When Power Becomes Performance: Why Governance by Shock Fails Democracies
By Karl Garcia
In different political systems and cultures, Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte practiced a similar style of leadership: governance by shock, confrontation, and personal dominance. Their supporters often praised this approach as “strong leadership” or a necessary disruption of elite complacency. Yet with the benefit of distance and evidence, it is increasingly clear that this style of rule produces more institutional damage than durable reform.
This is not a moral argument about personality. It is a governance argument about outcomes.
Power as spectacle, not capacity
Both leaders relied heavily on rhetoric, threats, and public confrontation to project authority. This approach treats power as something performed rather than exercised through institutions. Decisions are announced dramatically, opponents are shamed publicly, and complexity is reduced to slogans.
Such tactics can generate short-term compliance and political loyalty. But governance is not sustained by spectacle. It depends on bureaucratic competence, legal predictability, and coordination among institutions. When policy is driven by impulse or personal loyalty rather than process, implementation weakens and accountability erodes.
Over time, the state becomes reactive rather than strategic.
Institutions as obstacles instead of assets
A defining feature of this governing style is hostility toward mediating institutions—courts, legislatures, civil services, alliances, and even professional expertise. These are framed as impediments to “decisive action.”
Yet institutions exist precisely because modern societies are too complex to be governed by personal will alone. When leaders bypass or undermine them, they may accelerate decisions, but they also hollow out the very mechanisms needed to sustain those decisions.
In the United States, this manifested in policy reversals, diplomatic instability, and weakened alliances. In the Philippines, it contributed to legal uncertainty, uneven enforcement of law, and long-term institutional fragility.
Coercion mistaken for leadership
Threats—whether against political opponents, other branches of government, or foreign partners—are often confused with strength. In reality, coercion is a blunt instrument. It works best against weaker actors and fails against systems governed by law, markets, or collective decision-making.
The Greenland episode under Trump illustrates this limit. Loud assertions of power produced headlines but not results. Similarly, Duterte’s reliance on fear and force addressed symptoms while leaving structural causes—poverty, institutional weakness, governance gaps—largely intact.
Leadership that depends on coercion reaches a ceiling quickly. Leadership that builds consent and capacity scales.
The hidden cost: normalized dysfunction
Perhaps the most lasting damage of this style is cultural. When shock politics becomes normalized, citizens begin to associate chaos with decisiveness and cruelty with effectiveness. Law is seen as optional, and governance becomes transactional rather than principled.
This leaves societies vulnerable. When the leader exits, institutions are weaker, norms are eroded, and successors inherit systems less capable of solving complex problems.
The appeal of such leadership lies in real frustrations: inequality, corruption, slow justice, and unresponsive elites. But addressing these challenges requires institutional reform, not institutional bypassing.
Why it matters not to repeat this path
The question is not whether Trump or Duterte identified real problems—they often did. The question is whether their method of governing strengthened the state’s ability to solve those problems sustainably.
The evidence suggests it did not.
In an era defined by climate risk, technological disruption, geopolitical competition, and social fragmentation, states need resilience, coordination, and trust. These are built slowly, through boring but necessary work: rulemaking, enforcement, professionalization, and accountability.
Governance by shock undermines precisely these capacities.
Conclusion
Strong leadership is not measured by volume, threats, or fear. It is measured by whether institutions function better after a leader leaves than before they arrived.
The lesson from the Trump and Duterte years is not partisan. It is structural. Societies that confuse forceful rhetoric with effective governance pay a long-term price.
Avoiding a return to this style is not about civility. It is about protecting the state’s capacity to govern—after the applause fades.
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