Sycophantic displays—ritualized public flattery of a leader—are often linked to autocracies, where coercion and career dependence drive loyalty. This paper asks why such behavior has become widespread among Republican elites in the United States, a democratic system, and why some lawmakers flatter Donald Trump more than others.

Conventional wisdom—drawn largely from studies of autocracies—describes flattery as self-preservation under asymmetric power, especially for weaker elites. Whether this logic applies to democracies is far less certain. We contrast an alternative identity-signaling explanation, in which public praise functions as affirmation of shared ideological and cultural belonging. We use evangelical Protestant affiliation as a proxy for ideological alignment with Trump’s populist, culturally conservative coalition.

To test our theory, we collected and analyzed more than 90,000 Trump-related posts from 276 Republican lawmakers serving in the 119th U.S. Congress on X (2015–Aug 2025), identifying flattering messages via a token-based probabilistic model, rule-based heuristics, and a human-labeled training set. Results provide little support for the weak-elite thesis: senior, long-serving, and electorally secure lawmakers are often more likely to post flattering messages. By contrast, our findings strongly support the identity-signaling explanation: evangelical lawmakers are significantly more inclined to praise Trump, even after accounting for seniority, electoral safety, and other controls.

These findings indicate that in democratic populist contexts, sycophancy often reflects identity-based solidarity rather than coercive dependence. The paper advances understanding of personalist leadership and democratic erosion and highlights how the mechanisms of political flattery differ between autocratic and democratic settings.