The News
The best guide to this last week in Washington is a slim book, published in France last year to great acclaim and released last month in English with little fanfare under the title The Hour of the Predator.
The author, Giuliano da Empoli, has advised the Italian and French governments and walked the halls of power with their leaders. He observes without judgment that a new type of political figure has risen in this new era.
These new “predators” are not populists per se, but men of action who disdain laws and lawyers, who have fought their way to the top in a “digital Somalia, a bankrupt state on a planetary scale.” Their power is drawn in part from acting unpredictably toward a future that has become inherently unknowable and is shaped through force.
Trump, obviously, is da Empoli’s central example; the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is another. And last week’s dealmaking — between the countries and also the families of Trump and some of his inner circle, with the future of technology as the ultimate prize — embodies this worldview. On the side, Trump menaced Venezuela.
Modern politics, da Empoli writes, is shaped by a singular alliance: between the dominant operators of tech companies and this new wave of politicians.
Their convergence, he writes, is “structural,” as both “derive their power from digital insurrection, and neither is willing to tolerate any limits to its will to power.” As a natural consequence: “Lawyers are their natural enemies.”
Everybody blames the lawyers these days; da Empoli’s predators hate them because they get in the way. So do many Democrats: Dan Wang’s new book about the rise of China, Breakneck, also frets about the “lawyerly society” that has paralyzed the US.
Da Empoli’s other protagonists have little time for the law, including the Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele, who has brought down the murder rate with mass imprisonment based on men’s tattoos rather than due process. Another iconic predator is Vladimir Putin, the subject of da Empoli’s wonderful 2022 novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin. That work has been adapted into a film whose distributors told me recently they’ve yet to find a distributor — Hollywood is extremely scared of state-sponsored hacking attempts.
As Trump’s American critics and admirers alike struggle to understand him in terms of 20th-century right-wing traditions or Jacksonian strands in American history, da Empoli offers a useful alternative. And while his work has had surprisingly little resonance here (so far), it has begun to shape European leaders’ views.
President Emmanuel Macron, in particular, has adopted da Empoli’s rubric. “In the hour of the predators, no one can remain still,” he said on Bastille Day, announcing more defense spending. “To be free in this world, one must be feared.”
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Ben’s view
Da Empoli’s book was a sensation in France, but has drawn far less attention in the US since its release last October. I’d initially blamed the cover — we’ve got to put a moratorium on MAGA hat-themed political book covers. But maybe it’s because da Empoli’s take, while satisfyingly clear, feels less obvious in this more complicated moment, in which even MBS has emerged as a more predictable, if equally autocratic, force.
Friday afternoon, Trump was joking around with Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor-elect and the victor in his own digital Somalia of New York online politics. Is Mamdani one of the predators? Or is Trump — as he sometimes seems — more a reality television producer than a dark power player, welcoming a popular new character to goose ratings in a flagging Season 5?
Then by Sunday, the US was driving a chaotic intervention in Ukraine, and it was predator time again.
In both cases Trump has certainly validated one of da Empoli’s maxims: that these new-style leaders must be utterly unpredictable.
Room for Disagreement
Some French readers found da Empoli’s analysis overstated: “Bastions of democratic culture have not disappeared and are holding firm against the onslaught,” wrote Vincent Martigny. “Their absence from the narrative gives the impression that politics today is played out only in a theater where the cynical and violent hold leading roles, which seems both historically debatable and politically reductive.”
Notable
- In The New York Times, David Brooks denounces Trump, Putin, and others as “predators” and “wolves,” and clarifies that he means those terms as pejoratives: “The authoritarians take it as a compliment. They know they are wolves!”
- Some in the European political set see da Empoli as a second coming of Machiavelli, as Politico’s Giorgio Leali writes.