#loyalty tests

Way back in 1989 Robert knew what Trump was.

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The Method in the Madness

Why Trump’s chaos isn’t accidental—and how it corrodes democracy’s foundations

James B. Greenberg

Sep 21, 2025

Like many others, I once dismissed Trump as a clown—perhaps even a puppet of others’ designs. But that view underestimates his own tactical instincts. His chaos has method, his performance has purpose, and the damage lies not in accident but in intent.

Trump’s Art of the Deal is often shelved as business lore, but its real function is strategic. It outlines a worldview where power is extracted through leverage, not built through institutional trust. The tactics—think big, retaliate, control the narrative—aren’t just tools for negotiation. They form a template for dominance, one that translates easily into political life. When applied to governance, they don’t strengthen institutions. They bend them.

Strongmen have long relied on spectacle, loyalty tests, and enemy creation to consolidate control. What makes Trump distinctive is the setting: a system with formal constraints but exhausted citizens. He doesn’t dismantle institutions outright; he forces them to absorb disruption until their function is distorted. The result is a hazy authoritarianism—pervasive yet hard to pin down.

Governance turns episodic. Each act is calibrated for emotional impact rather than policy coherence. Firings, executive orders, and legal provocations are timed for maximum media saturation. Where institutions are slow and procedural, Trump’s moves are fast and theatrical. The mismatch is deliberate: it keeps courts, agencies, and journalists reactive, leaving oversight in a constant chase. Spectacle substitutes for substance until performance itself becomes policy.

By overwhelming the system, Trump reframes resistance as sabotage. Judges who block his orders or journalists who investigate his claims are cast as enemies of the people. This inversion lets him operate in legal ambiguity, test boundaries, and dare institutions to respond. The law, instead of constraining him, becomes bargaining space, and the tactic recodes legitimacy itself.

Some maneuvers are obvious; others operate beneath the surface. Symbols are turned into weapons that shift attention from structural problems to cultural fights: racial justice protests become threats to order, immigration becomes a proxy for national identity. The point is not to solve problems but to redirect blame. Narrative saturation intensifies the effect. Rather than impose a single version of events, Trump floods the arena with contradictions—COVID guidance, election claims, legal threats—each undermining the last. This confusion is deliberate, a strategy that erodes shared reality and turns institutional authority into partisan theater.

The pace produces exhaustion. Executive actions and rhetorical escalations force oversight bodies into constant response. The system hasn’t collapsed, but it is drowning in shocks: watchdogs scramble, norms fray, the public tunes out, and fatigue sets in. Chaos becomes a loyalty test. Adapt and you remain; resist and you’re cut out. In such an environment, competence matters less than obedience, while unpredictability functions as a diagnostic tool, revealing who recalibrates and who resists.

Drift also redistributes wealth and advantage. Chaos funnels power upward. Deregulation by disruption clears the field for corporations, financiers, and insiders who can act quickly while oversight bodies drown in procedure, allowing those closest to power to scoop up contracts, licenses, and exemptions. This short-term spectacle clashes with democracy’s slower rhythms of deliberation, hearings, and accountability. Trump governs on the tempo of the news cycle, while democracy depends on patience, and the mismatch corrodes civic time itself, leaving citizens disoriented and public life ruled by immediacy rather than continuity.

Legal ambiguity reinforces the pattern. Trump rarely violates laws directly but thrives in the spaces between them—pressuring officials, exploiting vagueness, delaying consequences. Institutions are forced to interpret rather than enforce. Accountability becomes a matter of timing: announcements dropped late, investigations slow-walked, momentum carefully managed.

Even the madman bluff—the threat to Zelenskyy, the erratic diplomacy, the rhetorical escalations—follows this logic. The threat is extreme, the delivery unpredictable, the consequence real. It forces reactive compliance and destabilizes negotiation, turning unpredictability into coercion through disorientation.

Some tools remain underused. Constitutional overhaul is untouched, though norms are tested. Surveillance is present but not expanded as a signature device. Militarized repression appears selectively rather than systemically. Judicial purges are avoided in form but achieved through appointments. These absences preserve the appearance of continuity while masking the drift, which spreads not from a single center but across networks of loyalists, media allies, and local officials who replicate tactics in their own domains.

This drift carries anthropological weight. It reshapes how people perceive authority, truth, and civic possibility. The danger lies in gradual warping: institutions lose symbolic weight, discourse turns into a contest of emotion, and trust erodes under the tempo until the shared architecture of civic life begins to fray.

Political ecology offers a parallel. Ecosystems don’t always collapse through sudden shocks; they degrade through imbalance, erosion, and stress. Civic systems follow the same pattern. The symptoms are familiar: confusion, fatigue, displacement. The response can’t be procedural alone. It must also be cultural, strategic, and narrative.

Countering this requires more than rebuttal. It demands frameworks that decode symbolic inversion, track motif drift, and restore institutional rhythm. The typology of tactics—displacement, saturation, exhaustion, ambiguity—offers a diagnostic lens for civic literacy and editorial resistance. And it calls for public life that refuses spectacle and insists on substance.

