There's the Truth and Then There's Daddy

Intelligence Can't Compete with Tribal Loyalty

Photo by Alejandro Cartagena 🇲🇽🏳‍🌈 on Unsplash

One of the things upon which I spend a lot of time pondering: watching right-leaning, but otherwise intelligent people in my life look at Donald Trump’s systematic destruction of constitutional government and see just mere incompetence, but generally normal politics. These aren’t people force-fed reactionary propaganda in media bubbles. These are sophisticated observers who, if the same fact patterns were playing out in Hungary or Venezuela, would immediately recognize authoritarian consolidation for what it is.

The only conclusion that makes sense is that some humans simply value tribal loyalty more than truth. Once that choice is made, everything else becomes motivated reasoning in service of protecting the tribe from its designated enemies.

The American right has achieved remarkable clarity about who their enemy is: “the left.” Whether it’s woke ideology, trans rights, Marxism, or whatever dark fantasy currently haunts their imagination, they’ve identified the existential threat that must be stopped at all costs. Once that becomes the organizing principle of your political worldview, everything else—competence, integrity, constitutional governance, basic honesty—becomes secondary to the primary mission of keeping “them” from power.

Donald Trump is obviously a fraud. A transparent con man who has never successfully negotiated anything beneficial for America in either of his administrations. There is no “art of the deal”—just decades of failed businesses, stiffed contractors, and elaborate schemes to avoid accountability for obvious crimes. His Republican enablers know this perfectly well.

But they also know who daddy is. And daddy is the guy their tribe gathers around, however repulsive and vulgar he might be.

Some of these people even recognize that Trump wants to be king. They can see the authoritarian impulses, the constitutional contempt, the obvious desire for unchecked power. But they reassure themselves that institutions will contain him, that checks and balances will hold, that somehow the system will prevent the worst outcomes. What they can’t admit is that institutions don’t constrain themselves—they’re constrained by people willing to defend them. And when daddy is systematically capturing those institutions, placing loyalists in every position of authority, redefining institutional purpose from public service to personal protection—the institutions become daddy’s tools rather than democracy’s safeguards.

Watch Republicans in Congress when Trump prostrates America before Vladimir Putin. You can see the embarrassment in their faces, feel their moral misapprehension at watching American soldiers kneel on tarmac to prepare red carpets for war criminals. They know what’s happening is wrong—deeply, obviously wrong.

But they also understand their role in the daddy dynamic: you give gentle suggestions while you watch him humiliate the country you claim to love. You offer private counsel while publicly defending his “negotiating style.” You express quiet concerns in closed-door meetings while voting to block any oversight that might constrain his collaboration with foreign adversaries.

The same psychology was on display after the Bolton raid. Republicans who spent years screaming about “weaponized law enforcement” fell silent when it actually happened—when the FBI raided a former National Security Advisor for the crime of writing a book critical of the president. They know it’s constitutional vandalism. They just can’t bring themselves to oppose daddy, even when he’s systematically destroying the institutions they claim will contain him.

The “daddy” dynamic captures both the infantilization involved—looking for a strong father figure to protect them from scary changes in the world—and the way authoritarian movements depend on personal loyalty rather than institutional consistency. Daddy doesn’t need to deliver results; he just needs to make the right enemies suffer. And if he happens to embarrass America on the world stage, collaborate with adversaries, or betray fundamental values—well, that’s just daddy being daddy.

There’s a stark contrast here with how truth-seekers operate. Liberals, genuine conservatives, and independents committed to democratic governance don’t look for daddy figures—they look for competent public servants accountable to constitutional constraints. They criticize their own leaders when those leaders fail or overreach. They value institutional integrity over personal loyalty. When Joe Biden’s classified documents were discovered, Democrats didn’t rally around him with excuses—they supported proper investigation. When Democratic governors gerrymanander, progressive activists organize against them. Truth-seekers understand that no individual is more important than the system of accountability itself.

But once you’ve chosen daddy over democracy, normal political persuasion becomes futile. You’re trying to have a rational policy debate with people who have fundamentally abandoned the framework where policies matter. They’re engaged in tribal warfare where competence matters less than loyalty, where truth matters less than victory, where national dignity matters less than keeping “them” from power.

The tragedy is watching intelligent people voluntarily surrender their analytical capacity to tribal belonging. They’ve chosen the comfort of knowing who their enemies are over the difficulty of thinking clearly about complex realities. They’ve chosen daddy over country, tribal identity over constitutional duty, personal loyalty over national interest.

This isn’t stupidity. It’s the deliberate subordination of truth-seeking to threat perception. Once someone becomes convinced that political opponents represent existential danger, everything else becomes tactical calculation. The question isn’t whether Trump is competent or honest or patriotic—the question is whether he’s useful for destroying the people who threaten their vision of America.

In tribal warfare, daddy doesn’t need to be good. He just needs to be theirs. And as long as loyalty trumps reality, daddy wins—even if it means America loses.

Republicans love daddy.