Loyalty To Trump Will NOT Result In Protection When He's Gone

The following is part of a post by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report: 

You’re out there defending Donald Trump’s lawbreaking, cheering his attacks on judges, prosecutors, immigrants, journalists, and even the Constitution itself. You defend his bribe-taking, the jet from Qatar, the violence of ICE, and his hotel and crypto grifts. You say it’s necessary for him to abuse power to “get things done,” that the other side is worse, that he’s strong and that’s what the American people need.

History is littered with people who believed the same things. . . .

Here’s the uncomfortable (for you) truth: authoritarian leaders like Trump and Putin treat loyalty like a disposable resource. Just look at all the Republicans who served in Trump’s first term and he’s now trying to throw into prison. Loyalty, for narcissists and authoritarians like Trump, is always a one-way street.

So long as you’re useful, you’re protected, but the moment Dear Leader no longer commands power you’ll become a liability, an offering to be thrown out to appease the angry mob.

And when the prosecutors come calling for you after Trump’s gone, they won’t start with your elegant speeches or proclamations that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “domestic terrorists.” They start with your memos, phone calls, pressure campaigns, documents, and quiet threats; they’ll go after your “find the votes” activities, the cooked reports, the arrests without cause, the orders that violated others’ civil rights. . . .

Right now you may feel powerful. You’re on TV, retweeted, and praised by Trump. The base cheers, the fundraising money pours in, the billionaires are chummy, and it feels like history is being written by your side.

But history has a funny way of circling back:

— Nixon’s aides told themselves they were protecting the presidency, but they destroyed their own lives instead.

— The seniormost Nazis told themselves they were saving Germany, but they were prosecuted as war criminals.

— Mussolini’s ministers told themselves they were stabilizing Italy, but they ended up dead or disgraced.

— Pinochet’s enforcers told themselves they were fighting communism, but they ended up in prison.

And there’s no statute of limitations on some of the crimes you’re now waving away. . . .

You may tell yourself — like all those people before you told themselves — that Trump will protect you. But Nixon didn’t protect his people; he left the White House and never looked back to watch his underlings fall. History’s strongmen never look back. When the heat gets intense enough, they point at others, not themselves. . . .

The courts won’t ask whether you believed in the cause: they’ll ask what you did.

Did you pressure an official? Did you sign that order? Did you participate in killing those fishermen with a missile? Did you move the funds? Did you authorize those deportations to foreign torture centers? Did you look the other way? Did you help cover up the child rapes?

That’s when you’ll discover the very real difference between a political appointee and the defendant you’ll become. . . .

Presidents can walk away, but staffers, lawyers, deputies, agency heads, cabinet officials, and enablers can’t.

You still have time to choose which side of history you’re on, and which side of a courtroom you never want to sit in.

Because the lesson of every fallen strongman is the same: abusive power-by-association today becomes criminal liability tomorrow.