Chapter 2, Section III. The Continuum of Selfishness: Why Not All Actors Betray
- john raymond
- Jul 4
- 3 min read
When we talk about betrayal, we often resort to cartoonish binaries: someone is either a patriot or a traitor. But in truth, loyalty—like every other human quality—is a continuum. People are complicated. Their motivations vary, shift, and conflict. And to understand someone like Donald Trump, we must abandon our desire for moral clarity and instead build models that reflect human complexity.
The Spectrum of Motivation
At one end of the spectrum lies the Loyalist. This is the person who places the mission, the Constitution, or the collective good above personal gain. They are not saints—they can err, they can fail—but their orientation is toward service. Think of the civil servant who refuses to falsify a report, or the officer who upholds their oath despite pressure. Their loyalty costs them something, but they pay that price willingly.
Next is the Opportunist. This is the median political actor: someone who serves the system when it’s safe, but serves themselves when it isn’t risky. They are highly sensitive to consequences. They will stand up for the truth when there’s public outrage—but stay quiet when the danger lies only in abstraction. They believe in institutions, but not enough to risk personal loss. They can be useful, but only under the right conditions.
And finally, there is the Saboteur. This actor does not believe in the collective good, or in loyalty to anything beyond their own enrichment or status. They act for foreign powers, adversarial causes, or simply for the chaos that benefits them. Often, they do not see themselves as traitors—because they define virtue in terms of personal victory. They believe if they’re winning, then nothing else matters.
Trump is this kind of actor.
Trump: The Perfect Saboteur
Donald Trump doesn’t believe in America. He believes in Trump. This is not a secret. It’s not a conjecture. It’s his brand. And yet, for years, analysts have struggled to reconcile the grotesque selfishness of Trump with the possibility that he could also be betraying his country.
Here’s the simple truth: Trump doesn’t need to be ideologically pro-Russian. He doesn’t need to wake up and say, "How can I help Vladimir Putin today?" He simply needs to pursue his own advantage—and when that advantage aligns with Russia’s, he becomes a tool of foreign strategy. Not because he intends to betray, but because he is too selfish to care whether he does.
In fact, Trump is too selfish to even self-reflect on how grotesquely selfish he is. He doesn’t believe in introspection. He doesn’t believe in shame. His only consistent motive is gain. Gain of attention, of power, of wealth, of control. And when betrayal becomes a profitable move, he plays it—without hesitation, and without remorse.
He is not a mystery. He is not an anomaly. He is an example of how systems fail: when incentives reward the saboteur and punish the loyalist, betrayal becomes normalized.
Why This Framework Matters
Understanding this continuum is vital. It removes the drama from treason. It allows us to see Trump not as a rogue figure, but as a predictable outcome of broken incentives. We do not need conspiracy theories to explain him. We need only recognize how selfishness, when unchecked, becomes indistinguishable from sabotage.
And in asymmetric warfare, this is all an enemy like Putin needs: someone inside the walls who thinks only of himself.
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