Donald Trump has assembled around him a notably nasty bunch of people. They are arrogant, rude, and disrespectful of any kind of non-Trump authority and they are all very much exponents of the “Let Them Eat Cake” theory of treating the little people. Most are true haters. Besides that, they advocate certain things for other people, but not for themselves. Exhibit A would be the marital histories of some of them: they claim to uphold family values and living stable Christian lives, but several of them have been married two or three times, with often adulterous affairs in between marriages, and some have had children out of wedlock. Exhibit B would be the attitude exemplified by the old British film “I’m All Right, Jack”, i.e., they’ve got theirs (because they’re special, superior, or lucky people) and they don’t care if the rest of America loses out, in financial terms due to tariffs, in national security due to the wrecking of alliances with other countries, and in benefitting from the blessings of the First and other Amendments due to the destruction of the democratic order. Here is my characterization of the principals in this lot.

First, there is Donald Trump himself – or as I like to call him, The Grifter In Chief. He is, first and foremost, a decided narcissist, as is shown by his putting his name on everything, even things that aren’t his, like the Kennedy Center. His use of “I” innumerable times in his public pronouncements could be interpreted as his taking ownership of his decisions, but it is more likely his expression of his power and ego: he and he alone, according to him, has decided and will decide every issue that arises. For example, nobody else wants the United States to acquire Greenland or invade Venezuela, but he does; therefore many diplomatic and military resources have been devoted to those efforts, while dealing with domestic problems is neglected.

He is blatantly greedy. First, everything has to be grand so that Trump can be fittingly showcased; consider all the gold he has had placed in the White House. He directed the illegal destruction of the East Wing for the purpose of constructing a world-class ballroom – which will necessitate that a new story be added to the West Wing, ostensibly to balance the architectural look of the White House, but more probably to replace the East Wing office space. He must know that once he is out of office, everything that he named after himself will revert to their old names, but he seems not to care.

Second, he has overtly enriched himself and his family and friends with various real estate deals and with bitcoin investments that will turn into vapor some day, after he has dumped them on other people. He has huge conflicts of interest in doing so, but of course he will do whatever he can get away with. (If the Republicans in Congress ever stopped being a bunch of lapdogs, they would investigate him for all that; but then, given that there is so much going on, investigating him would take all their time.) Beyond that, he has accepted gifts and favors from people all over the world, inappropriately at best and illegally at worst – emoluments clause, shemoluments clause.

Third, he has quashed all kinds of  investigations of himself and his family and friends. I think that one reason we do not know more about this is that much of the media is afraid to cross him by really digging into it. But as the Bible says (Numbers 32:23), “Be sure your sin will find you out”. Trump and his gang should all think long and hard about that.

Trump is clearly a sexist and appears to be a racial and gender bigot as well. The sexism seems to be sincere and deeply ingrained in him, but at least some of the bigotry seems to be put on to appeal to his MAGA base. Vanity Fair reported that his mother asked Ivana Trump, around the time of their divorce, what kind of son she (his mother) had created. By all reports, his mother was a nice person and a devoted Catholic, but as his mother she had doubts about his character. (And probably about his soul.) But his father seems to have had more to do with how he turned out: Trump told friends that his father raised him to be a “king” and a “killer”. The “killer” part was no doubt meant to be metaphorical, but Trump’s approval of the summary killing of people in small boats near the coast of South America implies that the description might be literal as well.

The acronym TACO – Trump Always Chickens Out – certainly applies to him in economic terms, but so in other circumstances do the acronyms NACHO and TRIAGE – Never Actually Count Him Out (for his ability to survive what to other people would be fatal political blows) and Trump Ruins, Incinerates, And Guts Everything (for his highly destructive behavior as president). Like some children, Trump seems to enjoy tearing things apart that other people value, for example, US AID, the East Wing, and the NATO alliance.

