In our modern world, ‘disruption’ is of the highest praise. We glorify and celebrate the Ubers and OpenAis for looking at our establishment, made of regulations and traditions, and deciding that the rules simply don’t apply to them. They act quickly, break order and eventually win. It was only a matter of time before this praise of chaos was reflected in the geopolitical stage. For a politically active younger generation ,the idea of rules quickly seems outdated and mundane. A stagnant system is overtaken rapidly by the person who breaks the rules, not as a villain but as the only one with enough agency to actually get things done. In the political landscape, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are the ultimate political disruptors.
To begin to understand the appeal of the political chaos-maker, you’d be naive to not look at the outdated system of modern democracy. For many, the traditional political processes are full of friction – a queue that takes forever – full of diplomatic kindness, constant meetings and uninspiring policies. When a leader like Putin or Trump inevitably breaks a rule they remove this friction. Their electorate looks beyond the clear moral concerns and violations to ethics and sees a performance of strength. A performance that outdoes the rules of war/politics and so a performance powerful enough to fight for them. Rule-breaking is proof to this.
Within this framework, Vladimir Putin is a strategic genius. He plays the chess-master, cold and calculated. His rule-breaking isn’t loud or by whim, but a methodical recalibration of the stage itself. Putin characterises his power through the view of restoration. When he reshapes international borders, for example his miscalculated Ukraine invasion in 2022, he frames it as a necessary update to an obsolete system. The law is a code and if the code doesn’t lead to the desired outcome, you rewrite it. His strategic silence and calculated manoevers shows his supporters that he is a man 5 steps ahead of slow Western democracies as he explicitly expressed in his speech at the Munich Conference in 2007. He is the ultimate institutional disruptor – a man who takes over the system from the inside in order to shift it for his own survival.
If Putin is the Institutional Disruptor, Trump is the Entertainer. His style of rule-breaking is obnoxious, visible and always transactional. He has no interest in rewriting the code, instead, he wants to overwrite the entire system with his own personality. Trump’s disruption is centred in his lack of care for tradition. By ignoring the norms of presidency, whether that be from his communication via social media or his handling of diplomatic summits, he shows clearly that he is in no way part of any establishment. He ignores the norms of dog whistle tactics, instead prioritising his own charisma to manipulate the para-social fanbase that are naive to the severity of his threats. Therefore, his unpredictability is by far his greatest feature. By showing a world that seems increasingly scripted, Trump’s willingness to say and do the unthinkable and break every rule of decorum feels authentic to his supporters. He is the outside marketer who crashes the party, ignores everyone and then begins making deals on only his terms.
These leaders haven’t just disrupted the accepted individual rules, they have fundamentally shifted the meta of global politics. By exposing the fact that rules are only as powerful as the collective agreement to follow them, Putin and Trump have managed to capture their power through the same mindset – one’s power is only as great as the credit given to it. The landscape of Institutional Distrust that we are living in provides the perfect playing ground for disruption. When the average citizen loses trust with the institution itself – the media, the courts, the international borders – they stop caring if a player acts against them. In fact they start encouraging the player who can cause the most damage without being stopped, the player who exploits the system to win at all costs. Our political understanding has moved beyond the ‘bad’ or the ‘good’ leaders, but instead to the demand for agency. People have grown tired of feelings like the world is a mess, with no fix. A rule-breaker offers the simple image that they are more powerful than the mess itself.
The danger of the ‘disruptor’ in politics is the same as in tech: what happens after the disruption?
Uber disrupted taxis, yet traffic remains. AI disrupts content, yet truth is still elusive. When a leader attempts to disrupt for the purpose of power they find that the outdated and mundane rules were structurally protecting the system from total ruin. As we approach a future where traditions seem all but obsolete, rule-breakers have forced the question of what rules are necessary for society and whether to continue on our path or rewrite a system for a world no longer functioning.