In 1768 Sir James Porter, a British diplomat in Istanbul, reflected on the state of the Ottoman Empire, then beginning a war with Russia, which marked the first of a sequence of military defeats. He recalled a Turkish proverb to account for it: ‘The fish rots from the head.’ Porter suggested that the corrupt and weak leadership of the Ottoman Empire was ultimately responsible for the failure and that this characteristic coloured the whole of Turkish society. In short, the rot started at the head and subsequently traveled through the whole body.

When Donald Trump began his presidency four years ago, his inauguration speech on 20 January 2017 railed against the current state of the USA: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now” (“Inaugural Address,” 2017). Four years later, on 6 January 2021 as the votes were about to be confirmed in the Capitol, and after what must be one of the most divisive presidencies since the U.S. Civil War, Trump unleashed the very carnage he had promised to end. He told his supporters: “We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved…. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore…. we will stop the steal…. we won this election and we won it by a landslide …. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol – – And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them….  You have to show strength….” (Jacobo, 2021).

Trump had been forewarning of election fraud for months and called on his supporters to prepare for 6 January 2021 as the last chance to protest the ‘stolen election.’ When the Black Lives Matter protest took to the streets outside the Capitol on 1 June 2020, they were met with solid walls of well-armed police and the National Guard (Borger, 2021). When Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, the forces of law and order where extremely thin on the ground, and the mob found forcing an entry relatively easy. After five deaths, 56 officers injured, 68 arrests, and scenes of riot inside the Capitol shown live around the world, Trump eventually asked his supporters to go home, while reminding them that the election had been stolen. But the rioters, having done as summoned, had to be forced out of the Capitol building. The following day Trump rounded on them calling for “an orderly transition of power” after the “heinous attack… I am outraged by the violence… I immediately deployed the National Guard…. Now tempers must be cooled… My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote. In so doing, I was fighting to defend American democracy…. This moment calls for healing and reconciliation…” (“President Trump Releases Video,” 2021). So how do we explain this sudden volte-face: from incitement to condemnation? Did Trump suddenly understand his culpability and become ‘presidential’ at last, or might there be another explanation?

If we accept that Sir James Porter might have a point, that leadership ultimately bears the responsibility for what happens in organizations and countries, then we can turn to theories of ‘permission giving’ and scapegoating to explain this. We know that followers are often reluctant to engage in risky behaviour until others, and particularly leaders, give them permission to do so. Thus, the rise of Hitler coincides with an explosion of public antisemitism in Germany, and something similar happened in the UK when Brexit ‘gave permission’ for some of its supporters to articulate racist opinions. Indeed, there are clear correlations with attacks upon immigrants (Brexit “Major Influence”, 2019). Thus, public debates are altered by the role of leaders in their voicing of opinions that were hitherto regarded as either too divisive or too outrageous to be made public. Once permission is given the social controls that previously inhibited such behaviour disappear.

But what happens when the permission-giving of leaders to engage in dubious or criminal practices goes awry? The first thing to note is how leaders seldom articulate their wishes in clearly illegal terms. They rarely say, “go riot,” though sometimes they do. More usually they say, “march on the building,” or, “you know what you need to do,” knowing that this will be understood by their followers as permission to riot or whatever the leader tacitly implies. What happens next depends upon what happens next. Should the riot or attack be deemed successful, leaders will traditionally take responsibility, but if it fails, then leaders usually start distancing themselves and denying culpability. Indeed, they often start to scapegoat those very followers that they have just urged forward.