 Trump is clearly not an intelligent man. He thinks he can bluster and bully people into doing anything he wants and that is his go-to approach. Supposedly he can be very charming personally, but that quality has not been much in evidence in his second term. It is sickening to see people, both foreign and domestic, kiss up to him, especially the Cabinet secretaries who know well how he really is. One particularly nauseating event was the gift by Maria Corina Machado of her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump, apparently in order to get his buy-in on having her and her group take over Venezuela from the corrupt Maduro regime. But he made no commitments about that, so her sacrifice was in vain.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing Trump has done was to try to destroy the NATO alliance. I am so glad that for now, the alliance is prepared to hang together without the US. Trump has almost singlehandedly precipitated and prolonged the Russia-Ukraine war by withdrawing or withholding support for Ukraine. It was no surprise that at the late Pope John Paul II’s funeral, the only celebrity or government head receiving applause as he arrived was Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Nobody respects Trump – he is feared rather than respected – but everybody recognizes Zelenskyy’s courageous leadership.

Many people have opined that Trump is insane, or at least growing senile. I think that he is indeed losing canniness and presence every year, but is mostly the same person; he is just feeling more and more free to show the world what he is, i.e., he is coming out of cover more and more. After all he has done, one has to wonder if Trump is just…..well, pretty dense. His real estate machinations seem to have involved a lot of cheating, for example, by stiffing people who did work for him. He has had at least four bankruptcies and many of his real estate ventures were a bust. His success seems to be more due to luck and conniving than to cleverness. His ability to get out of just about any fix is amazing, but not, of course admirable. I have moments when I think I will never be happy until I see him in an orange jumpsuit.

Vice President J. D. Vance seems to be willing to bide his time until he can run for president. I am thinking that he shudders at every stupid or reprehensible thing Trump does and fears that as a result his own chances of becoming president are going up in smoke. Like practically all the other members of Trump’s gang, he once criticized Trump heavily, but then saw that if he hitched his wagon to Trump’s star, he could slide into the presidential slot once Trump left office. Well, I hate to disabuse him of that notion, but at the rate Trump is going, the people who worked closely with him won’t be able to run for dogcatcher. They all have the Trump stink on them now and it will stick for the rest of their lives.

As one of the principal sellouts in the adminstration, Vance is forced to take positions that he likely would have opposed in the past. Or maybe not forced: he never seems to be reluctant to promote the current administration line. From being a never-Trumper he has morphed to being a sycophantic upholder of Trump’s views.

It is interesting that he is married to an Indian-American. Since her parents immigrated from India, one wonders what she thinks of the current aggressive anti-immigration push and Vance’s support of it. She is still a Hindu; Vance has said that he hopes she will embrace Christianity one day. One wonders if he thinks she will go to Heaven when she dies; many evangelical Christians think that if you are not down with their dogma, you probably aren”t going to Heaven. (E.g., this writer’s husband.) She used to be a respected lawyer, but she retired in 2024 in deference to her husband’s career. Well, that last part is in line with most conservatives’ beliefs about women.

Vance wrote “Hillbilly Elegy”. I didn’t read the book, but I have read several critiques of it. His experience resonated with me, e.g., because my father was a lifelong alcoholic. I see the point of the principal criticism that has been made of the book: not all poor people are lazy and shiftless and even those who are should be shown some humanity and helped. Like so many others in Trump’s intimate circle, Vance divides the world into winners and losers. I think that he is proud of being one of life’s winners and he thinks that that means that he is a God-favored being (just the way Trump thinks about himself). This engenders a sense of entitlement. I myself understand this attitude because I was a gifted child with few prospects who pulled myself up by my own bootstraps. But fortunately I saw that if you think that being smart makes you a demigod among the plebians, you will never achieve the necessary humility and skepticism about yourself and others that will enable you to live what Socrates termed the examined life. I have met various gifted people who are admirably polite and humble toward others and are using their talents to help others – or, as I think of it, they are putting their shoulders to the wheel to move the vehicle of civilization forward. Clearly Vance has come down on the side of “To the victor belong the spoils”, at least politically, and “Let them plebians eat cake”. He could have been a star, but now he is on the road to has-been-ism; he could have been beloved, but now he is going to be held in contempt as a tool.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is another of the principal unprincipleds. Back when he was a senator, he had a reputation as a straight shooter and a person of integrity and ability. He was spoken of as one who could be president some day because of his intelligence and leadership qualities. But he has belied that in spades. Now he is just another common or garden Trump shill. He is complicit with the administration’s misdeeds in many areas, but his support for Trump’s aggressive diplomacy, with the message of “My way or the highway”, is eyepopping.

