In 2018, Anthony Scaramucci, who had served as White House Communications Director for only eleven days before being removed, was asked to compare his tenure to that of other short-lived Trump aides. He proposed a unit of measurement. One scaramucci, he suggested, equals eleven days. His successor had lasted about one and a half scaramuccis. Others had managed considerably more.

There is something darkly clarifying about this. When a phenomenon becomes so recognizable, so predictable in its contours, that it generates its own informal unit of time, it has crossed a threshold. It is no longer an event. It is a category. Scaramucci had unwittingly named something humans have been doing to one another for much longer than any specific administration’s news cycle, with a lightness that bordered on the philosophical.

The question the scaramucci quietly raises is not about him, nor about the specific court in which he briefly served. It is older than that, and stranger. Throughout history, the leader who abuses power rarely faces its full consequences. His loyalists do. And yet each generation produces a fresh supply of intelligent, ambitious people who enter that court believing the pattern will not apply to them. The mechanism of betrayal is well documented. The question worth sitting with is not why the powerful discard their loyalists — that is almost structurally inevitable — but why the loyalists never quite believe it will happen to them.

Scaramucci, asked later why he had served in that White House at all, answered with a single word.

Ego.

That answer will take some time to earn its full weight. But keep it close.

THE INTOXICATION

Nobody enters a powerful court intending to become a cautionary tale. This seems obvious, but it is worth saying plainly, because the tendency when looking back at figures who were destroyed by the leaders they served is to locate some original flaw that explains the outcome — naivety, cupidity, moral vacancy. The truth is more uncomfortable. Many of them were not naive. Many were not particularly venal. They were simply, and perhaps fatally, ambitious. And they had discovered what proximity to power actually feels like from the inside.

It is difficult to convey this adequately to someone who has not experienced it, which is perhaps why the pattern keeps repeating. Proximity to power does not feel like proximity to power. It feels like being at the center of the world. Decisions of genuine consequence move through the room where you are standing. Information reaches you before it reaches almost anyone else. People who were once your equals begin to treat you differently. You have become, in some not entirely illusory sense, more consequential. The gravitational pull of this is not trivial, and dismissing it as mere vanity misunderstands its nature.

What makes the intoxication particularly effective is that it arrives gradually. The loyalist does not sign a contract to absorb moral hazard on behalf of a powerful figure. He agrees to small things, then slightly larger things, then things that would have troubled his earlier self but which now seem, in context, defensible. Each compromise has a rationale. Each ratchet click is quiet. By the time the position has become genuinely dangerous, the ego investment has become too large to permit a clear-eyed assessment of it. To admit vulnerability would require admitting that the whole project was built on a foundation someone else controls.

This is the first gear in the mechanism, and it runs on a fuel that is specifically ego. Not greed, though greed is often present. Not ideology, though ideology frequently provides cover. Ego, here, represent the need to be at the center, to matter, to be among those who shape events rather than those who merely observe them. The same force that draws a person to the court is precisely what prevents them from seeing the court clearly once they are inside it. These two states are mutually exclusive. You cannot simultaneously need to believe the relationship is real and assess accurately whether it is.

The illusion of exceptionalism compounds this. Every courtier, at some level, believes his relationship with the powerful figure is uniquely genuine. Others may be discarded, but he and the leader have a real understanding. He has been trusted with things others have not. He has been present in rooms where he saw how the principal actually thinks, and what he saw there confirmed a certain intimacy, a mutual recognition. This belief is not entirely delusional. The intimacy is often real, in its way. The powerful figure may genuinely like the loyalist, in the way one genuinely likes a useful tool. That liking will not protect him when the calculation changes.

THE MECHANISM

The court that surrounds concentrated, unchecked power is not simply a collection of people who happen to be in the same room. It is a system, and like most systems, it has structural requirements that operate independently of the personalities moving through it.

The most important of these requirements is the need for disposable loyalists. This is not incidental to the system. It is central to it. The figure who concentrates power without adequate institutional checks cannot distribute moral hazard evenly across a structure, because there is no structure to distribute it across. He cannot say: the institution made this decision. He can only say: my people made this decision. And when decisions go wrong, as they do, the people must be seen to take responsibility. When legal exposure accumulates, someone must be standing closer to it than the principal. When embarrassment requires a sacrifice, someone must be sacrificeable.

The system selects for this almost perfectly. The qualities that make a loyalist valuable — proximity, discretion, willingness to do things the principal cannot publicly do — are precisely the qualities that make him vulnerable. He knows things. He has done things. He has placed himself between the principal and consequences often enough that he is now entangled. His value and his exposure are the same thing. This is not a flaw in the system's design. It is the design.

