Stephen Helgesen, 19/02/25
With just one month in office, Donald Trump is testing a maxim that one man’s loyalist is often viewed as a simple-minded sycophant. From my experience working with Washington bureaucrats, hangers-on and wannabe power brokers for over 20 years, there are probably more of them per square inch than June bugs or crab grass in the summer.
What separates loyalists (to either a man or his ideology) from sycophants then? It is their intentions, motivations and tendency to tell the truth rather than flatter their bosses. I completely understand the Democrats’ need to accuse Trump loyalists or true believers or whatever demeaning term they’re using to describe dedicated people whose ideologies they disagree with, as being sycophants. After all, it is their playbook to discredit anyone they oppose as they routinely claim that they are just tools of the establishment or worse, conservatives who sit to the right of Genghis Khan.
It’s happening right now with Elon Musk and his team of DOGEans to carry the President’s water to put out the burning fires of inefficiency and/or reveal deep-state forces that will do anything to protect their jobs and power. This “new broom” approach is nothing new. The new brooms of new administrations almost always have a tendency to sweep clean, but they often miss the cobwebs and spiders that hide in the hard to reach corners. In this case, it’s the many civil servants who have slow walked the implementation of policies they consider to be antithetical to their ethos or raison d’ être or that threaten their very existence. Well, now they have been confronted with the ultimate slice and dice machine operated by a man who has nothing to lose and who has the President’s ear and his confidence, at least for the time being.
It’s an understatement to say they’re worried. They’re petrified and like mackerels flopping around on a fishing boat’s deck, they’re gasping for breath before being dumped into ice and ultimately meeting their fate as somebody’s dinner. That may sound a bit too dramatic, but the life or death struggle for power in WASHDC is no mirage. It is real and is played out daily with many bureaucrats who have burrowed into the power structure throughout several presidential administrations and who are just now realizing that Donald Trump means business when he says it’s time to drain the swamp.
This week, a number of federal DOJ prosecutors have resigned as has the director of the Social Security Administration, herself a thirty-year government employee. Without casting aspersions as to her motivation for doing so, I would submit that hers could fall into the category of resign for effect departures by employees with nothing to lose. She gets to keep her pension. She can wear the Red Badge of Courage (for beating back the evil President and his hatchet man) and be welcomed into the waiting arms of Democrats who are now re-employing those who’ve resigned, some without pensions or golden parachutes.
That brings me to my next point. Watch where the resignees go. It will tell you more than their leaked letters to the New York Times or Washington Post ever could. If they land on their feet in some top Democrat-owned DC law firm or as a lobbyist for a Soros-funded think tank, you will know more about them. Now, far be it from me to impune the motives of all who have resigned as “conscientious objectors”. There may be many who are loyalists, but loyal to a different leader. If that is the case, that is their right and we will probably see them at Democrat fund-raisers, as commentators on CNN and on the nightly news broadcasts bemoaning the state of their weakened former agencies. That, too, is their right, but it is important for neutral parties to dig into their reasons for resigning to see if they were asked to do something illegal, unconstitutional or just contrary to accepted agency practices. Simply refusing to comply with a presidential order because you disagree with it is not going to cut it.
If that were found to be the case, then we should all be glad they’re gone and hope that they don’t resurface somewhere in our government where they can exert their political influence in different jobs.
Should they be able to worm their way back into positions of power it would signal that the efforts of DOGE were only temporary or superficial and that it had failed to prevent such ideologues from returning by failing to institute lasting policies that could keep them from ever coming back. I am not speaking of political litmus tests, but rather of simple, enforceable loyalty tests to the Constitution and to the office of the President. At this point, I know what the Left would say, “But Hitler required all civil servants and soldiers to take a new oath of loyalty to Hitler, personally. That’s what Trump is up to”!
To that I would simply say, take a breath. This is not the Weimar Republic of 1934 and that dog just won’t hunt. Trump does demand loyalty but loyalty to his right to exercise presidential authority that tracks with the Constitution and the ideology that voters voted for. It’s that simple. We can argue about how it’s being done til the cows come home, but that won’t make it illegal or immoral. It’s just unorthodox, and when have Americans ever apologized for being unorthodox? How about never. One thing is for certain. It is good television and it sells a lot of newspapers and keeps social media buzzing.
If Americans really believe old Cal’s (President Calvin Coolidge) statement that he made a century ago this year that “the business of America is business” than let’s do our due diligence, bite the bullet, get down to business and make America more efficient again. That’s the loyalty oath we all need to take.
Stephen Helgesen is a retired career U.S. diplomat specializing in international trade who lived and worked in 30 countries for 25 years during the Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush Administrations. He is the author of fourteen books, seven of which are on American politics, and he has written over 1,500 articles on politics, economics and social trends. He can be reached at: stephenhelgesen@gmail.com
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