When democracy’s institutions meet ‘personal brand’ politicians

Many years ago, when I was in high school, I was a pretty good wrestler. But when a friend jokingly remarked that I’d be a good guy to have alongside him in case of a mugging, I remember my younger brother chiming in: “Yeah, as long as he could tell the mugger, ‘Stay inside that circle. And stop if the referee blows the whistle!’”

Similarly constrained fights, but with real-world implications, have been raging this week on both sides of the Atlantic as two of the world’s leading democracies – the United States and Britain – moved formally to sanction men who, not too long ago, held the reins of power.

The decision by the U.S. Justice Department to indict former President Donald Trump for alleged security breaches and obstruction and Britain’s move to punish ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson for what an inquiry has deemed serial lies to Parliament were unprecedented. And they were bound to provoke a political firestorm.

But beyond the public drama, and the dueling claims of “due process” and “witch hunt,” the moves by the U.S. and British authorities represented an attempt to meet a challenge that has been building ever since Mr. Trump and Mr. Johnson first sought high office.

It is this: How can the centuries-old institutions, written rules, and long-accepted conventions of these two venerable democracies accommodate a brand of 21st-century politician that neither system was designed, or equipped, to cope with?

The answer will matter, a lot, to the future shape of democratic government in America and Britain; to Messrs. Trump and Johnson, out of office yet hopeful of regaining power; and to their admirers at the head of other, less robustly rooted democracies such as Hungary and Poland, Turkey and Israel.

For Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are strikingly similar figures.

Both were initially dismissed as almost comically unlikely to rise to rule their countries. Both did so, with enormous impact. Mr. Johnson ended Britain’s decadeslong membership in the European Union. Mr. Trump reshaped America’s approach to the world, shrugging off traditional alliances in favor of purely transactional deals he decided were of value.

Both men repeatedly ignored, or breached, their democracies’ established rules and conventions.

And both, this past week, were accused of the same transgression – a failure to tell the truth, and telling further untruths when investigators pressed them.

At issue for Mr. Trump was his retention and handling of highly classified documents. For Mr. Johnson, it was his testimony to a parliamentary committee looking into whether he’d misled legislators during the controversy that drove him from office last year about his breaches of pandemic lockdown rules.

Yet the most important similarity between the two men – and the reason that the ultimate outcome of this week’s showdowns remains uncertain – is that they’re not really politicians, in the traditional sense of the word, at all.

They’re performers. Entertainers. Essentially, personal brands: Trump “the politician” no less so than Trump Tower; Mr. Johnson, known universally by friend and foe alike, simply as “Boris.”

And they are prodigiously gifted performers, leaving crowds laughing, clapping, shouting, and jostling for selfies. Before Mr. Trump was excluded from Twitter, he had tens of millions of followers. Mr. Johnson has nearly 5 million – far more than any other British politician.

And while pundits frequently label both men “right-wing populists,” that’s not so much who they are, as much as it describes the political persona they embraced during their rise to power – first in their political parties, and then in their nations.

Donald Trump was not even a Republican in his earlier years. Though socially liberal himself, he embraced the party’s trademark policy crusades, for instance on abortion, as part of his grassroots rallying call – and proceeded, as president, to reshape the U.S. Supreme Court, paving the way for its restriction of abortion rights.

Mr. Johnson was the indispensable leader of the 2016 referendum campaign that took Britain out of the European Union. But only days before he publicly declared his backing for Brexit, he’d drafted two versions of his newspaper column – one supporting withdrawal, the other opposing it.

His ultimate decision proved not only a vehicle for greater national celebrity. It propelled him, a few years later, into No. 10 Downing Street.

So will he, and Mr. Trump, again prevail?

They’re certainly coming out fighting. Mr. Trump has denounced this week’s indictment as a travesty of American democracy, and nothing more than a blatant political hit job.

Mr. Johnson’s challenge is more daunting: The report of the parliamentary inquiry, concluding he had indeed deliberately misled Parliament, was released Thursday. It is due to go to the whole legislature for a vote early next week.

But his response was every bit as robust as Mr. Trump’s. A “dreadful day for democracy,” he said, calling the report “a charade ... intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination.”

And he added tellingly that the verdict on his, or anyone’s, parliamentary future isn’t up to a parliamentary committee. “It is for the people of this country to decide,” he said.

Still, at least so far, the prospects for Mr. Trump’s angry fightback are looking decidedly more promising than Mr. Johnson’s – and the reasons for this may hold clues to Britain’s and America’s future political course.

One key difference is in the architecture of the two democracies. Britain, unlike the U.S., does not vest power in a single elected president; that rests with the 650 members of the House of Commons. And any Prime Minister who cannot command a majority has to step down. That’s what happened to Mr. Johnson last September.

So the main obstacle to a Boris or Trump comeback lies not with rival political parties, but rather with their own tribes.

Mr. Johnson appears to have exhausted the patience of all but his most devoted followers in the Conservative Party. But across the Atlantic, the great majority of Mr. Trump’s tribe – federal indictment notwithstanding – seems uninclined to break ranks.