Trump's Very Own "Führerprinzip"

An embrace of demonstrable falsehoods and absolute loyalty to Trump are the litmus tests for those seeking to join the Administration. It is a playbook used by would-be autocrats from the Romans to the present day, and it is an insidious, lethal threat to the Republic.

Over the weekend, the New York Times gave us a glimpse into how far the incoming chief executive and his inner circle are imposing a Trumpist cult-of-personality loyalty test on aspiring job seekers. From the piece:

The questions went further than just affirming allegiance to the incoming administration. The interviewers asked which candidate the applicants had supported in the three most recent elections, what they thought about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. The sense they got was that there was only one right answer to each question.

This account is based on interviews with nine people who either interviewed for jobs in the administration or were directly involved in the process. Among those were applicants who said they gave what they intuited to be the wrong answer — either decrying the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 or saying that President Biden won in 2020. Their answers were met with silence and the taking of notes. They didn’t get the jobs.

In the pre-Trump era, asking a prospective political appointee whether they supported the incoming president's policy agenda was not only normal, but expected. In this case, the questions were not confined to Trump's policy positions--such as they are--but about loyalty to Trump the man....and apparently no questions about the actual oath all elected, appointed, or career civil servants take: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

This demand for absolute obeisance to Trump is well understood by the already GOP controlled House of Representatives. Consider Congressman Troy Nehls (R-TX) example:

If Donald Trump says, ‘jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our head.

This kind of "The Leader is always right" mentality is a hallmark of authoritarian and totalitarian figures throughout recorded history.

In Edward Watts outstanding account of the rise and eventual destruction of the Roman Republic, Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, he notes how for the better part of 300 years the Roman Republic's carefully balanced institutions and political norms generated economic growth and political stability. But as soon as men of overweening ambition and obvious corruption began to ignore those political norms and to subvert or ignore prohibitions on engaging in violence against political opponents, the Republic's days became numbered.

When the Republic lost the ability to regulate the rewards given to political victors and the punishments inflicted on the losers of political conflicts, Roman politics became a zero-sum game in which the winner reaped massive rewards and the losers often paid with their lives. (p.9) 

Decades before Julius Ceasar appeared on the scene, successive Roman leaders had built private armies and mobs of supporters that were loyal to them, not the Republic, hijacking the institutions of the state for their own ends. As Watts notes:

Roman history could not more clearly show that, when citizens look away as their leaders engage in these corrosive behaviors, their republic is in mortal danger. (p. 10)

Over 1900 years after the fall of the Roman Republic, a former Austrian army soldier-turned-anti-Semitic political activist and demagogue used the same playbook to destroy a weak and generally disdained fledgling German republic, take over an entire country, plunge the world into the bloodiest war in human history, and nearly physically annihilate an entire religious minority. Absolute loyalty to Hitler even had a term: the Führerprinzip.

The application of the "Trumpprinzip" is now playing itself out in real time as his transition team screens prospective cabinet and sub-cabinet appointees, with the most important job qualification being a willingness to do Trump's bidding, potentially including the commission of acts previously viewed as overtly unconstitutional or otherwise illegal--as so many of his were found the first time around. But with the July 2024 Supreme Court decision in Trump v. U.S.--the so-called presidential immunity ruling--de facto absolute power for Trump and his appointees to do as they wish may already be a fait accompli.

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