There is a further refinement. The loyalist who might otherwise protect himself through documentation, through careful positioning, through maintaining outside relationships and contingency plans, is often selected against. The court tends to favor those who are fully committed, which in practice means those who have made themselves most vulnerable. The half-in courtier, the one who hedges, the one who keeps one foot outside, may survive longer in one sense, but he is trusted less, given less access, rises more slowly. The reward structure favors full immersion. Full immersion eliminates the distance required for self-protection.

What the system has produced, with considerable elegance, is a mechanism that reliably generates people who are maximally useful to the powerful figure and maximally unable to protect themselves from him. They have been selected, shaped, and rewarded in ways that leave them precisely exposed. When they are discarded, they often experience this as a personal betrayal — and in some emotional sense it is. But it is also simply the system completing its function.

THE LONG SPAN

In 1535, Thomas Cromwell watched Anne Boleyn — King Henry VIII’s second wife and Queen of England — go to the block. He had helped build the case against her. Within five years, he was following her to it. Henry VIII had found him useful for the dissolution of the monasteries, for managing Parliament, for the kinds of institutional violence that required an executor who was effective and identifiable. When Cromwell's judgment on a political marriage proved catastrophic — the Cleves debacle, as history remembers it — his usefulness was over. The king who had raised him signed his attainder with little hesitation, by most accounts. The man who had served him with total devotion for a decade was dead within weeks of the order.

Cromwell was not naive. He was one of the most capable political operators of his age, a man who had studied power his entire life and deployed it with considerable skill. He had watched what happened to Wolsey, his own predecessor. He had seen the mechanism operate at close range. And yet, there is no evidence that he believed, during the years of his ascendancy, that it would operate on him. This is not ignorance. It is something stranger: the ego's capacity to exempt itself from the patterns it can observe everywhere else.

Stalin's inner circle offers perhaps the most psychologically arresting version of this pattern, because its members had participated directly in the purges that preceded their own destruction. They had signed death warrants. They had been present when colleagues were arrested. They understood how the system worked. They also lived in a state of constant terror, knowing they could be next. Many of them were. Bukharin, one of the most intellectually distinguished members of the Bolshevik leadership, spent his final years writing desperate letters to Stalin appealing to their friendship. The friendship was real, after a fashion. It did not help him.

The Ottoman court refined this to something approaching institutional policy. It was a known practice to eliminate viziers who had accumulated too much independent power, too many connections, and too much of a constituency of their own. It was a recognized hazard of the position. Capable men still sought it. The proximity to the Sultan, the scope of the authority, the sheer intoxication of operating at that level continued to draw ambitious men into a role they knew, at some level, could consume them. The pattern held across generations, across centuries, across the reigns of dozens of sultans and hundreds of viziers.

In Ming dynasty China, court officials who rose to prominence faced a version of the same dynamic. The examination system produced men of genuine intellectual distinction, deeply schooled in history and governance, who understood the cycles of rise and fall with considerable sophistication. They had read the records. They knew how their predecessors had ended. And still, the court drew them, the proximity to the Emperor organized their ambitions, and when the calculation changed, they discovered that their learning had not immunized them against the mechanism it described.

Nixon's loyalists are the American iteration. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell were men of professional accomplishment, not obvious fools, who went to prison while Nixon himself escaped through resignation and pardon. They had entered the White House orbit believing in the project, believing in the relationship, believing that their service established something that would hold. When it became necessary for the principal to separate himself from the consequences, they discovered that the relationship held exactly as much as it needed to — and no more.

The span across which this pattern repeats is long enough to establish something close to a law. It is not a Western pathology. It is not the product of any particular political culture or historical moment. It appears in imperial China and Ottoman Istanbul, in Tudor England and Stalinist Moscow, in the court of any concentrated power insufficiently restrained by institutional structure. The forms vary. The costumes change. The specific mechanism by which the loyalist is discarded adjusts to local custom. The underlying structure does not change at all.

THE AMERICAN SPECIFIC

There is a particular American refinement of this pattern worth considering, because it involves a failure of historical literacy that is, given the resources available, quite remarkable.

Thucydides documented the mechanics of demagogy and the destruction of democratic norms with a clarity that does not read as ancient history. It reads as reporting. He observed, in specific detail, how concentrated personal power undermines institutional structure, how the loyalists of a charismatic leader are implicated in his overreach, how the same ambition that draws them into orbit eventually renders them expendable. This was written in the fifth century before the common era. It has been in continuous circulation. It is taught in universities. It sits in libraries. The information has always been available.