Suggested Readings

Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Doubleday, 2020.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951.

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton, 2020.

Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2018.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018.

Charles P. Pierce at Esquire:

Want a job with the FBI? Want to carry a gun and a badge, wear low-cost suits and shiny cop shoes? Want to chase spies and mobsters and dangerous librarians who display children’s books about gay penguins? Answer the following questions: Was the 2020 presidential election stolen? Who were the real patriots in Washington on January 6, 2021? And, finally, conclusively, Who’s your real boss? According to The Washington Post, this is actually occurring within the current administration. Were these childish inquiries written in crayon? What’s the next step? Matchbooks? “If you can draw Kash Patel’s face, you can be a Fed”? It would be laughable if it weren’t so terrifying. This obvious attempt to turn the intelligence community into a private police force for the purpose of presidential vengeance, and operating with all the independence of a team of sled dogs, was an indication that the final assault on representative government is under way. At the same time that the Post was revealing this comic-opera villainy, officials up to and including the vice president of the United States were softening up the ground in preparation for the day when the president tells the judiciary to pound sand. That will occasion not so much a constitutional crisis as constitutional Armageddon. President Musk has weighed in on the subject, as has Stephen Miller, who between them racked up as many electoral votes in 2024 as Thurlow Weed and Elihu Root combined. They both chimed in on the subject of “unelected bureaucrats” opposing the president.

hey i was wondering if anyone could please do a predator and/or loyalty check on my father?

hes been really weird lately and i dont think i can put up with it anymore as a minor myself.

if you DM this account i can tell you how / why i think he's been weird! ill give u his insta to contact!

PLEASE no minors!! i dont want you getting into any trouble with him and id prefer if experienced people would help thank you so much

(serious post! not kidding! only serioud dms about this please as it really is a sensitive topic!)

Alex Samuels at Daily Kos:

The White House’s new federal hiring guidelines, issued last week, reek of a loyalty test, according to Axios. It’s the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration is moving to fully politicize the civil service—bulldozing more than a century of legal protections and norms meant to keep career government work nonpartisan. Notably, these new tests aren’t just for appointees or senior officials, either. Engineers, nurses, lawyers, surgeons—even janitors—just about anyone interviewing for a job within the federal government will now be asked to prove their patriotism and show they support President Donald Trump’s agenda before they’re allowed to serve. Applicants also have to certify that their answers weren’t generated with the help of artificial intelligence, because apparently, what really matters is that your suck-up essay is written authentically. Experts say these questions have nothing to do with qualifications or merit. They’re political, plain and simple. And they’ll also likely slow the hiring process. But that’s the point. [...] The message is clear: In Trump’s government, there’s no room for neutrality, professionalism, or nonpartisan public service. You’re either with him or you’re out.

The Trump White House’s insane imposition of loyalty tests that apply to every person working for the federal government, even including the janitors and surgeons, be asked to show patriotism and support for Donald Trump is a disturbing tool to turn the civil service into a politicized spoils system.

See Also:

Most of us were never really taught how political debate is supposed to work. Quick self-test: when you hear the words “political debate,” what image comes to mind? For many people, it is probably a televised shouting match: two partisan performers interrupting each other, trading slogans, hunting for the viral clip. Or maybe it is that argument on Facebook or X where the dunks were plentiful,…

Apparently, these days we’re just reincarnating the full structure of Nazi Germany -- or, less prosaically, the 1940s and 1950s United States, generally agreed to be a politically repressive and hazardous time for anyone who wasn’t “officially” a straight white male “Christian” citizen who toed and professed the desired political line.

Exclusive: Trump Appointee Compiles Loyalty List of U.S. Employees at U.N., State (foreignpolicy.com)

A senior advisor to the State Department appointed just two months ago has been quietly vetting career diplomats and American employees of international institutions to determine whether they are loyal to President Donald Trump and his political agenda, according to nearly a dozen current and former U.S. officials.

Mari Stull, a former food and beverage lobbyist-turned-wine blogger under the name “Vino Vixen,” has reviewed the social media pages of State Department staffers for signs of ideological deviation. She has researched the names of government officials to determine whether they signed off on Obama-era policies — though signing off does not mean officials personally endorsed them but merely cleared them through the bureaucratic chain. And she has inquired about Americans employed by international agencies, including the World Health Organization and the United Nations, asking their colleagues when they were hired and by whom, according the officials.  

[...] Her probing, along with a highly secretive management style, has become so uncomfortable that at least three senior officials are poised to leave the bureau, according to the sources. Officials there have warned some Americans employed by the U.N. to sidestep traditional meet-and-greet sessions with the department’s upper management to avoid drawing attention to themselves.

“She is gunning for American citizens in the U.N. to see if they are toeing the line,” the diplomatic source added....

In the 1940s, we had the internment camps for citizens -- yes, citizens -- of Japanese descent; in the 1950s, we had the infamous “Red Scare”, McCarthyism, loyalty oaths, and public show trials to demand those loyalty oaths of prominent people. In the new century, we apparently have concentration camps for children and loyalty tests for civil servants.