'I Need Loyalty'

[DonViejo]

To hear him talk, it’s Trump’s favorite quality in other humans. But it’s unclear what that word means to him.

By MICHAEL KRUSE March/April 2018



A week exactly after his inauguration, seated for dinner at a small, oval table in the Green Room of the White House, Donald Trump said to the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation what might end up being the six most consequential words of his presidency.

“I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”

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. “I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive and more than energy,” Trump once said. It is possible to see Trump’s fixation on loyalty, the pledging of it, the proof of it, the failure to receive it or provide it, as the animating force behind so many of the defining events of his first year in office. Consider James Comey’s extraordinary dismissal; the “Dear Leader” Cabinet meetings convened for aides to bestow slavish praise; public humiliations of his attorney general and secretary of state; the banishment and subsequent contrition of top adviser Steve Bannon; speculation that Robert Mueller won’t last long as special counsel and the parade of lockstep minions whose forced exits from the campaign or the administration have not squelched their public displays of devotion.

By presidential standards, these episodes are bizarre. But in Trumpworld, they fit a distinct pattern. They all trace back to a notion of loyalty that Trump absorbed when he was young—and has never abandoned.

According to people who know him well, Trump’s definition of loyalty is blunt. “Support Donald Trump in anything he says and does,” Roger Stone, the president’s longest-running political adviser, told me. “No matter what,” former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res said. “Or else,” added Louise Sunshine, a friend of Trump for nearly 50 years. “I think he defines it as allegiance,” biographer Tim O’Brien told me. “And it’s not allegiance to the flag or allegiance to the country—it’s allegiance to Trump.”

Congenitally untrusting, reared in the ruthless arena of pay-to-play, back-scratching (and back-stabbing) New York City politics of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, Trump was schooled and shaped by some of the most committed, effective and objectionable practitioners of quid pro quo. The self-interested sense of loyalty he developed then is transactional to the point of ephemeral, an almost always one-way street that can double as a revolving door—a kind of pliability that makes him seem at times something close to forgiving.

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/06/donald-trump-loyalty-staff-217227

[el_bryanto]

1. Loyalty means subservience - it's amazing how a positive word has been corrupted

In corporate and governmental circles being loyal means putting someone elses needs, professional and emotional, above your own. It's believing that the people who have been placed in power above you are just smarter and better than you are.

I'm a normally loyal person - born in the year of the Dog - but I hate it when it comes out of a corporate mouth.

True loyalty goes both ways - as an employee I support my employer and she supports me so that we can both do our best work -but that's not always the reality.

Bryant

[Cary]

2. It means he goes around making proclamations by the seat of his pants

And then everyone around him has to lie and cover and do whatever he says.

[raging moderate]

3. Organized crime bosses need "loyalty".

Good US Presidents need competence. Abraham Lincoln understood that, and he worked very well with his Team of Rivals. as documented by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her fine book.

[yallerdawg]

4. The oath?

Protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?

This is the loyalty.

I hate and despise this jackass more than any human on earth.

[FM123]

5. Loyalty means ownership to him. He can use & abuse you like a rag then set you on fire when he done.