No loyalty for Trump
In the final minutes of Tuesday’s extraordinary hearing of the Jan. 6 select committee, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., teased a revelation of possible crimes that had been committed — not on that awful day or leading up to it, but after. Namely, potential witness tampering.
Cheney revealed that witnesses coming before the committee had been contacted by people close to former president Donald Trump. One unnamed witness said something that could have come right from a mafia movie:
“What they said to me is, as long as I continue to be a team player, they know that I’m on the team, I’m doing the right thing, I’m protecting who I need to protect, you know, I’ll continue to stay in good graces in Trump world. And they have reminded me a couple of times that Trump does read transcripts and just to keep that in mind as I proceeded through my depositions and interviews with the committee.”
Another witness was told in advance of their deposition: “He wants me to let you know that he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal, and you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition.” Cheney did not specify whether the “he” was Trump, but that was certainly the implication.
It should not be surprising that, even now, Trump is utterly obsessed with the question of loyalty. It’s safe to say that never in U.S. history has there been a president more preoccupied with maintaining the loyalty of those who worked for him. Yet never has there been a president who received less loyalty than he did.
One Republican after another who labored in Trump’s employ has come to reveal the former president’s misdeeds and potential crimes. It demonstrates again why he was so consumed with loyalty: precisely because he knew he didn’t deserve it, couldn’t earn it and wouldn’t get it.
This is a good lesson in the limitations of loyalty. In our own lives, we praise the loyal friend and the boss who is loyal to her employees. We see it as admirable to be willing to sometimes put aside your own interests to help those to whom you have bonds of connection and care.
But in politics, loyalty operates a little differently. The politicians who receive it are those who earn it through both the loyalty they show those who serve them (something Trump has rarely, if ever, done; he demands loyalty but almost never returns it) and their own behavior. It’s easy to be loyal to a president who acts ethically and embodies virtues you admire.
Consider: Do you recall how many tell-all books were written by Obama administration insiders? The answer is zero. Obama staffers wrote books after leaving his White House, but none were score-settling takedowns of their former boss; they were filled with praise for him.
Compare that to the long list of books by Trump staffers excoriating him, from John Bolton to Mark Esper to Stephanie Grisham to William Barr to Omarosa Manigault Newman. And many books written by journalists overflow with quotes from former aides dishing on Trump’s misconduct and character flaws.
Trump’s central dilemma was this: For someone to give him the loyalty he sought, they would have to prove themselves to be utterly incapable of loyalty to anyone or anything. If you were the kind of person who was loyal to a moral code, to your country, or to the rule of law, that would render you suspect in Trump’s eyes, and rightly so.
Early in his presidency, Trump told then-FBI Director James B. Comey: “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” Comey replied that he would always be honest with the president but the bureau had to remain independent of political influence. Comey clearly failed Trump’s test. He was fired a few months later.
Throughout his presidency, Trump was positively obsessed with the possibility of disloyalty. Potential hires were vetted not for experience or competence but for whether they had ever said anything mean about Trump. As Jonathan Karl wrote in the Atlantic, the Presidential Personnel Office “was transformed into an internal police force, obsessively monitoring administration officials for any sign of dissent, purging those who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Trump and frightening others into silence.”
In one almost surreal case, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows rushed out of Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing to deal with a crisis — namely that a young staffer at Housing and Urban Development had “liked” an Instagram post by liberal pop star Taylor Swift encouraging people to vote in 2020. I kid you not.
Nor did Trump ever hide how he thought about loyalty. You may recall the time he complained about the common prosecutorial practice of convincing those facing criminal charges to testify against higher-ups, as is often done with organized crime. He said: “It’s called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal.”
As for Cassidy Hutchinson, who has provided such devastating testimony about Jan. 6, she was an avid Trumpist and fervent Republican. As one former White House staffer told The Post, “She would have been the last person I would have ever expected to do this,” because “She was totally enthusiastic about Trump and working in that White House.”
But it turned out she had other loyalties that overcame her loyalty to Trump, as did many others who moved in and out of his orbit. Just as mob bosses are so often betrayed no matter how much they threaten their soldiers, it was inevitable that at least some of those who saw Trump’s villainy up close would decide he wasn’t worthy of their loyalty, and tell what they knew.
Back at Mar-a-Lago, Trump is no doubt enraged; the walls are probably covered in ketchup. But you can bet he’s not surprised. It’s exactly what he feared all along.