And yet each American generation manages to be surprised. This is partly because American political culture packages power as glamour in ways that other cultures do not quite replicate. The television cameras, the book deals, the speaking fees, the particular social currency of having been in the room all make the intoxication more acute and its distortions more complete. The court does not present itself as a court. It presents itself as a meritocracy in which the deserving have risen and are now doing important things. The ego investment is not framed as ego. It is framed as service.

This framing is genuinely dangerous, because it adds a layer of self-deception that pure ambition does not require. The person who enters the court knowing he is there for power at least has an accurate map of the territory. The person who enters believing he is there to serve the nation has layered moral self-regard on top of the ego investment, making the entire structure harder to examine clearly. He is not just protecting his position. He is protecting his account of himself.

The failure of historical literacy is not simply an intellectual failure. It is a structural consequence of the ego investment. You cannot read history's lesson about the courtier clearly while you are busy being the courtier. The reading requires a distance the position systematically prevents.

—

Scaramucci lasted eleven days. He emerged from the experience with something that most of his predecessors across the long span of history did not: a capacity for clear-eyed description. He had been in the system long enough to feel its forces and briefly enough to escape its full consequences. He coined a unit of measurement. He answered the central question in one word.

That word ego is both the simplest and most complete answer the essay's governing question has ever received. Why do intelligent, historically literate people enter courts they know to be dangerous? Why do they persist in believing the pattern will not apply to them? Why, when the evidence of five centuries is arrayed against them, do they nonetheless make the same calculation that Cromwell made, that Bukharin made, that Haldeman made?

Because the ego that draws them to power is precisely what prevents them from assessing it accurately. The ambition that seeks proximity to the principal, and the clear-sightedness that would reveal the proximity as dangerous are two capacities that are mutually exclusive. You cannot simultaneously need to be at the center and see the center clearly. The ego investment and the honest assessment cannot coexist. And since the ego investment arrives first, and arrives with considerable force, the honest assessment rarely gets a turn.

The mechanism has been running for a very long time. It runs on the same fuel across radically different cultures, political systems, and centuries. The gears turn with a consistency that suggests not contingency but something closer to structural necessity. The disposable loyalist is not a bug in the system of concentrated power. He is a feature. The system requires him. And the ego ensures a continuous supply.

We now have a word for eleven days. We have, perhaps, always had a word for what produces them.

—

THE LONG SPAN

The Central Question

The Pattern

The leader who concentrates power rarely faces its full consequences. His loyalists do.

The Puzzle

Each generation produces intelligent, ambitious people who enter that court believing the pattern will not apply to them.

The Answer

Ego. The same force that draws them to power is precisely what prevents them from seeing it clearly.

—

The Mechanism

Selection

The qualities that make a loyalist valuable — proximity, discretion, willingness to act — are the same qualities that make him vulnerable. His usefulness and his exposure are the same thing.

Gradualism

Nobody enters a court intending to become a fall guy. Commitment deepens through small compromises, each individually defensible, until the ego investment is too large to assess honestly.

The Structural Irony

The system selects for full immersion and punishes hedging. Full immersion eliminates the distance required for self-protection.

—

The Historical Span

Tudor England

Thomas Cromwell served Henry VIII with total devotion, executed by the king he had served so zealously. He had watched it happen to his predecessor.

Stalinist Moscow

Stalin's inner circle had participated directly in the purges. They understood the mechanism at close range. Many were consumed by it.

Ottoman Court

The elimination of viziers who accumulated too much influence was not exceptional — it was a recognized hazard. Capable men still sought the position.

Ming Dynasty

Scholars steeped in historical precedent, who knew how predecessors had ended, were drawn into the same court dynamic they had studied.

Nixon's Washington

Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell went to prison while Nixon walked free through resignation and pardon.

—

What Distorts

The Illusion of Exceptionalism

Every courtier believes his relationship with the principal is uniquely genuine. This belief is not entirely delusional — the intimacy is often real, in its way. It will not protect him when the calculation changes.

Proximity as Confirmation

Being in the room feels like evidence of security. It is evidence of exposure.

Moral Self-Regard

When framed as service rather than ambition, the ego investment becomes harder to examine — and the distance required for self-protection becomes harder to maintain.

Historical Literacy

The reading requires a distance the position systematically prevents. You cannot read history's lesson about the courtier clearly while you are busy being the courtier.

—

Closing Note

This is not a pattern confined to any particular culture, political system, or historical moment. It appears across Tudor England and Ottoman Istanbul, Stalinist Moscow and Ming dynasty China, ancient Athens and contemporary Washington. The forms differ. The structure does not.

Once the mechanism is visible, the question shifts from why it keeps happening to what, if anything, the awareness of it changes. That question remains open.