The Office Carries the Man

What strikes me most about the current president of the United States is a strange inversion that would be almost comic if it were not so consequential. He shows little regard for the role he occupies, scant respect for the law, and no evident commitment to the country beyond what it can deliver to him personally. And yet he remains in place because others continue to believe in the office itself, in the Constitution behind it, and in the idea that public life can stand for something beyond wealth, dominance, or spectacle. That belief supplies the gravity he does not.

There is nothing especially mysterious about this. Autocracy only benefits the elites, but it depends on broad participation to function. The role continues to work because people keep treating it seriously, even while the person occupying it does not. Authority is carried forward by habit and compliance rather than by judgment or responsibility. Procedures are followed. Signals are obeyed. Deference is enacted. Power accumulates upward, while obligation drains outward. What looks like stability is really momentum, and what passes for governance becomes performance sustained by routine.

When meaning is carried by collective behaviour rather than by a single centre, it can endure long after that centre has hollowed out. The seriousness that once anchored the office keeps it running, not because it is honoured by the person inside it, but because so many others still feel bound to honour it. In that way, shared belief becomes both the system’s strength and its vulnerability, capable of sustaining public order, but also of carrying someone who treats that order as incidental.