Loyalty Loyalty Loyalty?

It’s always been one-way for Trump. He’d better be ready for a backlash from those he’s abandoned

- Timothy L. O’Brien

“I’m going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people. We want top-of-the-line professionals.” —Donald Trump, Aug. 8, 2015

In life, business, and now politics, the president of the United States has treated loyalty as a one-sided affair, something he expects from others but has rarely doled out to anyone but his closest family members.

That formula allowed the Trump Organization to float along as a marketing and development boutique built around Donald Trump himself—but also ensured that it would never evolve into a Fortune 500 enterprise manned by capable professionals. As long as he stayed out of legal trouble, Trump also could—and for decades did—tear through people and propositions willy-nilly, dismissing naysayers with a leak to the gossip pages, an appearance on a talk show, or a vicious tweet.

By the time Trump began running for president in 2015, anyone who’d been paying attention knew exactly what his game amounted to and avoided him. Many of the folks who chose to sign on back then—Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Boris Epshteyn, Steve Bannon, Donald McGahn, Omarosa Manigault Newman, Sarah Sanders, and Kellyanne Conway, for example—were second- or third-rate opportunists content to hitch their stars to the Trump train in exchange for visibility.

Some of them were also criminals, as it turns out.