The world has seen dangerous men, and it has seen ridiculous men; the real trouble starts when it gets someone determined to be both at once and to run an empire while doing it. With Donald Trump now in the second year of his second term, history does not feel as if it is repeating so much as workshopping an old routine with a louder microphone and a looser sense of shame.
Miranda Carter once asked what happens when a “bad-tempered, distractible doofus” runs an empire, and answered by introducing Kaiser Wilhelm II, a man whose mixture of vanity, insecurity, and power kept his ministers in a permanent state of nervous palpitations. Wilhelm’s mother wrote that “he is very arrogant, extremely smug and quite taken with himself… offended at the slightest comment… unbelievably lazy and slovenly,” which reads less like a maternal note than an early performance review for a future case study in leadership courses titled “What Not To Do.” A recent reassessment of Kaiser Wilhelm II by the historian Miranda Carter reads today with unsettling familiarity. Her portrait of the last German Emperor, who reigned from 1888 to 1918 and whose leadership helped shape the preconditions for the First World War, suggests that narcissistic leadership has a recognizable style: loud, thin-skinned, convinced of its own brilliance, and strikingly unable to learn. That Wilhelm wore a spiked helmet and Trump a red cap begins to look less like a meaningful difference than a change of costume.
Wilhelm’s contemporaries were not mystified by the problem. The diplomat and diarist Harry Graf Kessler, who knew him well, described a man of quick intelligence and real charm, fascinated by modernity and capable of flashes of insight, but also superficial, restless, impatient with sustained effort, and desperate for applause. Later historians echoed the judgment. Isabel Hull, among others, emphasized the contradiction at the heart of Wilhelm’s rule: a highly intelligent man capable of breathtaking misjudgments, erratic behavior, and self-sabotaging inconsistency, so extreme that some contemporaries openly questioned his mental stability. It is the kind of profile that makes later readers nod with uneasy recognition.
Trump’s own administration has generated comparable assessments. Bob Woodward and other reporters documented repeated episodes in which senior officials privately expressed alarm at the president’s grasp of policy and impulse control. Rex Tillerson was widely reported to have used profane language about Trump’s intelligence after a meeting on nuclear weapons, a characterization Tillerson later declined to confirm or deny directly. James Mattis and John Kelly publicly disputed specific quotations attributed to them, but not the broader picture of frustration and concern. The pattern matters more than the phrasing: senior officials in both eras struggled to reconcile the gravity of the office with the temperament of the man holding it.
Both leaders were intensely preoccupied with their public image. Wilhelm obsessively followed press coverage, collecting clippings and reacting sharply to criticism, a habit noted repeatedly by courtiers and foreign observers. Trump’s fixation on television coverage, crowd size, and personal acclaim is exhaustively documented. Each cultivated a distinctive personal appearance—Wilhelm with his theatrical mustache, Trump with his carefully maintained hair—but the deeper continuity lies in how much state energy is consumed by managing one man’s sense of himself.
Wilhelm’s failures were not merely personal; they had strategic consequences. In 1890, he allowed Germany’s Reinsurance Treaty with Russia to lapse, persuaded that Russia needed Germany more than Germany needed Russia. The result was Russia’s gradual alignment with France, a development that directly reshaped the European balance of power. Wilhelm expressed surprise at the outcome, but nothing in his subsequent conduct suggests the lesson took hold. He continued to treat diplomacy as an extension of instinct and personal confidence, as though reality would eventually submit.
Trump’s approach to foreign policy follows a similar logic. Diplomacy is framed as personal transaction, alliances as imbalanced deals, institutions as obstacles rather than safeguards. Critics across the political spectrum have noted the tendency to dismiss adverse evidence not as corrective feedback but as proof that others are incompetent, disloyal, or insufficiently appreciative of his brilliance.
