What do Trump, a red card and Aristotle have in common?

What do Trump, a red card and Aristotle have in common?

I read the story almost in passing. Trump had reportedly leaned on FIFA to overturn a red card during the Club World Cup, and FIFA had gone along with it. My first reaction was the one I suspect most people had, something between an eye roll and a shrug. Then I noticed I wasn't actually thinking about football anymore. I was thinking about a question that shows up constantly in my work with leaders, just wearing a different costume.

What happens to our character when we have enough power to bend the rules?

Whether you agree with his politics is beside the point here, and I'd rather we didn't get stuck on that. What held my attention was the leadership question underneath it, and that question has nothing to do with football and everything to do with how any of us behave once we have influence.

One thing I've always liked about NLP is the assumption that every behaviour carries a positive intention, at least for the person doing it. That doesn't excuse the behaviour, and it doesn't mean it was wise. It just asks us to get curious before we get judgmental, and I find that a far more useful place to start than condemnation, even when the behaviour in question is hard to defend.

So what might the intention have been? Supporting his team. Demonstrating decisiveness. Loyalty. Publicity. Or a genuine belief that an injustice had happened. I don't know, and the more I sat with it, the more I realised it doesn't matter, because Aristotle would ask a completely different question.

Not "why did you do it," but "what kind of person does this make you, and what kind of community does it create?"

That distinction is the whole reason I'm writing this.

Two questions, not one

NLP explains behaviour. Aristotle evaluates it. They aren't in competition with each other, and I think that's a more interesting relationship than most of us give it credit for. Understanding why someone acted the way they did can build compassion. But it can't tell us whether the action itself was good, and those are genuinely different jobs.

Aristotle's idea of eudaimonia, often translated as human flourishing, was never about personal success measured against everyone else. It was about living with virtue in a way that allows people and communities to thrive together. Justice, courage, temperance, wisdom. None of those are individual achievements. They only mean anything in relation to other people.

A competition only flourishes if everyone trusts the rules apply equally. The moment someone powerful appears able to bend them, something bigger than one match gets damaged. It isn't really about who wins. Imagine the outcome had gone the other way and the team had lifted the trophy. Would the intervention suddenly have been virtuous because it worked? Of course not. Which tells you something important: success was never the measure. Character was.

Where this actually shows up

I've sat in enough leadership rooms to know this pattern rarely arrives as one dramatic ethical failure. It arrives quietly, as a small exception nobody thinks is a big deal at the time.

The executive who skips the recruitment process because they already know who they want. The founder who bypasses procurement because a supplier is a friend. The senior leader who tells HR to "just make it happen," meaning make the policy disappear for one person, just this once. I've watched people say these things with no sense at all that they were doing anything wrong. Often they weren't trying to. That's what makes it so hard to name in the moment.

None of those moments feel dramatic, and that's exactly what makes them dangerous. Each one teaches everyone watching something, and it's rarely the lesson intended. It isn't really a lesson about the rule. It's a lesson about who the rule is actually for. Once people learn that rules apply differently depending on who you are, something in the room shifts. Psychological safety starts to erode, quietly, in ways that are very hard to rebuild once people have noticed.

Trust doesn't disappear all at once. It wears away one exception at a time, and by the time anyone names it, it's usually been happening for a while.

The question worth asking before we use influence

I've come to think leadership isn't really tested by whether we can bend a system. Most people with enough seniority can, eventually, if they push hard enough. It's tested by whether we should, and that's a much less comfortable question to sit with.

Maybe the more useful thing to ask, before using influence of any kind, is simply this: am I creating fairness, or am I creating advantage for myself or my own?

Or put another way: if everyone at my level of power behaved the way I'm about to behave, would the system get stronger, or weaker?

That feels close to what Aristotle meant by phronesis, practical wisdom. Not knowing the right answer in the abstract, but being able to read a specific situation and choose well within it, again and again, until it becomes less a decision you make and more who you are.

Character isn't revealed when we lack power. It's revealed in what we choose once we have it.

I keep returning to the fact that this isn't really about Trump, or FIFA, or a red card. It's about the small moments any of us face when influence makes an exception available to us, and nobody would ever know if we took it. Not whether we're pursuing our own flourishing, but whether the way we use whatever influence we hold helps the people and systems around us flourish too. I find, more often than I'd like to admit, that the two turn out to be the same thing.

What would it look like to ask that question the next time you're tempted to make an exception for yourself?