Loyalty and Potential Exposure

Figure 1

I was wondering today why Trump is said to put so high a value on loyalty while appearing not to reciprocate.

Loyalty, after all is not transactional - you are loyal to someone whatever they do. But Trump is nothing if not transactional in all his dealings, something many commentators, even the dolts on Fox, have noted.

It dawned on me today that loyalty may not be the right term (any more than "trust" is an appropriate term for Denzel Washington's crew in training day - great film, J Brandon White).

What Trump may mean is simply not giving up where the bodies are buried. And it is highly transactional; keep quiet and in return you are included in the inner circle; defect and you become an enemy, a target.

And the corollary is that the greater the expected (negative) value of legal jeopardy, the greater the need for this variant of loyalty (see Fig 1)