Election expert and U.S. Hamline University Prof. David Schultz says that U.S. President Donald Trump, barely two weeks into his presidency, has made the U.S. "less great and weaker than it was before he took office."

The reason for that is Trump’s failure to grasp the essence of leadership and the unique role that the United States has as moral exemplar among nations of the world, Prof. Schultz said.

MBA and other graduate programs are littered with leadership classes, he notes. A ton of ink has been spilled seeking to describe the essence of leadership, especially for the presidency.

But American historian James MacGregor Burns’ book, "Leadership" is still the single best book that joins these topics. In it Burns distinguishes between two types of leadership – transactional and transformational. Transactional is the quid pro quo of cutting deals, the ordinary game of bargaining. But, real leadership is transformational. A transformational leader literally transforms institutions or the world, forging new ways to look and organize the world. Presidents such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan were transformative.

But to be a transformative leader, something special is required. It is moral authority.

Transforming leadership happens when "one or more persons engage with each other in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality." Burns once stated that real transformative leadership is authority guided by moral principle. Authoritarians exert mere power or brute force, but real leadership has a moral dimension capable of transforming and moving people in ways that mere transactional bargaining cannot.

For the most successful of U.S. presidents, the concept of moral leadership is enhanced by the country’s special status in the world. Maybe it goes back to the concept of American exceptionalism rooted in Puritan John Winthrop’s 1630 speech, “A Model of Christian Charity,” which he gave on the ship Arbella before it docked in the Massachusetts colony, where he described this new place as a “shining city upon the hill.” For many coming to America, we were as Abraham Lincoln declared, the “last great hope” on Earth to found a just and ethical country.

Part of what makes the United States great is its moral leadership – the defender of human rights, democracy, and its willing to play fair for the right causes and reasons. This country’s strength was not simply the hard power of bombs and bullets, but as Paul Kennedy said, it also included the soft power of moral leadership and authority in the world that makes it possible to criticize dictators and despots. The power to persuade includes a moral position.

President Trump understands none of this. First, his concept of leadership is narrow and transactional. Trump’s "Art of the Deal" is an ode to quid pro quo bargaining in its thinnest sense.

But good negotiators tell you that real bargaining is not zero sum. It leaves both sides feeling good because both are winners. The "Art of the Deal" is about how Trump took advantage of others for selfish or personal reasons, not to enhance the position of both sides. But even if the "Art of the Deal" was more, it still describes a world of transactions and not transformation. Trump’s concept of leadership is woefully thin and confined to this narrow notion of quid pro quo. It is about the U.S. getting better one-on-one deals with other countries that puts America first. It is hardly a form of leadership that rebuilds or builds structures and institutions in ways to help the country.

President Trump also misunderstands the importance of American exceptionalism and the gravity it exercises in the world.

America’s real authority – which includes its soft power, rests upon its moral status in the world. If we respect individual rights at home, support freedom of the press, and obey the rule of law, it makes it easier to criticize authoritarians and regimes around the world that fail to do that. President Trump simply does not understand that. Eschewing respect for the press, his Muslim travel ban, or in his recent prayer breakfast speech declaring only “citizens can practice their beliefs without fear of hostility or a fear of violence,” President Trump undermines not only domestically the values that are important to American democracy but he vastly weakens the moral position of the United States and his presidency in the world.