“Political Loyalty” is a Nonsensical Concept

Andrew Anglin July 9, 2025

Since the beginning of Donald Trump’s political career in 2015, “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) has been more than a slogan, and instead a concept that embodies a series of simple and easily understood principles about the problems facing America and the solutions to these problems. MAGA was never a specific series of policy proposals, as it was intended to be something bigger than any specific policy. It was a vision of a new America. While short on specifics, the vision was clear: the current establishment had wasted America’s wealth on foreign wars and domestic social engineering agendas that had hollowed out the nation. Though it was not theocratic or puritanical or otherwise moralizing, it was opposed to “weird stuff” which sought to undermine what were traditionally considered “American values,” and it was anti-immigration and anti-war. Again, it was never specific, but everyone definitely understood those three major cornerstones of the program. (It was also “anti-corruption,” though as no one is publicly “pro-corruption,” that is not a particularly meaningful position to take.)

During his first term, Trump failed to do much MAGA, but it was generally understood that he was trying to, but that the president simply doesn’t really have very much power in America. However, in these early months of his second term, Trump is not simply failing to live up to the ideals of MAGA, but is attempting to completely confuse the meaning of the term, attempting to convince his own followers that “MAGA” was never really what they thought it was.

In a series of statements reminiscent of Anthony Fauci’s infamous pronunciation that “I am The Science,” Trump has recently claimed “I am MAGA,” and that he is the decider of what is or isn’t MAGA, and whatever new policies he decides on do not necessarily need to have any relationship to what was previously understood to be the MAGA political platform.

What he is effectively saying is that his political movement was always just about him as a person, and that anyone who ever supported MAGA was supporting him as a person. Therefore, anyone who disagrees with his totally new series of policies he has developed in recent weeks, most of which are the opposite of how MAGA had previously been defined, is not actually a believer in MAGA, because MAGA was never a series of policies, but instead an expression of loyalty to Donald Trump personally, and a pledge to support whatever it is he decides to do at any moment.

This situation is most brightly highlighted in the way Trump has dealt with Congressman Thomas Massie, who is, I would argue, the standard-bearer of the MAGA platform as it was initially introduced by Trump in 2015. Trump has claimed Massie is a traitor and vowed to destroy him. It is very obvious to everyone that Massie has not changed any of his positions on anything.

In the most recent betrayal of the ideals that were sold as representing MAGA, Donald Trump has decided that he wants to continue the endless war in the Ukraine. While meeting with his handler and earthly master Bibi Netanyahu this week, Trump declared that there is no plan to cut any funding to the Ukraine, and he actually plans to increase weapons shipments.

Although it’s not totally clear what happened, it appears that last week, Pete Hegseth halted shipments of weapons to the Ukraine. During the questioning in front of his boss, Trump claimed he didn’t know who was responsible for canceling these weapons shipments, and asked the media to tell him who did it. (Hegseth was sitting directly to his left.) He then declared a planned increase in weapons.

Following these statements, The Washington Post Editorial Board rushed to support Trump, publishing an op-ed praising his support for the Ukraine.

I would not suppose that anyone who voted for Trump in any of his three elections ever expected that the WaPo Editorial Board would become the standard bearer of MAGA, but that is apparently precisely what has taken place.

Trump had previously claimed that involving the US in Israel’s war with Iran actually was in-line with MAGA policy, which was explicitly anti-war, because he wasn’t really doing a war, he was just doing a bombing.

In another betrayal, Trump’s AG, Pam Bimbo, has claimed that there isn’t actually an Epstein client list. I don’t know what that means and no one has explained it, but the implication apparently is that Epstein did not have any clients, and either no women were trafficked, or they were trafficked to no one.

Though it is perhaps a slightly lesser offense to the MAGA agenda, which has never been particularly focused on fiscal responsibility, Trump has also this week moved to explode the national debt with the biggest spending bill in American history. What is most notable about this is that he vastly expanded military spending to the highest levels ever just weeks after claiming he was going to attempt to halve the military budget.

While “fiscal responsibility” might be slightly beyond the intellectual scope of MAGA, which has never been particularly sophisticated, “we’re going to stop wasting money on foreign wars and spend that money here at home where our country is falling apart” is definitely something we all understood to be core to the MAGA doctrine. Now, because MAGA has been redefined from a series of principles about how America should be run into “whatever Donald Trump says at whichever time he happens to be speaking,” the continuation of the Ukraine war, bombing countries for Israel, and spending the most money ever on war, all fall under the definition of “MAGA.”

