The Influencer Prince
Machiavelli wrote for rulers. This book is for everybody forced to live with their decisions.
Power does not need a crown anymore. It has a microphone, a podcast, a boardroom, a pulpit, a donor network, a social feed, and somebody standing nearby insisting none of this is political.
The Influencer Prince reimagines Machiavelli for an America shaped by celebrity politics, billionaire mythology, racial hierarchy, labor precarity, religious performance, media spectacle, and algorithmic control.
Reflective Reads
These books live where civic education, political warning signs, satire, survival, history, and democratic common sense meet. They are written for people who want the truth without the velvet glove, the homework without the boredom, and the receipts before the room starts pretending it never heard the question.
Books by Michael Smith
Start where your curiosity is loudest: modern political power, democracy, presidential authority, or the survival story that asks what happens when the country's floorboards start creaking under everybody's feet.
The Influencer Prince
Power, Performance, and the People Under the Throne
Available Now · Paperback · Kindle · Kindle Unlimited
Niccolò Machiavelli wrote for rulers. The Influencer Prince is written for everyone forced to live with their decisions. Michael Smith reimagines The Prince for an age shaped by celebrity politics, billionaire mythology, labor precarity, racial hierarchy, religious performance, media spectacle, and algorithmic control.
How to Not Screw Up Democracy
A Playbook for the Clueless
Democracy can be complicated, but it does not have to be wrapped in marble columns and legal jargon until regular people stop asking questions. This guide breaks down the Constitution, institutions, civic responsibility, courts, power, and participation with humor, clarity, and a healthy suspicion of anybody who says, “Don't worry about it.”
The Imperial President: Above the Law
The Dangers of Unchecked Power
A sharp examination of presidential immunity, Supreme Court power, executive overreach, and what happens when accountability starts looking optional. This book asks the question polite institutions keep dodging: what good are guardrails if the people driving the bus are allowed to call the crash “official business”?
Return to Youngstown
Survival in a Collapsing Nation
In a fractured America gripped by martial law, Michael Smith flees back to his childhood home in Youngstown, Ohio, trying to protect family, memory, and hope while the country breaks open around him. Part survival story, part political warning, part family reckoning, this novel asks what remains when the systems people trusted start acting brand new and dangerous.
The people pay.”
The crown changed. The game didn't.
In today's America, power rarely arrives wearing a crown. It comes as a brand, a broadcast, a boardroom, a pulpit, a donor network, a platform, or a carefully managed public persona. It performs intimacy while operating through distance. It asks to be admired while remaining largely unaccountable.
Moving from Machiavelli's world to our own, The Influencer Prince examines not only how modern power survives, but what that survival costs the people beneath it.
Sharp, historically grounded, and unafraid to name names, this is a study of power as performance—and a reminder that the people under the throne are never merely the audience.
Read the books. Then read the room.
Reflective Reads is not separate from the blog. It is part of the same mission: make democracy less mysterious, power less comfortable, history harder to erase, and public conversation less allergic to context.
The books give you the longer arc. The blog gives you the current weather. Together, they are a field kit for surviving political nonsense without losing your sense of humor or your grip on reality.
The Influencer Prince
Want the full book overview, chapter themes, author information, and direct Amazon access? The dedicated book page keeps everything in one place.
Visit the Official Book PageReflective Bookshop
My books live here in Reflective Reads. The Reflective Bookshop is the companion shelf: Black history, democracy, power, labor, memory, culture, and books worth keeping within arm's reach.
Explore the Reflective Bookshop
