The Why of it All
Men, Power, and the Whole Damn Thing

ELIZABETH GEORGE
April 22, 2026

In 1887, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, John Dalberg-Acton wrote: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” With those words, Dalberg-Acton was setting forth the argument that all great leaders should be judged critically. They should not be excused (emphasis mine) because of their position.

The Supreme Court of the United States turned its back on this entire idea and the implications of it when they ruled that anything Donald Trump does as President of the United States cannot be deemed a crime. I would ask you to sit with that for a moment because in making that ruling the foremost twig on the Judicial Branch of our government formally gave its imprimatur to every decision, every action, and every crime that Donald Trump might commit, as long as he commits it as a Presidential act. This legitimatizes his “take-over” of Venezuela, his invasion of Iran, and his potential next invasion: Cuba. As President, he pointed out to us that Venezuela was a hotbed of drug smuggling; having torn up a nuclear arms agreement that President Obama had forged with Iran, he proclaimed that Iran was hanging onto enriched uranium, or Iran was enriching uranium, or Iran was hiding their nuclear weaponry…depending upon which day he made his declaration; and when it comes to Cuba, it’s a “failing state” which, I suspect, he intends to Make Great Again as he has demonstrated in our own country.

However, I am less interested in Donald Trump today than am I interested in the conundrum of what happens to some men when they believe they are in a position of power that immunizes them from the responsibility of their actions. The power they perceive themselves as having can be an actual part of their professional responsibility: a CEO, for example, or an elected official. It can be assigned to them by virtue of an appointment: a judge appointed to the federal bench, perhaps, or a cabinet member of whatever person holds the position of President. It can devolve from an elevation in assignment: a priest is chosen to become a bishop; a bishop is chosen to become a cardinal; a cardinal is chosen to become a pope. But in these cases and many others, the individual finds himself gifted with power: suddenly, or through clever machinations, or as the outcome of an election.
There is, to state the obvious, no inherent evil in power. The good or the evil of power comes from its use and its abuse. Unfortunately and as we have seen again and again and again, the abuse of power has led men to take horrific actions, to make demented decisions, to selfishly destroy lives, to bolster a faltering ego, to exercise virtual suzerainty over individuals deemed weaker or lesser in a hierarchy of which both the powerful and the powerless are part.

I’d like to examine a particular kind of abuse of power: that of the elected official. Being elected to public office is being handed a modicum of power which, over time and through political gamesmanship, often increases. This increase can easily become a siren call as the elected official begins to be surrounded by people who seek his favor, who want a favor, who admire his acuity and his intelligence as well as his ability to spar with opponents. If his is a charismatic nature, he serves as the flame to which the moths are drawn. He can hardly be blamed if he wonders whether those moths will venture near enough to be…not quite burned but rather suitably warmed. Entertaining this thought for any length of time, ultimately he might need to find a way to understand how much heat the moth can endure.

Everyone faces temptation in one form or another during his lifetime, and the man in power probably faces it more than most. But not every man in such a position decides that, while power has its privileges, his power gives him the privilege of demonstrating his virility photographically in hope of ensnaring a woman who—he assumes—will swoon at the sight of his genitals. The reality this man apparently cannot come to terms with is that there really are very few women who will be enraptured by a pictorial rendering of his penis, his testicles, and/or his so-aptly-named scrotum. These vital parts of his anatomy might be of interest to his urologist and his proctologist and, perhaps, even to his mother, anxious as she might be to see evidence of her little boy all grown up. But to a woman who is the object of his seductive dreams…? Unlikely. And yet men continue to believe—apparently—that sending photos of their genitalia hither and non is the heady aphrodisiac to which a woman responds.

Admittedly, I have much trouble understanding these men, especially those of them who decide to run for higher office despite having at one time or another in their past sent photos of their genitalia into the digital ether. And when it comes to men running for office who have sexually assaulted women in the past and who apparently believe not a single one of these women is going to step forward…I must say that most voters are not so stupid as to believe that sexually harassing or assaulting women is just another wrinkle in the blanket of your career.

I can see why a man in power might think his past behavior toward women is so much water under the bridge that spans his life, however. After all, Donald Trump has openly admitted to sexually assaulting women—lovingly referring to this act as “grabbing them by the pussy.” And in his case, we all know what happened. Since what happened was exactly nothing, I can understand the thinking behind a man’s mistaken belief that nothing, perforce, would or will ever happen to him. Even if some random woman does come forward to declare his unfitness for office based her past experience with the man in question, history shows us that no one will believe her words. Witness Anita Hill. Witness Christine Blasey Ford. Witness the Epstein survivors. Indeed, it seems that only Harvey Weinstein has been held to account for his assaults upon women and it’s probable that, had not the likes of household-name actresses stepped forward, he may well have slithered out of what he now is doing, which is cooling his jets for 23 years in a New York prison and 16 years in a California prison thanks in part to Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Uma Thurman, Mira Sorvino, Annabella Sciorra, Asia Argento, Lupita Nyong’o, and Selma Hayek.

Perhaps it’s time that powerful men do a bit of self-exploration, asking if their sense of masculinity is so depleted that only by harassing, assaulting, drugging, and raping women can they see themselves as “real” men. And it might behoove these same powerful men to to define what a “real” man is, in the first place. Is it a creature akin to Cassius’s description of Caesar who “doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus”, a godlike figure of immense power who conquers nations, wears a laurel wreath, and sees his magnificence sculpted in marble to last more than 1,000 years? Or is it more caveman than conqueror, with drugs taking the place of dragging women by their hair into a cave?
How pathetic if either of those examples act as powerful men’s only definition of manhood, eh? What little creatures they are if their very sense of self must be bolstered by establishing empires or assaulting women.

When a man in power feels and succumbs to a need to display his genitals or to use them in the assault of a woman, he makes himself not only insignificant. He makes himself contemptible. He reduces himself to the power he clings to, the power he seeks to accumulate, and to the genitalia that he likes to photograph and send to women.

We often ask in astonishment, “What was he thinking?” when a man does such a thing. The only answer I’ve been able to come up with is this: he must have been thinking that a woman is going to swoon at the sight of an up-close-and-personal photo of that which dangles between his legs. While I don’t actually know any women who are interested in having their lives completed by receiving such a photograph, I’m perfectly willing to admit that such women may well be out there.

Yet we cannot deny that power often brings out the worst in people, and political power often tempts those same people to cross over the line that separates the acceptable from the questionable; the honorable from the contemptible; and the dignified from the disgraceful.

We of the masses have seen the unwise, unethical, illegal, arrogant, and hurtful choices powerful men make it over and over again. It would be a triumph of our species should we actually be beyond those men’s inclination to make these choices. We are, however and alas, not beyond that point. Instead we’re hurtling through a present and toward a future that appears to ask far too much of us to take the time to question who we are as well as who we are becoming.

© 2026 Elizabeth George
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104