, and many of his supporters liked the idea of America being run as a business. Today, his detractors decry his use of tactics straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

What no one is pointing out is that these two qualities are linked. Trump is a walking caricature of the traits that came to dominate corporate America when the winners of a new competitive corporate “tournament” replaced the “organization man” of the 1950s.

And the antidote to such evils? The empowerment of women.

Over the last 50 years, corporate executives shifted from General Motors’s we’re-all-in-this-together assertion (“What’s good for GM is good for America”) to a winner-take-all world in which they rig the system to benefit themselves. That system depends on recruiting the right men (and a very few women) and bringing out the worst in them.

They do it by adopting high-stakes bonus systems that make everyone insecure. Jack Welch, the late CEO of GE and one of the pioneers of this system, liked to brag: adopt his method of pitting employees against each other and management could get workers to do whatever management wanted.

Executives in such environments feel a constant need to prove themselves by demonstrating the traits associated with “real men” — engaging in aggressive behaviors, cut-throat competition and rule-breaking; working fanatical hours; taking unnecessary risks; bullying and sexually harassing other workers. This behavior increases when executives feel insecure.

The “winners” then recruit like-minded allies, who help them outflank the competition. That might be why, as a McKinsey report found in October, the corporate ladder to the top for women has a broken rung.

Trump used that playbook to manage his businesses and he has proved to be a master at employing the same tactics to increase his political influence.

First, increase insecurity — those who think they’re losing are easier to manipulate. In the corporate world, this mean bonus structures that apply unrelenting pressure (in Sam Walton’s words, “beat yesterday”). In the political sphere, it means Trump casting the U.S. as an “impoverished hellscape beset by bloodthirsty urban anarchists, a terrorist fifth column, and the machinations of globalist elites,” as CNN’s Gregory Krieg summarized in 2016, and appealing to the very real sense among his followers that they are losing ground. The intentional stoking of insecurity commands loyalty and readiness for action.

Second, personalize power — those who see the system as rigged yearn for a larger-than-life figure who will tear it down. In the corporate sphere, this has been described as “the irrational quest for charismatic CEOs”; for Trump, it involves his continual refrain that “I alone can fix it.” The ability to break the rules and get away with it — to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and have your supporters stay with you — symbolizes the power of personal dominance.

Third, insist that the world is a zero-sum enterprise and emphasize in-group solidarity — the greater the threat, the more important it is to protect your allies and the more insular such alliances become. In the business world, competitive pay has been linked to greater distrust and more politicized decision-making. In the political arena, Christian nationalism and white grievance have combined, with those who score high on Christian nationalism scales in particular more likely to believe that Christian identity is threatened by those who are secular and members of non-Christian religions.

Finally, valorize manhood. In the corporate world, that means picking “alpha males” more likely to have an unrealistically high opinion of themselves (including outright narcissism), a large degree of self-confidence and a greater willingness to take risks and cut ethical corners — traits that describe a distinct subset of the general population that is also more likely to be male. The political game becomes one to raise the status of “real” men at the expense of those who threaten them.

In short, politicians like Trump have found that the corporate playbook works in the political arena the same way that it does in the business sphere.

So, what exactly does this have to do with women? The short answer is that women have a much harder time winning this game — and many don’t want to try.

Gender inequalities widen in every institution that adopts competitive pay. It is little wonder that when employers advertise for positions that pit employees against each other, “the gender gap in applications more than doubles when a large fraction of the wage (50%) depends on relative performance.”

If the corporate “tournament” — or Trump’s businesses — really produced outsized returns, the techniques might merit a serious look. Instead, Trump owes close to half a billion dollars for inflating the value of his assets.

Wall Street, in the meantime, has discovered that, on average, female CEOs substantially outperform male CEOs. The greater presence of women on corporate boards has been linked to lower levels of securities fraud, accounting manipulation and simple errors that require reporting corrections.

Precisely because women can’t win the rigged game — in business or in politics — they are an important source of opposition to it.

June Carbone is the Robina Chair in Law, Science, and Technology at the University of Minnesota Law School. Nancy Levit is the associate dean for faculty and Curator’s Professor and Edward D. Ellison Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. Naomi Cahn is the Justice Anthony M. Kennedy Distinguished Professor of Law, Armistead M. Dobie Professor, and codirector of the Family Law Center at the University of Virginia School of Law. Together, they are the authors of “Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy” (Simon & Schuster, May 7, 2024).