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olitical scientists have followed the popular culture in their developing obsession with the leadership styles of America’s presidents. Psychologists such as David Keirsey have constructed elaborate taxonomies, assigning presidents to categories such as Guardians (George Washington, Gerald Ford) and Artisans (Franklin Pierce, John F. Kennedy). Others, such as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, think we should evaluate potential presidents based on “temperament.” That hard-to-define quality is, she recently told NPR, “the most important thing to understand about a leader. In fact, I think it should have been the keystone for what we looked for in our candidates in 2016.”

Surprisingly—since Goodwin was surely thinking of anyone but him—Donald Trump agrees. “My strongest asset, maybe by far, is my temperament,” he said during the first presidential debate. Alas, Trump’s temperament is best described not as an asset but as a heaping serving of reflexive anger with a side of impulse-control issues; it comes at reporters, staffers, and even former Miss Universe contestants in unpredictable waves and tweet-storms. This volatility is spiked with frequent flights of grandiose fantasy, such as Trump’s claim that he would have rushed into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida to stop the shooter who gunned down 17 kids. “I really believe I’d run in, even if I didn’t have a weapon,” he told a room full of the nation’s governors.

The defensive anger and expansive braggadocio of our head of state have introduced a new moral hazard into American public life. His leadership style has been embraced by others in the public eye, most recently the man responsible for protecting the children who attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School: Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel.

Recall how news reports revealed that Scot Peterson, the armed officer assigned to patrol the high school, had failed to engage the shooter (or even enter the school building) and that several other Broward County officers had remained outside the school as shots were fired. Their boss, Sheriff Israel, might have been expected to respond with a little humility, given the carnage that occurred on his watch. Instead, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Israel praised his officers’ actions, insisting that they had done everything they could have done. “Our deputies have done amazing things,” he said.

A few days later, he doubled down by taking a page from the Trump leadership manual. First, he refused to take responsibility for his underlings’ behavior: “It’s not the responsibility of a general or the president if you have a deserter… You don’t measure a person’s leadership by a deputy not going in.” And then, incredibly, he went on to state: “I’ve given amazing leadership to this agency.”

Like Trump, Israel is a politician (although he is a Democrat); the office of sheriff is an elective position in Broward County, and Israel’s term doesn’t end until 2020. Also like Trump, he seems intent on brazening out the widespread criticism of his actions. Florida’s state house speaker, Richard Corcoran, sent a letter (signed by 73 of his Republican colleagues) to Governor Rick Scott requesting that he remove Israel for “incompetence and neglect of duty.” The letter said flatly that “Sheriff Israel failed to maintain a culture of alertness, vigilance, and thoroughness.”

Israel’s response? “It was a shameful, politically motivated letter that had no facts,” he said. “And of course I won’t resign.” His deflection-by-boasting and the all-or-nothing tone of his many defensive statements (he and his deputies are either “amazing” or “did nothing wrong”) are leadership tactics that are textbook Trump in style. But are they likely to be effective?

The answer in the near term, if Trump is any guide, is, unfortunately, yes.

As Wharton business-school professor Robert J. House noted several decades ago in the Journal of Management, populist “charismatic” leaders like Trump are “exceptionally self-confident, are strongly motivated to attain and assert influence, and have strong conviction in the moral correctness of their beliefs.” They also happen to be well represented among American presidential candidates, who are, as a rule, “exceptionally high on self-confidence.” This is clearly true of Trump, who cited his extraordinary “common sense” in an interview with the Washington Post in 2016.  “Trump said … he has never read a biography of a president and has little patience for detailed reports or briefings,” the Post’s Michael Kranish noted.

The challenge to a person of such exceptionally high self-confidence is that when tested in the heat of political battle or actual gunfire, he or she often fails to fulfill the demands of leadership and instead falls back on easy excuse-making and self-aggrandizement. As Hal Gregersen of MIT’s Leadership Center told Business Insider last year, Trump’s “top-down” or “command-and-control” leaderships style is most effective in “predictable and certain” situations. But there is little that is predictable and certain about the presidency, to say nothing of the aftermath of a school shooting.

It might be reassuring to assume that Scott Israel was an exception—a mere county sheriff aping the swagger of the president in order to deflect from the extraordinary negligence of his department. But he’s not an anomaly. He’s a harbinger. In an era of Twitter-fueled media cycles and fake news, the boastful, self-reflexive, “charismatic” style often wins the day.

Consider the crowds at the recent CPAC convention in Washington, D.C., who thrilled to the presence and remarks of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the niece of French far-right stalwart Marine Le Pen and the woman who has called her Holocaust-denying grandfather and National Front party founder “a visionary.” CPAC also hosted the UK’s top Brexit supporter and Trump booster Nigel Farage, who posed for selfies with the “hordes of young conservatives who idolize him,” according to the New York Times. Perhaps those young conservatives admired the fact that Farage had campaigned in Alabama for accused child molester Judge Roy Moore. (“You can’t get everything right,” Farage told the New York Times about Moore’s defeat.)

One of the worst conceits of American presidents in recent memory has been their relentless focus on crafting a “legacy,” even at the expense of national interest (see: Obama’s Iran deal). Trump, who recently announced that he’s running for reelection in 2020, no doubt has his own ideas about what his legacy should be. But as the behavior of Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel and others suggests, part of that legacy, unfortunately, is a style of leadership that not only dodges responsibility, but makes a mockery of leadership itself.

Then again, it might be time for Americans to get over our collective fetishization of “leadership,” which, as the behavior of men like Trump and Israel shows, has become little more than a rationale for ambitious people to justify self-aggrandizing behavior, no matter if it ends up raising style over substance and flash above achievement.