Loyalty, Democracy, and the Future of American Politics

The place of loyalty in this country’s political system has been at the forefront of political conversations since the November election returned Donald Trump to the Oval Office. Loyalty has long been seen as what the president values most in his relationship with others.

In his 2024 presidential campaign Trump did not try to hide any of that. “We love loyalty in life,” he said. “Don’t you think? Loyalty?”

And recall what he said early in his first term to then-FBI Director James Comey, “I need loyalty; I expect loyalty.” And that was no one-off; years earlier, President Trump wrote, “I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive and more than energy.”

Trump praised the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, who used ruthless legal tactics against his perceived enemies, calling him “a truly loyal guy. … Just compare that with all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty.”

The juxtaposition of loyalty and integrity is telling.

The kind of loyalty to which Trump refers is “commitment to a cause or a person, irrespective of the situation and change that time brings… Loyalty transcends promises and performances. It is a commitment beyond consequences - which may be favorable or unfavorable.” The loyalty that Trump seeks is what philosophers call “particularistic.” It is, focused on persons or groups, not on principles.

Seven years ago, Michael Kruse wrote: “All leaders want loyalty. All politicians. All presidents. But in the 241-year history of the United States of America, there’s never been a commander in chief who has thought about loyalty and attempted to use it and enforce it quite like Trump.”

Kruse’s analysis seems even more apt today.

News reports suggest that “Job-seekers hoping to join the Trump administration are facing intense loyalty tests, including questions on who they voted for and when their moment of “MAGA revelation” occurred.” And the acting attorney general, Emil Bove, is implementing the president’s loyalty agenda even in traditionally independent places.

He has begun screening Justice Department officials and FBI agents to determine if they can “faithfully implement the agenda that the American people elected President Trump to execute.”

Properly understood, loyalty is neither a primary personal nor political virtue. And democratic loyalty requires attachment to the principles and procedures that are necessary to a government of, for and by the people. Democratic loyalty is directed at our fellow citizens and manifests itself as a concern for the rights and well-being of others.

Democratic loyalty is, in that sense, impersonal. Indeed, in a democratic political system, misplaced loyalty can be quite a dangerous thing. It requires “us not merely to suspend our own judgment about its object but even to set aside good judgment…”

Where loyalty attaches to persons, especially to political leaders, it goes “hand in hand with royalty. Royalty does not change - it is passed down from generation to generation, whereas democracy needs an impartial decision and good judgment.”

Writing in 1974, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, New York Times columnist William Safire observed, “Men are loyal to political leaders for different reasons: Some… share a belief in a cause or hatred of a perceived danger, and they want a ticket to the center of the action. Others…care little for ideology or favor, rooting their loyalty in a need to be needed and a belief ‘in others’ estimates of the uniqueness of their qualifications.”

And President Nixon was, like Trump, obsessed with loyalty. Like Trump. He started his second term by launching a loyalty campaign.

The historian and author Michael Koncewicz recalls that, “during a meeting with his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and Special Assistant Fred Malek, two months after his landslide victory over George McGovern,” Nixon announced that during his remianing time in office, “There must be absolute loyalty.”

“The White House’s repeated clashes with executive branch officials,” Koncewicz writes, “convinced Nixon that he needed to wrangle the federal bureaucracy during his second term. At one point, he even asked for the resignation of every cabinet member, a mostly symbolic gesture that was meant to send a message across the administration. Nixon demanded that the bureaucracy would be at his disposal, particularly when it came to using the levers of government against his enemies.“

Seventy years later what Nixon said has a very familiar ring to it.

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby notes that “Nixon’s obsession with loyalty… “blossomed into full-blown, paranoid us-versus-themism’ — 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.”

Lyndon Baines Johnson, who became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and was Nixon’s predecessor, was also “obsessed with loyalty.” Jeff Shesol reports that he “brooded about it, demanded it, doubted it, and never seemed to find enough of it.”

Shesol says that LBJ once said about someone seeking a job in his administration, “I don’t want loyalty. I want loyalty. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.”

And, of course, at the height of the post-World War II Red Scare, Harry Truman issued an executive order mandating a “loyalty investigation of every person entering the civilian employment of any department or agency of the executive branch of the Federal Government.” The loyalty that Truman demanded was not loyalty to him.

Instead, Truman demanded “complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States.”

Truman feared the Program could become a “witch hunt,” but he defended it as necessary to preserve American security during a time of great tension.

President Trump seems less concerned than Truman was that loyalty tests to him or the country will become witch hunts. He is determined to rid the federal government of those deemed to be disloyal, no matter what the costs in terms of the government’s ability to function effectively in serving the American people.

In the administration he is setting up, loyalty more than brains will be the coin of the realm. As Shesol puts it, “On the continuum between with-the-program loyalty and pecker-in-my-pocket loyalty, Trump clearly wants the latter.”

But maybe loyalty is not the right word.

John Bolton, national security advisor to the president during his first term, argues that “fealty” is a better one. Bolton suggests that Trump wants his appointees “to display fealty, a medieval concept implying not mere loyalty but submission.” What Trump demands, Bolton writes, “is not, in fact, loyalty; it is fealty, servility, sycophancy.“

He warns that “the kind of personalist link that Mr. Trump expects will elide constitutional obligations.” Recall Bove’s emphasis on loyalty to the president, not the Constitution.

Over two hundred years ago, Alexander Hamilton worried about the corrupting influence of personal loyalty among those chosen to serve the president. He hoped that the requirement that the president’s appointments be subject to Senatorial confirmation would “be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters…(who would be) in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”

I can’t imagine that Hamilton is resting easily today.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.