U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, right, stands after President Donald Trump, left, signed an executive order at the Pentagon in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
It was the choice of the word “betrayed” that caught everyone’s attention.
President Trump wasn’t relieving acting attorney general Sally Yates from her position because she was incompetent or simply because she and Trump didn’t see eye-to-eye. She was fired, a release from the White House read, because she had “betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States.”
One can debate the extent to which Yates betrayed the department she served, but there’s no debate about the betrayal that most immediately irked the White House. Yates had betrayed Trump himself bydetermining that defending his executive order was inconsistent with the department’s “solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right” — and adding that she was not “convinced that the Executive Order is lawful.” Whether or not those reasons were sufficient cause for her to take the stand that she did (many argue that they were not), the fireable offense was described as betrayal, not dereliction. Betrayal of Trump’s Justice Department. Betrayal of Trump.
“Betray” is the inverse of “loyal,” one of Trump’s favorite ways of describing the world that surrounds him.
When Macy’s stopped carrying his products after Trump disparaged Mexican immigrants at his campaign announcement, Trump called them disloyaland celebrated a slump in their stock price.
The phrasing in the tweet above is very similar to the phrasing in the Yates release. Macy’s was disloyal “to the subject of illegal immigration” — which makes no sense, standing alone. Macy’s was actually disloyal to Trump by means of being at odds with his position on illegal immigration. As with Yates, the offense to Trump is framed as an offense to something more abstract.
Trump doesn’t always offer a concrete distraction from his insistence on loyalty to himself. When House Speaker Paul Ryan waffled on standing behind Trump’s candidacy after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, Trump declared him disloyal.
To whom was Ryan disloyal? To Trump. When other Republicans seemed to be wavering, they were described the same way.
When Trump celebrated the election of Jane Timken lead the Ohio Republican party, he summarized his praise in one word: Loyal.
Trump views relationships through this lens. Sen. Marco Rubio’s decision to run for the presidency was disloyal to Jeb Bush. Hillary Clinton was disloyal to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The president of NBC was “loyal” because he sent a nice noteafter staying in a Trump hotel.
At a rally in North Carolina during the campaign he praised his supporters as being “the most loyal people, the smartest people.” (He was excoriated during the primaries for asking rally attendees tocommit to that loyalty with an oath.) Anyone who isn’t on Team Trump, by extension, isn’t among the smartest people — and certainly doesn’t qualify as loyal. He praised his supporters as loyal in Reno, the weekend before Election Day. In an interview with The Post in August, he was direct when discussing Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who wasn’t endorsing his candidacy.
“I don’t know Kelly Ayotte. I know she’s given me no support, zero support, and yet I’m leading her in the polls,” he told our Philip Rucker. “And I’m doing very well in New Hampshire. We need loyal people in this country. We need fighters in this country. We don’t need weak people. We have enough of them. We need fighters in this country.”
Emphasis added. Ayotte wasn’t loyal because she was supposed to endorse him, because he’d won her party’s nomination. He’d earned that loyalty, the implication goes.
That same attitude seeps out in his understanding of what it means for the country to unite around his presidency. He has, on several occasions, spoken aboutthe need for unity as we move forward. But those statements have come from Teleprompter Trump, the politician we got to know over the tail end of the presidential campaign who sticks to prepared remarks. He spoke of the need for unity in his Thanksgiving address to the country and on election night. But when given an unfiltered means of communicating to the world — Twitter or the microphone at a “victory tour” rally — Trump expressed his frustration that there were still elements of the country that weren’t backing him. Paid protesters. Political enemies. And so on.
The disloyalty to Trump displayed by Yates probably was to be expected. No government official is supposed to be loyal to a president instead of his or her job. (The 1883 Pendleton Act erected a barrier between political favor and merit in federal employment.) Trump framed the firing as a betrayal of her position, but it’s impossible to separate the use of that word from his insistence on loyalty more broadly.
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