Rubio surely knows better about Greenland, immigration, NATO, etc., but he seems to go along with whatever Trump irrationally decides to do. He undoubtedly has access to all kinds of information about how other countries will react to Trump’s bombastic pronouncements and tantrums, but he chooses not to use the information to be a forceful counselor to Trump. All we seem to hear from him is “Yessir, Mr. President”. It is as though he were a butler instead of a secretary. If he harbors any illusions about becoming president some day, he had better get over them. The leaders of other countries, especially NATO countries, are probably relieved at the thought that he is not electable.

Regarding Pam Bondi, Attorney General, gosh, what an awful bitch that woman is! She is among the most arrogant of the Trumpies and she is really insulting to congressmen, judges, and others who have a claim on her attention and respect. Bondi – or Pammy Jo, as I sarcastically think of her – appears to have been an able and agile lawyer in the past. But she has sold her soul and now uses her power for evil instead of good. The same could be said of all of the Trump bunch, but it is especially alarming in her case because she heads the Department of Justice. The Rule of Law….Due Process….Truth, Justice, and the American Way…well, she and her henchpeople have eviscerated all that.

Bondi is 60, though she doesn’t look it. She wears her fake blond hair long, loose, and touching her breasts as it hangs. This seems de rigeur among the women around Trump, except for Susie Wiles and Linda McMahon, whose hairdos must have been grandfathered in. It is interesting that Bondi is twice-divorced and has no children; in former days, conservatives always required a woman in public life to have a husband and children or to be a spinster, unless she was a widow or was infertile. Bondi has a longtime boyfriend, however, which might cast doubt on the idea that she is unduly hard to get along with. That last point might be debatable, however: she is so testy that the boyfriend might be a beard to make her look like a regular human being instead of the cold-hearted attack dog that she appears to be.

Sean Duffy, Secretary of Transportation writes sycophantic things on Facebook like “God bless @potus and his first year back in the White House”. He and his wife have many children, one of whom has Down Syndrome. Given all those children, one would think that he would have more of a connection with the sentiments of the public with respect to air travel. But he seems to be more of an excusemaker than a leader. We all understand that it takes several years to train an air traffic controller, but the DOT has had years to address this problem and they have not done so effectively. So the shortage is on him, as DOT’s leader.

A side note: Duffy’s wife Rachel is Hispanic on both sides (she was born in Tempe, Arizona). Some of their children have names like Paloma and Evita. We can hope that they are not hassled by ICE simply because they may look Hispanic. One of them, now adult, slammed TSA because she did not want to be scanned at an airline gate while pregnant and hence was subjected to an intrusive pat-down. So maybe Duffy doesn’t get respect in his family circle.

Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce, seems to be a birdbrain extraordinaire. Actually, he is probably not so dumb since he led a financial services firm out of trouble when it lost a significant number of employees in the 9/11 attack. He is, of course, a billionaire and surely understands very well that tariffs put money into the US government’s pockets, not the US population’s pockets. Yet he pushes them for Trump with a big smile on his face. It makes one wonder what he is getting out of all this.

One service he has performed is making a negative comment on his visit to Epstein’s house – that was illuminating. However, it has since been discovered that although he professed not to have had anything to do with Epstein after that visit, he in fact had lunch on Epstein’s island with his family and had apparent business contacts with Epstein, all after Epstein’s first arrest as a sexual predator. This doesn’t undercut the theory that Lutnick is a birdbrain: he is a convincing liar, but not a smart one. He doesn’t seem to focus on commerce very much anyway, so there isn’t a lot for him to do except look adoringly at Trump.

