Loyalty.

It’s a concept most people think of as a virtue, and that fact alone played right into Donald Trump’s hands.

He talks about loyalty a lot, but the kind of loyalty Trump’s selling is anything but honorable. It’s the one-way loyalty demanded by a mob boss. Worse still, it’s the kind of loyalty that puts fealty to Trump above personal safety, above the Constitution, even above facts.

Loyalty to a lie is precisely what Trump demands, and it’s precisely what the base of the Republican Party has given him. Loyalty to a lie is the very thing that empowers fascism; that turns the truth on its head; that creates an Orwellian reality in which 2+2=5 because a single person says so: a person who demands loyalty in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Regardless of court decisions, and entirely apart from logic.

A message to Cassidy Hutchinson from her boss, Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, warned her that “[a person] let me know you have your deposition tomorrow. 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.”

Whether “a person” was Meadows or Trump himself (or Meadows speaking on Trump’s behalf) matters little. The implication is clear: Big Brother is watching you to make sure you’re loyal, regardless of the facts, or even in spite of them. To paraphrase: “The facts don’t matter. What matters is your loyalty.”

If you don’t provide it, you’ll be ostracized, harassed, threatened, subjected to smear campaigns. The works.

Two-pronged strategy

Trump persuaded his base to exchange truth for blind loyalty using a two-pronged stratety:

First, he played on Republicans’ fear of Democrats, demonizing them to such an extent that anything was better than letting them win. Cozying up to Russia. Breaking the rules. Violating the Constitution. Abandoning their own principles. Literally anything.

Second, he cast himself as a messianic figure who could defeat the Democrats, promising that he alone could “fix it,” and persuading his followers that he would in fact do so – on one condition: that they remain blindly loyal to him.   

“In the reality that we face today as Republicans, as we think about the choice in front of us, we have to choose, because Republicans cannot both be loyal to Donald Trump and loyal to the Constitution.” Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming

They wanted to believe him so badly that they did, in spite of evidence to the contrary. In spite, even, of his own inability to keep most of the promises he made.* Then, once they had bought his line, second-guessing themselves was simply too painful. They couldn’t admit they were wrong, because they still knew they were right about the Democrats.  In their minds, following Trump blindly was a lot more dangerous than allowing the Democrats to be in power.

Trump, of course, encouraged this mindset, reminding them every step of the way that it was easier to “keep the faith” in him than risk giving the Democrats even a little bit of credit. Better to chalk up any stories of Trump’s misdeeds to “fake news” manufactured by Democrats seeking to discredit him.

So the truth became, in their view, lies, and Trump’s lies became the truth.

Blind faith

Faith is just another word for loyalty, and one with similarly positive connotations – except for one small detail: Blind faith is never a good idea. Putting your faith in the wrong person can be disastrous. And Trump was definitely the wrong person.

Misplaced faith is the abdication of power to someone who will use you and cast you aside the minute you no longer serve his purpose. Time and again, Trump has done exactly that to those who once proclaimed their loyalty. Michael Cohen. Bill Barr. Jeff Sessions. Mike Pence. The list goes on and on. But still, the threat posed by the Democrats is supposedly worse than risking the wrath of Trump. And they could justify it by couching it in terms of a supposed virtue:

Loyalty. Faith. Fidelity.

Call it whatever you will. It’s the single word Trump has used to keep the Republican Party in his thrall – a party whose base is already accustomed to putting faith of a different sort ahead of science. Trump (who seldom if ever attends church services) bastardized that faith and, at the same time, used it as a template, superimposing himself over the figure of Jesus as a new messiah. Parroting the words attributed to Jesus in the Bible: “Whoever is not for me is against me.”

If you want a recipe for fascism, you need look no further than the concept of valuing loyalty above truth. It’s a recipe George Orwell set forth in 1984, and it’s one Donald Trump followed to the letter in 2020.

The only question that remains is whether it will poison us all.

*(Trump deserves little credit for the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. Any conservative Republican president would have nominated the same or similar idealogues to the high court. If anyone deserves credit – or blame – it’s Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who refused to grant Obama nominee Merrick Garland a hearing in the hope that a Republican president would choose someone else. His gambit worked like a charm.)