When loyalty becomes the only qualification

The Trump administration shows how power can turn institutions into instruments of personal loyalty. Beneath the combative rhetoric and high-profile departures lies a deeper danger: persuasion replacing knowledge, loyalty eclipsing institutional responsibility, and educated people normalising behaviour they once condemned

Here is where it is coming to an end, step by step. The façade is crumbling; the putrid structure is becoming visible. First, they leave. There is no grand theoretical explanation, no elaborate political doctrine, no convincing institutional account. They simply depart, citing personal reasons, political disagreements, reassignment or silence. This is how such systems often end, not with a single dramatic collapse, but with departures that gradually reveal what had been concealed by the appearance of control. President Trump’s administration offers a laboratory in which loyalty can become more valuable than competence, repetition more useful than evidence, aggression more effective than explanation, and personal allegiance more important than institutional responsibility. The deeper danger is that intelligent people learn to justify the behaviour, reproduce it and eventually mistake their participation in it for political virtue. The political order begins to fracture, and their loyalty does not necessarily protect them.

Pam Bondi, former Attorney General, Tulsi Gabbard, the former spy chief, and Karoline Leavitt, the former White House press secretary, are revealing precisely because they are not identical figures. Leavitt transformed the office of White House press secretary from an institution supposed to mediate between government and journalists into something closer to a combat platform. The press secretary became an amplifier. The exchange was no longer about what the administration had done, but about how effectively the administration could defeat the person asking. A press briefing ceases to be an information mechanism when the performance of dominance becomes more important than the transmission of information. The exchange is clipped, posted, shared, praised, attacked and recycled. A hostile question becomes a thirty-second video. The answer need not survive scrutiny if the clip survives the news cycle. The reporter could be recategorised as an enemy, a partisan, a “left-wing hack”. Once that transformation occurs, the factual content of the question becomes secondary. The audience is invited to judge allegiance rather than accuracy. This is precisely the political psychology of propaganda. The public no longer asks, “Is the claim true?” It asks, “Whose side is this person on?” Plato’s warning about persuasion without knowledge becomes particularly relevant here because propaganda does not require the elimination of facts. It requires only the destruction of a common procedure for deciding which facts deserve belief.

Pam Bondi exposes a different mechanism: the transformation of institutional authority into personal loyalty. Her exceptional loyalty to Trump did not guarantee permanence. Her removal demonstrates the brutal rule of personalised government: loyalty is necessary but never sufficient. A subordinate can be indispensable on Monday and expendable on Thursday. Such systems consume loyalists because those who gain institutional authority, knowledge and independent judgement can eventually become liabilities.

The Epstein affair further reveals the collision between secrecy, expectation and political loyalty. A promise to release information creates an obligation; delay creates suspicion; incomplete disclosure creates a vacuum filled by speculation. The dismissed official becomes part of the story. Removing an official does not remove the underlying institutional crisis.

Gabbard presents the third variation. She is the subordinate whose independent judgement can become politically dangerous even when she remains formally loyal. Her reported hesitation over the justification for the Iran war and her defence of a former subordinate illustrate the narrow space available to officials who possess their own institutional credibility. Such a system needs experienced people because inexperienced loyalists are incompetent. Yet experienced people possess knowledge, networks and judgement of their own. The more seriously they exercise those qualities, the greater the possibility that they will disagree with the leader. The system consequently begins selecting not merely for loyalty but for anticipatory obedience.

Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” A conviction can become immune to evidence precisely because it is experienced as moral identity. The political loyalist does not necessarily believe every statement because it is factually persuasive. Joseph Goebbels did not invent propaganda; he industrialised its relationship with the modern mass public. Stalin’s system did not survive because every Soviet official was personally convinced of every proposition issued by the Kremlin. It survived because institutions were progressively organised around obedience, fear, career incentives and the destruction of independent sources of authority. The Roman imperial system offers another variation. Under emperors such as Tiberius and Domitian, proximity to power could be extraordinarily advantageous and extraordinarily dangerous. Court politics rewarded those who understood the ruler’s psychology, but the same intimacy could make a courtier vulnerable when the ruler’s suspicion changed direction. Tacitus understood that imperial power corrupts not only those who command but those who adapt themselves to command.

The personalised leader does not create loyal institutions; he creates loyal relationships within institutions. An institution survives a bad minister because its procedures remain stronger than the personality occupying the office. A personalised administration survives by weakening precisely those procedures.

He claims that “the more powerful than the weaker” naturally deserves more, and that laws can become instruments devised by the weak to restrain the strong. That argument has survived because it contains a temptation that democratic societies never permanently eliminate. Power can persuade people that its own success is evidence of its righteousness. If the leader wins, defeats opponents, humiliates journalists and forces institutions to retreat, supporters can interpret every victory as proof that he is right. Failure becomes sabotage by enemies. Criticism becomes persecution. Evidence becomes propaganda. Accountability becomes betrayal. The political system then develops an extraordinary capacity to convert contradiction into confirmation.

He insists that “to do injustice is the greatest of evils, and to suffer injustice is the next greatest evil.” Political systems obsessed with humiliation, victory and retaliation teach their servants to fear losing power more than becoming corrupted by it. Once retaining the leader’s favour becomes the supreme political good, every compromise with truth can be rationalised as necessary. The official who knows a claim is false can repeat it. The official who knows a policy is failing can defend it. The official who sees an institution being degraded can convince herself that she is protecting democracy by remaining inside the room.

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” Its political meaning is harsher. Opposition movements can reproduce the habits of the power they oppose. When criticism becomes treason and disagreement becomes existential, the result is not merely bad government but epistemic decay-the loss of a shared basis for deciding what happened.

The question is no longer why the leader behaved as he did, but why so many educated people learned to make his behaviour appear normal. And isn’t it happening, in different forms, in many of our countries?

The question is no longer why the leader behaved as he did, but why so many educated people learned to make his behaviour appear normal. And isn’t it happening, in different forms, in many of our countries?

The writer is a columnist based in Colombo; Views presented are personal.