It’s official: White House positions now come with intense MAGA loyalty tests

In an ideal government, Donald Trump’s second term in office, not the latter.

Many of us already expected the president to put unconditional loyalty above any other quality important to governance. During his campaign trail, his tendency to surround himself with people who were least likely to show him any resistance was in plain sight, the type of resistance he encountered during his first term from qualified political servants. One could say Trump learned a lesson from that resistance.

Now, he’s doing things so he won’t have to feel as inclined to fire the very people he hired once they disagree with his wishes. In practice, this means his aides are taking extra methodical steps in screening applicants for federal positions.

Fealty to Trump and his agenda before all else

According to a report published by the Associated Press, this Trump istration is going the extra mile to guarantee that positions are filled by loyalists who won’t turncoat no matter what. One such measure was to issue “questionnaires to ensure they were fully committed to Trump’s agenda.” Some people have denominated these questionnaires as “loyalty tests.”

Appointees were expected “to prove their bona fides” and show as much “enthusiasm” about enacting the Trump agenda as humanly possible — one need only hear the new White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt making her debut to hear what that sounds like. Applicants were asked “whether they have made social media posts that could be considered incriminating by Trump’s team,” as well as about the moment when their “MAGA revelation” came to them.

The latter question sounds suspiciously close to something you might hear when someone’s being screened to enter a cult rather than being hired as a government employee. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tells Jon Stewart in the clip above, “This is now a billionaire feeding frenzy. It’s a kiss-ass race. It is ‘How can I show how much fealty I have to Donald Trump?’ in order to get my digs.”

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), as well as many other Democratic leaders, warned the public last year that a second Trump istration would include nothing but blind loyalty to the president, and that the istration would forgo any adherence to expertise or experience in favor of following the twice-impeached convicted felon wherever his whims took him. So, it cannot objectively be a surprise that this would be the outcome, as the writing was on the wall all along. Well before Nov. 5, the alarm had been sounded off — by AOC included — that Project 2025 was a blueprint for Trump’s second term, and nothing that has happened in the two weeks since Trump took office has proven otherwise.

We had already heard from former staff about how the billionaire New Yorker found something worth emulating in the way Hitler’s generals followed their führer. Another former staff employee, John Bolton, the national security adviser during Trump’s first term, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times titled “Presidents Expect Loyalty. Trump Demands Fealty,” in which he put, in the clearest , how Trump’s handpicked personnel follow one requirement that “is unfortunately consistent: the likelihood that they will carry out Mr. Trump’s orders blind to norms and standards underlying effective governance or perhaps even to legality.”

While many of us foresaw the potential open their eyes in the middle of the spiraling ride down or remain with eyes tightly shut and hands in the air as they enjoy the poisoned fruits of their November votes.