Here is where it is coming to an end, step by step. The façade is crumbling; the putrid structure is becoming visible. First they leave. There is no grand theoretical explanation, no elaborate political doctrine, no convincing institutional account. They simply depart, citing personal reasons, political disagreements, reassignment, or silence.
This is how such systems often end, not with a single dramatic collapse, but with departures that gradually reveal what had been concealed by the appearance of control.
US President Donald Trump’s administration offers a laboratory in which loyalty can become more valuable than competence, repetition more useful than evidence, aggression more effective than explanation, and personal allegiance more important than institutional responsibility. The deeper danger is that intelligent people learn to justify the behaviour, reproduce it, and eventually mistake their participation in it for political virtue. The political order begins to fracture, and their loyalty does not necessarily protect them.
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi, former spy chief Tulsi Gabbard, and former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt are revealing precisely because they are not identical figures.
Karoline Leavitt
Leavitt transformed the office of White House Press Secretary from an institution supposed to mediate between government and journalists into something closer to a combat platform. The Financial Times account describes a young official who routinely confronted reporters, questioned their motives, and turned exchanges into material for viral political consumption.
The Hamburg-based Die Zeit account goes further, arguing that she did not simply defend Trump’s administration but helped redefine the function itself. The press secretary became an amplifier. The exchange was no longer about what the administration had done, but about how effectively the administration could defeat the person asking. A press briefing ceases to be an information mechanism when the performance of dominance becomes more important than the transmission of information.
Plato saw this problem with astonishing precision more than two millennia ago. In ‘Gorgias,’ Socrates distinguishes knowledge from persuasion and describes rhetoric as something capable of creating belief without possessing knowledge. A political communicator can become extremely effective without being required to know whether what she says is true.
“Rhetoric is the artificer of a persuasion which creates belief about the just and unjust, but gives no instruction about them.” That sentence could have been written as a description of an algorithmically amplified political briefing in 2026. The exchange is clipped, posted, shared, praised, attacked, and recycled. A hostile question becomes a 30-second video. The answer need not survive scrutiny if the clip survives the news cycle.
The reporter could be recategorised as an enemy, a partisan, a ‘left-wing hack’. Once that transformation occurs, the factual content of the question becomes secondary. The audience is invited to judge allegiance rather than accuracy. This is precisely the political psychology of propaganda. The public no longer asks, ‘Is the claim true?’ It asks: ‘Whose side is this person on?’
Plato’s warning about persuasion without knowledge becomes particularly relevant here because propaganda does not require the elimination of facts. It requires only the destruction of a common procedure for deciding which facts deserve belief.
Pam Bondi
Bondi exposes a different mechanism. Her importance was not primarily rhetorical. She represented the transformation of institutional authority into personal loyalty. According to the supplied account, Bondi had remained exceptionally loyal to Trump, yet loyalty did not guarantee permanence. Her removal demonstrates a brutal rule of personalised government.
Loyalty is necessary but never sufficient. The subordinate can be indispensable on Monday and expendable on Thursday. This is why authoritarian or heavily personalised systems consume loyalists at a remarkable rate. The leader needs people who will defend him, but once they occupy an institution long enough to acquire their own authority, they can become liabilities. They know too much, they become associated with failures, or they simply cease to be useful.
The Jeffrey Epstein affair is especially revealing because it illustrates the collision between secrecy, expectation, and political loyalty. The promise to release information creates an obligation; delay creates suspicion; incomplete disclosure creates a vacuum; the vacuum is filled by speculation. The dismissed official becomes part of the story. A political leader who treats personnel changes as solutions to institutional crises eventually discovers that removing an official does not remove the underlying problem.
Tulsi Gabbard
Gabbard presents the third variation. She is the subordinate whose independent judgement can become politically dangerous even when she remains formally loyal. Her reported hesitation over the justification for the Iran war and her defence of a former subordinate illustrate the narrow space available to officials who possess their own institutional credibility.
Such a system needs experienced people because inexperienced loyalists are incompetent. Yet experienced people possess knowledge, networks, and judgement of their own. The more seriously they exercise those qualities, the greater the possibility that they will disagree with the leader. The system consequently begins selecting not merely for loyalty but for anticipatory obedience.
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” A conviction can become immune to evidence precisely because it is experienced as moral identity. The political loyalist does not necessarily believe every statement because it is factually persuasive.
Joseph Goebbels did not invent propaganda; he industrialised its relationship with the modern mass public. Joseph Stalin’s system did not survive because every Soviet official was personally convinced of every proposition issued by the Kremlin. It survived because institutions were progressively organised around obedience, fear, career incentives, and the destruction of independent sources of authority.
Procedures vs. personalities
The Roman imperial system offers another variation. Under emperors such as Tiberius and Domitian, proximity to power could be extraordinarily advantageous and extraordinarily dangerous. Court politics rewarded those who understood the ruler’s psychology, but the same intimacy could make a courtier vulnerable when the ruler’s suspicion changed direction. Tacitus understood that imperial power corrupts not only those who command but those who adapt themselves to command.
The personalised leader does not create loyal institutions; he creates loyal relationships within institutions. An institution survives a bad minister because its procedures remain stronger than the personality occupying the office. A personalised administration survives by weakening precisely those procedures.
He claims that “the more powerful than the weaker” naturally deserves more, and that laws can become instruments devised by the weak to restrain the strong. That argument has survived because it contains a temptation that democratic societies never permanently eliminate. Power can persuade people that its own success is evidence of its righteousness.
If the leader wins, defeats opponents, humiliates journalists, and forces institutions to retreat, supporters can interpret every victory as proof that he is right. Failure becomes sabotage by enemies. Criticism becomes persecution. Evidence becomes propaganda. Accountability becomes betrayal. The political system then develops an extraordinary capacity to convert contradiction into confirmation.
He insists that “to do injustice is the greatest of evils, and to suffer injustice is the next greatest evil”. Political systems obsessed with humiliation, victory, and retaliation teach their servants to fear losing power more than becoming corrupted by it.
Once retaining the leader’s favour becomes the supreme political good, every compromise with truth can be rationalised as necessary. The official who knows a claim is false can repeat it. The official who knows a policy is failing can defend it. The official who sees an institution being degraded can convince herself that she is protecting democracy by remaining inside the room.
Epistemic decay
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” The line is often reduced to a quotation about hypocrisy. Its political meaning is harsher.
Opposition movements can reproduce the psychological habits of the power they oppose. A government that treats opponents as enemies can teach its opponents to treat every disagreement as existential. A press office that turns journalism into warfare encourages journalists to behave as combatants.
A political movement that regards criticism as treason eventually becomes incapable of distinguishing criticism from treason. The result is not merely bad government. It is epistemic decay, the destruction of the conditions under which a society can agree that something happened.
The question is no longer why the leader behaved as he did. The more disturbing question is why so many educated people learnt to make his behaviour appear normal. And isn’t it happening, in different forms, in many of our countries?
(The writer is an author based in Colombo)
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)