Beware any candidate who values loyalty above all else
Trump, like Nixon and Johnson, expected his aides to be more loyal to him than to the country and the Constitution.
At a campaign rally last month in Ankeny, Iowa, former president Donald Trump reached for one of the worst insults in his lexicon to disparage the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, for having endorsed Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida in the 2024 presidential race.
He accused her of disloyalty. “I mean, that was her choice to do this. But I believe in loyalty,” he said.
At another rally a few days later, Trump again condemned Reynolds for not showing him more loyalty. “We love loyalty in life,” he said. “Don’t you think? Loyalty?”
Trump has long had an obsession with loyalty. He demands that supplicants and subordinates profess their loyalty to him. He opened his first Cabinet meeting as president by having each official at the table loyally sing his praises. When he met then-FBI director James Comey in January 2017, Trump made clear what he wanted in exchange for letting him keep the job. As Comey later testified before Congress, Trump said: “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” A key Trump aide during his presidential term was John McEntee, whose mission as director of the Presidential Personnel Office was to purge insufficiently loyal officials from federal agencies and subject job applicants to a litmus test of loyalty to Trump.
“I value loyalty above everything else” Trump wrote in his 2007 book “Think Big” — “more than brains, more than drive, and more than energy.”
Of course Trump isn’t the only politician who puts loyalty at the top of their hierarchy of values. Richard Nixon, always neurotic and insecure, was fixated on loyalty and surrounded himself with yes-men. By the summer of 1971, journalist Eric Felten has written, Nixon’s obsession with loyalty “had blossomed into full-blown, paranoid us-versusthemism” — so much so that when a small dip in unemployment didn’t get much media attention, he became convinced that disloyal staffers in the Bureau of Labor Statistics were conspiring against him. The culture of fierce loyalty inculcated in the Nixon White House would lead the following year to the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, triggering the Watergate scandal that destroyed Nixon’s presidency.
Yet even Nixon’s insistence on loyalty at all costs was outmatched by that of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. In his remarkable biography of the 36th president, historian Robert Caro documents over and over that “what Johnson called ‘loyalty’ — unquestioning obedience; not only the willingness but eagerness to take orders, to bow to his will — was the quality he most desired in subordinates.” Like Trump, LBJ valued loyalty “more than brains.” That can be a formula for achieving great power, but it is just as likely to lead to the kind of scandal, failure, or debacle from which it is impossible to recover. By the time Johnson left office, Caro writes, the trust and admiration with which Americans used to regard him “was in shreds, destroyed by lies and duplicity that went beyond permissible political license.”
In the abstract, loyalty is a fine quality. Most of us cherish loyal friends and loved ones. But should loyalty be the quality we most value in those we’re close to? Should it matter more than integrity? More than decency? More than kindness? Is loyalty a virtue even when it is invoked to defend the wicked?
William Bulger, the former president of the Massachusetts Senate and University of Massachusetts, refused to condemn the crimes of his brother Whitey, a homicidal gangster on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. He would not even urge Whitey to turn himself in. “I do have an honest loyalty to my brother,” Bulger said, “I don’t have an obligation to help everyone catch him.”
None of this is to suggest that disloyalty is praiseworthy. It is to suggest that unwavering loyalty to a politician, a party, or a political cause can lead to grievous moral wrongdoing. The notorious Nuremberg defense — “I was just following orders” — is just another way of saying, “I placed loyalty ahead of every other consideration.” Indeed, the motto of Hitler’s SS was “Meine Ehre heisst Treue” — My Honor is Loyalty.
A bad political leader values the loyalty of his advisers and staff members more than their integrity, insight, or good judgment. Trump, like Nixon and Johnson, expected his aides to be more loyal to him than to the country and the Constitution. That is one reason his presidency, like theirs, was riddled with dishonor. Beware the candidate for any position who refuses to hear any dissent or to tolerate principled disagreement. Power in their hands will inevitably be abused and the decisions they make will rarely be the wisest.