A Test of the Limits of “Political Loyalty”

“Loyalty” is a quality that should be explicitly reserved for personal relationships. A man should be loyal to his family. Loyalty to a political figure or a political movement should not be possible, as it serves no purpose.

To be loyal to someone means that you will stick by them whether they are right or wrong. The reason we are loyal to our families is that we need them to be loyal to us, because this is how humans survive. If people abandoned family members because they were wrong about something, we would all be completely alone. We have to take the good and the bad with family members, because we need them.

Loyalty also makes sense in military units. It could make sense in the context of various business relationships. And there are, I’m certain, other examples of where the behavioral quality of loyalty would or could be appropriate.

One place where loyalty is not appropriate is in politics. Being “loyal” to a political figure is nonsensical. The only reason any person would support any political figure is that that political figure is doing political things they agree with and that helps them and their personal agenda. There is no place at all for loyalty to a political figure, as you do not personally know the political figure, and therefore you do not owe personal allegiance. There is no mutuality at all. Either the political figure is promoting an agenda you agree with, and therefore you rally for them and defend them because you benefit, or they are doing something different, which you do not benefit from, in which case you owe them nothing.

What Trump has done with intention is form a kind of personality cult, where people feel that they know him, and therefore owe him some kind of personal loyalty outside of his role as a policy maker. This is something that is only really possible in the age of electronic media. Most people see Donald Trump speaking nearly every day, and their subconscious mind, which is not familiar with the nature of video screens, registers him as someone they know personally, and are regularly hanging out with socially. Such a person would be the kind of person you would owe a personal loyalty to, and whose mistakes you would overlook, at least until the point where they got completely out of control.

We are going to see the limits of the “loyalty” personality cult tested.

Clearly, the personality cult is not considered ironclad, in the way it would be with someone like Jim Jones, as there is understood to be a need for distractions. This week, Trump is covering up the series of betrayals with a Romanesque “cruelty circus,” sending immigrants to cages in an alligator swamp. The media that supports Trump will say “yeah so, I guess there never was an Epstein list, and yeah we’re just going to keep doing that Ukraine war forever apparently – now let’s go back to the scene of the alligator pit, where your tribal enemies, the immigrants, are going to be fed to large, nasty lizards.”

They will keep the circus distractions coming, I’m sure. But ultimately, there is going to be a strict math equation regarding how many people are willing to ignore the fact that Trump is abandoning most of the core of his platform, not only failing to do the things he promised to do, but telling people he never really cared about those things anyway.

It’s worth mentioning that people will continue supporting a political figure that fails if they feel he is trying his best, which is why Trump remained so popular after not doing very much the first time he was president. But this time, it seems he is attempting to completely shift his stated priorities. This week he said “we have to defend the Ukraine.” This is very much the diametric opposite of what he campaigned on when he said “it’s not our responsibility to defend the Ukraine.” That is different than “sorry, I can’t figure out how to get Congress to stop funding the Ukraine” or “I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do to end this war, this whole thing is really confusing and I don’t know what to do.” What I mean to say is: failure is different than betrayal, and while failure is tolerable, betrayal should not be tolerable.

In the case of “actually, there never was an Epstein client list,” that is just obvious lying, which would fall under the “betrayal” category, unless a person is stupid enough to believe that Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking underage girls to no one, which some Trump supporters are probably stupid enough to believe, though I can’t say for certain.

Unfortunately: Democracy

Fortunately for Donald Trump and his cadre, and unfortunately for all the people in America, we live in a democracy, and therefore it is possible for zero people to support Donald Trump, and for him to remain president, and continue to do whatever it is he feels like doing at any given time.

There are probably some reasons that political support is important in a democracy, but I can’t think of what they might be. Trump appears to care personally about people supporting him, as it appears he has a rather fragile ego that feeds on popular support, and if people are booing him, it appears to hurt his ego. But ultimately, because this is a democracy and there is therefore no mechanism through which the public can petition grievances, he can do whatever he wants while he remains in office, and no one’s opinion about what he does means anything.

That said, Trump probably will maintain some fanatical base of morons who don’t really know much about what is going on but are very excited by alligators. And of course, the polls published can say whatever.

Then, after he does whatever it is he is going to do, he can turn over the government to Gavin Newsom or AOC, and they can be popular for a while after claiming they are going to do something or other, and then become unpopular after they do something different than what they claimed they would do. And we will just keep going on like that until eventually, something gives out, and the American empire falls into disarray, and something finally happens.

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