President Trump’s sweeping executive orders and his administration’s policy actions continue to have widespread effects on state and local governments—as well as the private sector and civil society. As a result, public leaders of all levels have had to face challenges they may not have experienced.
vlog talked with former Massachusetts governor and David R. Gergen Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership Deval Patrick about the challenges leaders may be facing now and the leadership skills this moment of change calls for. Patrick recently taught a class on leading through public crises and currently has 80 students enrolled in his “Principles and Politics When Running for Public Office” course.
Q: You served as governor of Massachusetts from 2007 to 2015. You are no stranger to crisis leadership having weathered the Boston Marathon bombing and other crises during your tenure. Would it be fair to say that public leaders today are dealing with significant crises?
Patrick: I feel what is happening now is pretty serious.
We have lots of evidence that court orders are being ignored. We have students being scooped up by masked men and shoved into unmarked cars and flown off to unknown destinations out of state, out of our commonwealth, and elsewhere. And for what exactly? During his first term and during his candidacy, Trump used issues around undocumented people and the security of the border as a scare tactic and to “other” people not like us. Now it seems to be a cover for anybody who may have expressed a point of view that is contrary to the president personally or to the president’s interest, not the national interest necessarily.
What we need when it comes to immigration, what we need in terms of all kinds of reforms, are updated rules that are current and thoughtful and sensible and serve our long-term interests. What we have is impulse and carelessness and a profound cruelty and unseriousness to what I think is a big, big problem. It has discredited us in a variety of ways around the world and it is causing turmoil socially and economically at home.
“I also think we need more civic engagement, and I don’t think it necessarily has to be political engagement, but service. I really do think community service is vital. It reminds us of who we are.”
Q: In your experience from your time as governor of Massachusetts, are the ways in which the federal government is interacting with state governments typical, or is Trump pursuing a different path than his predecessors?
Patrick: It’s not just states and local governments. It’s private industry as well as business and it is coming from an administration that says that it is cutting regulation. It’s some of the most extraordinary interventions into private choices and private decisions I think we’ve seen.
This administration also wants to defer to states on education and yet demand they do it their way. From a historical standpoint, that has been a tension in this country from the beginning, figuring out how to find that balance. But that’s not what this is. This is interventionist.
One of the ways I think that our leaders can lead for us right now and show that courage is to call that out, just as Governor Mills (D-Maine) did [in pushing back against Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports], and resist it using the tools that we have, including the courts.
Q: What do you say to your students or anyone who wants to serve in public administration now?
Patrick: We need good people, and I will say that the folks who voted for the president, who voted for Vice President Harris, or the 90 million people who could have voted and didn’t vote at all, they’re not wrong when they say the system is broken: it is broken. It has in some ways been broken on purpose. When you think about legislative gerrymandering and dark money, much of that influences policymaking and politics. But it is up to us to fix it. It’s not going to be the election of this or that president or this or that legislative leader.
It’s going to be all of us committing to this idea that government has a role to play in helping us help ourselves. Democracy is how we make those choices. That’s how we do it. Not leaving it to experts, not leaving it to billionaires, not leaving it to elites. All of us coming together and insisting that the system of policymaking and the system of politics actually belongs to us.
I also think we need more civic engagement, and I don’t think it necessarily has to be political engagement, but service. I really do think community service is vital. It reminds us of who we are. There are ways in which each of us need other people. I think it’s important to be reminded that there are lots and lots of unmet needs, and some of those needs need to be met through a sense of community through which we all participate.
I think it is a time for leadership that is values-based and values-driven. This is a time to be brave.
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Photograph by AP Photo/Andrew Harnik.