Donald Trump is only loyal to himself

May 27, 2026

The President of the United States woke up early this morning, May 26th, 2026, for his third “annual” physical exam in just the past 13 months. Before leaving the White House for Walter Reed Medical Center, Donald Trump posted close to 20 times on Truth Social. Not about rising costs, global instability, or the growing violence spreading across the country. Instead, he spent the morning posting fake images of Barack Obama and glamour-shot propaganda photos of himself trying to look powerful, feared, and untouchable. A “master dealmaker.” A strongman. But one post stood out from the rest because it crossed into something darker, into a line no American president has ever crossed before. Donald Trump shared an image of himself holding a shotgun as if he were personally threatening members of his own political party, whom he believes are not loyal enough to him.

The image showed Trump kneeling next to a rhinoceros holding a shotgun beside giant capital letters that read: “NO RINOS!” complete with an exclamation point. At first glance, it would already be disturbing enough if it were simply about killing an endangered animal for sport. But that’s not what this was actually about. “RINO” has become MAGA shorthand for Republicans they view as traitors. Weak. Disloyal. Disposable. “Republicans in name only.” The image was not subtle. It was the President of the United States using violent imagery to target members of his own party who refuse total loyalty to him.

And here is the thing the people clapping for him still refuse to understand. He will turn on them, too. He turns on everyone. There is no level of devotion that buys safety, because loyalty is not a thing he feels or returns. It is only a thing he demands. The moment you are no longer useful to him, the moment you cost him something or tell him a truth he does not want to hear, you stop being an ally and become a target. He has shown us this over and over, and he showed us again tonight.

Because tonight, in Texas, we watched it happen yet again. John Cornyn, a four-term Republican senator first elected in 2002, lost his primary runoff to Ken Paxton, the candidate Trump endorsed. Cornyn had spent more than a year courting Trump, even going so far as to introduce legislation to name a 1,800-mile highway “Trump Interstate” to woo the president into endorsing him. None of it mattered because his loyalty wasn’t infinite. When Trump eventually endorsed Paxton, he said Cornyn was “a good man” but “was not supportive of me when times were tough.” That was it. Trump held a grudge against someone who was loyal, just not loyal enough. Cornyn did not bow low enough. So Trump targeted him.

And here is what makes it worse, because this is the part that proves loyalty was never the real point. Cornyn was the safer bet for Republicans, and his own party knew it. Cornyn spent weeks warning that Paxton at the top of the ticket would be a disaster, telling crowds, “We will have an Election Day massacre. If Ken Paxton is at the top of the ticket, we risk losing the Senate seat, losing the majority in the House of Representatives, and it will take a toll on everybody on the ballot.” This is not a Democrat talking. This is the Republican senator Trump just helped destroy. Paxton was impeached by his own GOP-dominated state legislature in 2023 on sixteen counts of alleged wrongdoing, survived only because the Texas Senate acquitted him, and carries a trail of allegations involving fraud, abuse of office, and infidelity. National Republicans have been screaming that he could lose them a seat they have held for three decades. Trump handed him the nomination anyway. Because punishing a man who once failed a loyalty test mattered more to Trump than keeping his own party’s grip on the Senate. He will burn his own house down to settle a score. Texas will now spend the next five months living with the consequences of that choice, and Paxton will face Democrat James Talarico in November.

And Cornyn is only the newest name. Just a week ago, Trump’s hand-picked challenger defeated Representative Thomas Massie in the Kentucky primary, ending the career of a Congressman who had represented his Kentucky district since 2012, and who had endorsed Trump in 2024. The race became the most expensive House primary in American history, more than 32 million dollars spent to destroy one man, much of it funneled in by Trump-aligned groups that could have saved that money for the general election they are expected to struggle in. Massie’s crime was that he pushed to release the Epstein files and voted against the budget bill. He used his own judgment. That was enough. The pattern does not bend. You serve him completely, or you are the next one he will turn on.

And this is not new behavior that started this term. It is who he has always been. Back in 2017, in the early weeks of his first presidency, Trump reportedly went around the Oval Office one by one, asking each aide to declare their loyalty to him over whoever they had worked for before. An allegiance test, conducted like an inquisition. And the people who failed those tests in the years that followed were the ones who chose the Constitution over the man. Jeff Sessions, discarded for allowing the Russia investigation to proceed. William Barr, cast aside for refusing to declare the 2020 election stolen. Mike Pence, turned into an enemy overnight for declining to overturn the election results, and was hunted by a mob chanting for his death while Trump watched. Each one was loyal right up until the moment loyalty required them to betray the Constitution or break the law. And that was the moment they became the enemy.

Even Elon Musk, who spent close to 300 million dollars to put Trump back in office and ran his government-slashing operation for him, lasted only months before the whole thing detonated in public. The instant Musk criticized the spending bill, Trump posted that he had “gone CRAZY” and threatened to strip his government contracts. The richest man in the world, the single biggest donor to Trump’s victory, discarded like everyone else the moment he stopped being useful and started being inconvenient. Their relationship to this day is rocky at best.

