Having to demand loyalty oaths from everyone around you is the loneliest place on earth. It’s like having to buy a friend. The equation of a personal loyalty oath is weakness, the fealty demanded and its promise under pressure, because real loyalty is not gained through coercion. Power accrues to those who seek loyalty and those who give it only when there is an allegiance greater than to oneself.
In that way, loyalty is the opposite of duty. Freely given, loyalty’s power comes from belief and trust, not obligation. Donald Trump’s obsession with personal loyalty reveals the emptiness within him and the weakness in the way he lives his life. To take an oath to the Constitution is to say that you support what that founding document stands for. Such an oath is therefore its own guarantee. Because a political oath to a person contains no such guarantee, it must be monitored to ensure it isn’t violated.
Donald Trump uses fear to control those from whom he has extracted oaths of loyalty. I would point you to the lineup of tech broligarchs who attended Trump’s inauguration. Their enormous donations to Trump were their oaths, guaranteed by their fear that if they did not pledge loyalty to the new president, he would damage them. He might nix a merger between media empires. He might support passage of a law or regulation that would weaken their reach and thus their ability to make profits. He might cancel government contracts or make new ones harder to get. Bezos and Zuckerberg and Google CEO Pichai and Musk, as well as Apple CEO Tim Cook are all dependent on government economic largess or what we might see as the permission structure of regulation. The presence of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew speaks for itself, since TikTok was and is reliant on a Trump executive order that functionally negated no less a barrier than a Supreme Court ruling.
All of them were and are afraid of Trump, as are those who have pledged loyalty to him in order to secure favors and jobs and special treatment from Trump’s utterly and completely transactional government.
What they don’t yet realize is the weak ground on which they stand. Rather than the security of having pledged loyalty to the Constitution and the law, they are dependent on one man, Donald Trump, to recognize and reward their fealty. If or when he decides their loyalty is in question, he can cancel the bargain they thought they struck with him.
Trump is already at work cancelling those whom he considers disloyal. He withdrew a security detail protecting former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from Iran’s death threats because of some perceived slight, a disease now circulating widely in Washington D.C. Trump has stripped former officials of security clearances. He has even said he doesn’t want anyone who worked for Pompeo to get a job in his new administration.
Such a ban applies to anyone who had the misfortune of working in the State Department while Pompeo was Secretary of State. It’s not necessary that they did something wrong in Trump’s eyes. To enforce his demand for absolute loyalty, Trump has returned to the customs and methods of his mentor and hero, Roy Cohn, and has redeployed guilt by association in service of his hold on power.
Think of the depth of his weakness, that Donald Trump would punish a raft of innocent others as he lashes out at people like Pompeo and Bolton and people he perceives were disloyal. Who could be next? The teachers they had in high school civics who passed along to them forbidden texts about civil rights and equality?
As I sat down to write this column, I tried to think of what has been the opposite of the loyalty oaths that Trump demands and the climate of fear he has created to enforce his will on our government. It is, at root, the difference between taking and giving. Millions have served this country in and out of uniform. The military uses medals to recognize exemplary service. Every significant medal I can think of is awarded for having given freely of oneself for others. Nothing is transactional on the battlefield. A commander cannot offer a soldier a raise or a promotion to a higher rank if he or she agrees to, say, assault an enemy machine gun position or defend against an enemy attack. There is a golden rule in a war: soldiers do for each other what they would have done for themselves. In order for an army to work, soldiers must know that they are all in it together. An award for individual heroism is respected by soldiers because they know it was earned by someone acting on behalf of the unit, not themselves.
This is the essence of real power, that it is derived from the desire for the whole to achieve a greater good and not from the need of one person to seek to profit from the service of others. A loyalty oath to Trump is, by its nature, good for only the person who demanded it: Trump. Your life is held hostage to his whims and demands.
Donald Trump is deluded about many things, but perhaps his most profound delusion is that he can bend or even break our democracy with rule by fear. Being in a state of fear weakens both the person feeling fear and the person who makes fear his cause. The saying that the arc of history bends toward justice has a corollary. Fear is not recorded by history as one of mankind’s accomplishments, but rather as his failure to reckon with the future.
Loyalty oaths seek to deal with the threat of change by making an impossible guarantee of a certain future. The only thing certain about the future is that what happens today will be altered by what happens tomorrow. Donald Trump’s demand for loyalty oaths is a desperate attempt for immortality—his, not ours. Without a commitment to a higher cause, loyalty to Trump is as empty as he is.
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
You can read Lucian Truscott's daily articles at luciantruscott.substack.com. We encourage our readers to get a subscription.
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