One revealing Wilhelm episode comes from his dealings with Belgium. Accounts from the period describe a proposal in which Wilhelm envisioned Belgium effectively subordinated to German influence, with King Leopold II compensated by territorial or dynastic rearrangements elsewhere. When Leopold pointed out the constitutional impossibility of such schemes, Wilhelm reportedly expressed contempt for monarchs constrained by parliaments. The anecdote, sometimes embellished in retelling, captures a documented trait: Wilhelm’s inability to grasp political limits not imposed by himself.
Trump’s record offers its own examples. Alliances are repeatedly framed as protection rackets, praise and threats toward foreign leaders alternate without warning, and consistency is treated as optional. The effect has been to strain long-standing relationships while presenting adversaries with repeated opportunities to exploit uncertainty. Where Wilhelm relied on telegrams and carefully staged interviews, Trump enjoys instantaneous, unfiltered communication with millions, with little inclination toward restraint.
Administrative chaos is a predictable result. Under Wilhelm, ministers often struggled to determine which statements represented actual policy and which were momentary impulses. Many quietly devoted themselves to neutralizing his latest idea before it did lasting damage. Under Trump, high turnover, contradictory announcements, and persistent ambiguity about what constitutes binding policy have produced a similar fog. Former aides have repeatedly described the difficulty of translating presidential impulses into coherent governance. In both systems, the task becomes less about implementation than containment.
The military dimension is especially disquieting. Wilhelm adored uniforms, ceremonies, and parades, owning an extraordinary number of military outfits. Yet the German General Staff largely agreed that he lacked the discipline, focus, and judgment to command even a modest unit. He loved the spectacle of force but showed little patience for the analytical labor that precedes its responsible use. Trump’s fascination with military display, impatience with detailed briefings, and tendency to treat generals as stage props rather than independent advisers reflect a similar theatrical relationship to power.
For all the noise he generated, Wilhelm achieved surprisingly little. He was perpetually active—traveling, hunting, reviewing troops, but left few durable accomplishments. His verbosity was legendary. Among Europe’s famously reserved monarchs, he stood out for oversharing, complaining, and delivering long monologues about personal grievances, including strained family relationships, to baffled foreign dignitaries. Observers repeatedly noted his inability to maintain the boundary between private resentment and public office.
Wilhelm did not single-handedly cause the First World War, but he helped create a political environment in which catastrophe became more likely. His volatility, poor judgment, and flamboyant nationalism resonated with a Germany entering a phase of heightened sensitivity to perceived slights and eager displays of power. When crisis arrived, his temperament did not ignite the fuse, but it made extinguishing the fire far more difficult.
Otto von Bismarck, who actually unified Germany and understood the art of avoiding unnecessary wars, is often credited with observing that fools learn only from their own mistakes, while wise men learn from the mistakes of others. Wilhelm learned from neither. The question confronting the United States in 2026 is whether it intends to play the wise role—or insists on auditioning for the other.
at Doorn, 1933.
The international system is not what it was in 1914. There are more formal constraints on executive power, more democracies, and the sobering presence of nuclear weapons. Wilhelm, for all his bluster, faced institutional limits as well, and they proved inadequate when personal pathology collided with structural tension. The combination of brittle ego, transactional loyalty, and contempt for expertise does not guarantee disaster. It merely increases its likelihood.
Carter has remarked that writing about Wilhelm was emotionally draining because of his refusal to learn. When challenged, he escalated; when frustrated, he doubled down. Certain personality structures reliably produce this pattern: leaders who cannot absorb criticism, who treat relationships as transactions, who reward flattery and punish dissent, and who mistake personal validation for national interest. Instability follows—not through a single dramatic decision, but through the slow accumulation of distortions.
Historical analogies are never exact, and no one should expect a replay of 1914 in real time. But there is a reason a study of a long-dead German emperor feels urgent in the age of cable news and social media. Human nature repeats itself, and when a major power is steered by someone whose strongest commitment is to his own reflection, the century matters less than we would like to believe.
The ghost of the Kaiser is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a warning. Ego that consistently outruns judgment at the summit of power has a history, and it is not a comforting one. Whether in Berlin in 1910 or Washington in 2026, the pattern is recognizable. The difference this time is that no one can claim not to have seen it before.
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