There is nobody safe from Trump’s twisted loyalty games anymore. And those games are more dangerous now than they were before, because Trump has nothing left to lose. He will sacrifice anyone and anything to protect himself and stay in power. But what’s even more concerning is that the version of Trump we are seeing today no longer seems capable of thinking beyond the immediate emotional impulse. Years ago, there was at least some degree of calculation behind his attacks. Cruelty, yes. Narcissism, absolutely. But there was still enough awareness left to occasionally think about consequences, optics, or what came after the explosion. The Trump we are watching now feels different. Smaller. More erratic. More consumed by grievance and paranoia with every passing month. Modern Trump is a fraction of who he used to be, and the decline appears to be accelerating mentally and physically in front of all of us.

And maybe “loyalty” was never even the right word for what he wanted. I don’t think Donald Trump has ever really understood loyalty as a human feeling built on trust, care, sacrifice, or mutual respect. What he understands is submission. Protection of himself at all costs. Obedience. The second someone stops serving his emotional needs, they become disposable, no matter how long they stood beside him. And maybe that is why today felt so revealing. He woke up this morning, posted a meme about shooting members of his own political party, then drove to Walter Reed for his third “annual” physical exam in roughly 13 months before announcing to the country that everything checked out “PERFECTLY.” Perfectly. This is a man turning 80 next month. His own doctors’ reports have already documented swelling in his legs tied to chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition associated with aging. That alone would not shock anyone. Bodies age. Human beings slow down. That is life. If he had simply said he was in good shape for his age with a few ordinary medical issues, most Americans would probably accept it without a second thought.

But Trump cannot tolerate even the appearance of weakness. Everything must always be perfect. Flawless. Untouchable. The strongest, healthiest, and smartest. And the same man who cannot emotionally tolerate the existence of a single physical flaw also cannot tolerate the existence of a single Republican unwilling to bow before him completely. It is the same impulse pointed in two different directions. One inward. One outward. Both rooted in fear, and with loyalists willing to play along.

Which the doctors have. Remember that his October visit was first described as a routine follow-up, then Trump said he had gotten an MRI, then it turned out to be a CT scan. The story changed three times. Those are the people now vouching for “perfect.” And here is what they should understand better than anyone: he will turn on them, too. The doctors covering for him are no different from Cornyn. The day their assessment becomes inconvenient is the day they become disloyal. There is no exemption. There never has been.

And it is not just the senators, the generals, and the doctors. It is the ordinary people who believed in him most. Look at the Trump phone. The venture his sons launched, trading on his name and pocketing licensing fees for him, spent the last year taking $100 deposits for a $499 gold smartphone it promised was ‘Made in the USA,’ and roughly 59 million dollars came in, much of it from his most devoted supporters. Then the “Made in the USA” promise quietly vanished from the website. Then the company rewrote its own fine print to say it “does not guarantee that a device will be produced or made available for purchase,” that a deposit is only a “conditional opportunity.” People paid for a chance to give him more money for a product that was supposed to be a symbol of patriotism and American manufacturing, and the few phones that have reportedly been sent out appear to be little more than relabeled and outdated overstock. The promotional material for the phones even show the wrong number of stripes on the decorative American flag printed on the device itself. That is what loyalty to Trump eventually becomes. Even his own supporters end up disrespected, exploited, and treated like they exist only to be used.

And it goes deeper than a phone, because the same people are being hurt in ways that will cost them far more than a deposit. The budget bill he calls big and beautiful made the largest cuts to Medicaid in history. The Congressional Budget Office estimates nearly 12 million people could lose their health coverage. And the communities hit hardest are rural and lower-income, the very places that voted for him in the largest numbers, where hospitals are already closing, and the nearest care is already an hour’s drive away. He cut the lifeline out from under his own base and sold them a phone that many may never receive. And somehow, there are still people convinced this is a man who cares whether they live or die. He does not. He has never once shown that he does. The evidence is everywhere, and still the loyalty flows in one direction only, toward him, away from them, and they cannot see it.

This is the man we have handed the nuclear codes. This is who our children are told to look up to. The leader of the United States, who posts cartoons about threatening anyone who crosses him. And the response to all of it is a collective shrug. There is no emergency session of Congress. No serious talk of the 25th Amendment. No wall of Democratic leaders standing on the Capitol steps saying out loud that this is not normal, that we cannot live like this. The whole country has been trained to look at a sitting president threatening his own party and say, well, that’s just Trump being Trump. It is not just that. It is that a man with no real concept of loyalty, no internal limits, and no line he will not cross, is holding the most powerful office on earth, and so many people have grown so accustomed to the chaos that they barely even react to it anymore.

Trump and the GOP are going to keep learning some very hard lessons. About power and limits, and about fear and backlash. And about what happens when ordinary people finally decide they have had enough. Because today, in South Carolina, the Republican-led state Senate killed Trump’s redistricting push, the scheme designed to redraw the map and erase the state’s only majority-Black district, the seat held by Jim Clyburn. Trump wanted it done. He pressured Republicans to deliver it. And instead, several Republicans crossed the line and joined Democrats to stop it on the very first day of early voting for the June primaries. One of them, Republican state Senator Richard Cash, said he could not in good conscience support changing the rules of an election that was already underway, telling his colleagues, “Neither my conscience nor my common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already begun.” By early that afternoon, more than 32,000 South Carolinians had already cast ballots. Record turnout on day one. And that turnout, those ordinary people showing up and refusing to stay quiet, is exactly what gave a handful of Republicans the spine and political cover to stand up to him.

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