The Burden of Leading When Leadership Fails Us

I love my team. They really pour their hearts into work that increasingly feels like building sandcastles against a rising tide. Yesterday, one of them asked me point-blank: "Will my checks keep coming when the federal grant ends and we just got three grant declines this week?"

I didn't have a good answer. Because how do you lead with confidence when the ground beneath you keeps shifting?

As Francis Fukuyama accurately describes, "The Trump administration is behaving as if it were born yesterday, innocent of any of the accumulated understanding of regional politics or of the sources of earlier American policy failures. Indeed, it has expressed contempt for experts coming out of the establishment—diplomats, intelligence analysts, military officers, and many others—and sidelined them. Instead, it has relied on a small circle of sycophantic Trump loyalists, none of whom are likely to give the president realistic assessments of the way forward."

While none of us are public policy experts, my staff sees this. They're not naive. They whisper worries about nuclear threats casually tossed around like poker chips. They wonder if the families we've spent years building trust with will be torn apart by deportation raids. They ask whether our evidence-based programs will be targeted simply because we serve the "wrong" populations or use the "wrong" words in our mission statement.

Anyone who likes to read a little history, like me, can connect the dots for both warnings and a bit of hope. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, surrounded by courtiers who told him his music was divine. Hitler's inner circle fed his delusions even as reality closed in. Shakespeare captured it perfectly in Julius Caesar: "The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power." But here's what history, and sometimes dramatization, also teaches us—those who maintained their integrity, who kept serving despite the madness above them, they're the ones who really mattered. I find myself thinking of Schindler's List and The Zookeepers Wife. And maybe a bit of Jojo Rabbit.

My team lives for service. Every day, they choose to show up not for power or prestige, but because somewhere a child needs a book, a grandparent needs someone to read to, a family needs hope when the systems that are supposed to help them seem designed to exclude them.

Brené Brown talks about "vulnerability"—the courage to show up and keep going when you can't control the outcome. Last week, I stood before my entire staff and admitted I don't know what's coming. I can't promise our funding is safe. I can't guarantee we won't face persecution or that the war will quickly end. What I can promise is that we'll face whatever comes together, with our values intact.

A long time ago, I studied "The Art of War" to better understand about conflict and strategy. Sun Tzu wrote that "all warfare is based on deception," but he meant know your enemy's deceptions, not become them. When leadership above us trades expertise for loyalty, facts for comfortable lies, we respond by doubling down on truth. We document everything. We measure our outcomes meticulously. We build coalitions with others who share our commitment to evidence and compassion. We tend and befriend, not fight or flight.

Because here's what I try to convey to my team: Truth has a way of outlasting lies. When Nero's Rome finally burned, it was rebuilt. When Hitler's reich fell, it was ordinary people who remembered what decency looked like. Every time throughout history when loyalty trumped competence, when sycophants replaced experts, reality eventually reasserted itself—often painfully, but inevitably.

So we stay focused by remembering that our work—the unglamorous, daily work of serving others—is itself an act of resistance. Every family we help navigate a bedtime routine is a repudiation of cruelty. Every program we run based on evidence rather than ideology or personality is a small victory for truth. Every time we show up with integrity when integrity is mocked from the highest offices, we plant seeds for what comes after.

I tell my staff: We may not control the weather, but we can tend our garden. We can't stop the storms, but we can shelter each other. We can't guarantee outcomes, but we can guarantee that we'll face whatever comes with our principles intact.

Shakespeare's Cassius said, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." The inverse is also true—the hope is not in our stars, but in ourselves. In our daily choice to serve rather than surrender, to document rather than despair, to support each other when support from above evaporates.

I'm not unrealistic. We have a lot of hard work ahead. Truth and integrity may not pay the bills tomorrow. They may not protect us from whatever fresh chaos emerges from Washington or the big wide world. But they're the only foundation solid enough to build on when everything else is shifting sand. And history shows us, again and again, that those who build on that foundation are the ones still standing when the tyrants fall and the sycophants scatter.

For all of you working on something that uplifts others and moves towards peace and decency, we can do this. Not because it's easy, but because it's necessary. Not because we're guaranteed to win, but because the act of trying, together, with compassion and competence and courage, is itself the victory.