Kash Patel was an odd pick from the get-go to be head of the FBI and he has looked odder and odder in the role as time goes on. His parents are immigrants from Uganda by way of India, which is ironic in view of his current command of the FBI in aiding immigrant removal efforts. He seems not to have a complex about being darker-skinned or short or somewhat bro-dorky; quite the opposite, he seems to think he is a gift to the world. His entitled behavior suggests that he is an only child or a youngest child or an only son; he seems to have only an older sister, so his behavior may qualify on two counts. He is smart and could have succeded in various fields, but he was also ambitious and so chose politics. This was a bad choice in view of his laziness in addressing any kind of issue requiring an intellectually-based defense of his bureau’s actions. He is bringing down a proud and effective law-enforcement entity once admired around the world. We can hope that some of the experienced people who have left or been fired will be willing to come back when Trump leaves office and Patel is out on his ear.

Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, is your ultimate glam girl. No matter what the occasion, she always seems to be well turned out, her makeup fresh, her Trump girl hair combed, and her shirt tucked in. Because of this and her stories about killing a young dog and a pet goat and her lack of personality in public appearances and her continuing association with a reputed lover while her husband stays back at home with the children, I wondered if she was a narcissist. I checked with the Internet and it turns out that some others have wondered that too. There is also the recent story about how the Coast Guard plane she was to take was not in service and so she and her retinue had to take another one. Somehow her blankie did not make the transfer to the second plane and so she did not have it when she wanted it. The pilot of the plane was summarily fired, reportedly by Noem’s boyfriend and aide-de-camp Cory Lewandowski. (Did he have authority to do that? No, but in true Trump style he did it anyway.) However, the pilot was almost immediately reinstated because there was no other pilot available to fly them and the plane back home.

I also wondered how it was that she ever got elected governor of South Dakota. South Dakota appears to be one of those Western places with a high concentration of straightforward, hard-working people without pretensions, so it seems that her fauxness would be apparent and offputting to them. But no. Back then she just worked the issues important to South Dakotans at the time and emphasized her background as a rancher, and that did the trick. However, while she did achieve some conservative goals, she alienated a lot of people with her profiting from her office, as Common Cause noted, and with her arrogant approach to Indian affairs. The underclass of citizens and the immigrant class get no sympathy from her, while her clueless behavior when she visited the El Salvadorean prison CECOT turned off a lot of even the MAGA folks. Then there is her desire to have the government buy DHS a luxuriously appointed plane….for deportation use. Yeah, right – they’re going to have the prisoners sleep six or eight to one of those high-end beds during the flight.

People have said lately that she is the single most incompetent person in the Cabinet – I  don’t know about that, since the competition is fierce – but she clearly qualifies for the Tin Ear award, alienating people right and left. She speaks as if she were reciting from a prepared script. Her empty eyes look at people, but do not appear to be seeing them. She doesn’t have any fans but Trump now, so her chances of avoiding impeachment seem slim. Good riddance, when that happens.

Karoline Leavitt, Trump spokeswoman, is an obnoxious, presumptuous little snip. It pops your eyes open to realize that she is only 28 years old, that she had a child in July 2024 out of wedlock, that the wealthy father is 32 years older than she is, and that she married that father only in 2025 (just days before Trump’s inauguration). So much for family values. Well, she is expecting a second child in May 2025, so maybe she has stabilized, familywise. Leavitt speaks as if she knows it all, but clearly she is still very wet behind the ears and is fed everything she says. She doesn’t appear to have many supporters among Trump’s conservative base, so when he leaves office she is likely to be out on her ear, with few prospects of a job on a par with the one she holds now. Maybe she can wait tables at Applebee’s or Denny’s.

Linda McMahon, Secretary of Education, is at the oldest Cabinet member at 77. She trained as a French teacher, but apparently she never actually taught. She and her husband created their fortune from nothing by hard work, which is commendable, but they are high honchos of wrestling bouts, often fake wrestling bouts, which fact has alienated a lot of regular citizens. She could have used her position to foster excellence in education (although she seems pretty dumb for an educated person), but in fact she signed on the destroy the Department of Education. So her mild-mannered exterior conceals a cold-hearted approach to those intended to benefit from the department, i.e., students and teachers (and by extension, the whole country).

Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, reportedly has athetoid cerebral palsy, but on the evidence he has no compassion for the handicapped or any other unfortunates. I would give Miller the nod as Chief Nasty because of his malign involvement with so much of the evil that the Trumpies do. One thing about Miller is that he seems to enjoy making life hard for others and fostering the cruel activities of ICE. This implies that he is not just indifferent, but an actual sadist. After the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti (RIP, guys), a bystander cried out in each case, “What did you do??” I think that Miller should have to hear people cry out to him every night for the rest of his life in his dreams. “What did you do??”, indeed.

By the way, I think that Minnesotans are the Ukrainians of America, standing up bravely for their way of life and their neighbors. That would make Miller the Putin of America – and gosh, don’t they resemble one another physically as well?

For Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, there is only one word: inept. Nobody seems to respect him; clearly he occupies his post only because he serves Trump singlemindedly. It is worrisome that he is “only a heartbeat away from the presidency”, being third in line as Speaker.

His being the way he is bothers me more than most of the Trumpies’ being the way they are. Before he became Speaker, he appeared to be a sincere Christian and to espouse Christian principles. However, he thinks that everybody else ought to espouse them too, in very literal ways, and that religious people and organizations should have favored status in dealing with the government. He doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state as the courts have interpreted it. He is against so many things that the majority of Americans accept as opinions that others may hold without discrimination or persecution: abortion, certain provisions regarding contraception and family planning, homosexuality and gay marriage, atheism, and even no-fault divorce. The Speaker of the House should ideally be someone who can work with a wide spectrum of people in a nonpartisan, collegial manner, and he ain’t it.

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the Evil Genius in Trump’s orbit, a spider who has caught Trump in his web and is calling the shots now. Stephen Miller is just a nasty little punk compared to the deeply oppressive Vought. Vought seems to be very conceited and convinced that he knows better than other people — all other people. But he is smart enough and controlled enough not to show it too often and not to come out of the shadows very much. However, we all know he’s “the guy” because he co-authored the Project 25 document and because he peeks out of cover from time to time to crack the whip over somebody. His attempts to choke off aid to Ukraine and his strangulation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are particularly notable as evidence of his attitude toward the little people: “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo” (I hate the uninitiated vulgar and keep them at a distance – Horace). I think he is a person of principle; the trouble is that his principles are destructive of civilization as a whole and democracy in particular. Some day he is going to be the least popular person in the nursing home, among his peers and the staff alike. When that day comes, he’d better watch his back.

Tom Homan looks and acts like a pretty obtuse and graceless person. He is not very articulate and when pressed to explain he seems to iterate his points without any real inflection or interpretation. He appears to have his head down and to be doggedly bur cluelessly running the ball toward the goal – right into the arms of a big tackle.  We see this in his first-Trump-term advocacy of family separation and in his second-Trump-term handling of the ICE street fights: they were so ham-handed that they turned off many people who otherwise might have supported Trump. It is totally credible that Homan should have been dumb enough to have taken a bribe, as he is accused of doing.

Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury, is among the very most hypocritical of all the Trumpies, because he certainly knows intellectually, e.g., that tariffs are taxes that accrue to the Treasury and not to the people and yet he continues to dance around trying not to say so. Also, as MSNOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell has pointed out, he seems to have a great conflict in another way: he is gay, is married to a man, and is raising children with his husband, all of which most MAGA people abhor. But there he is, mingling with the Trumpies as though he were one of them, which he can never really be. He seems to be likeable and to have good family values and so of all the Trumpies he is the one I most want to tell to get out while he still can – before, e.g., Trump is impeached or the nation implodes. I like that he and Bill Pulte had a shouting match and ditto he and Elon Musk: it shows that he is conflicted in trying to be a team player in the Trump circle and so there might be hope of his redemption some day.

Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, is widely viewed as a joke – deservedly. This goofball could not lead his way out of a paper bag. Furthermore, he is constantly parading his masculinity, as though he were a walking penis. This was notably in evidence at the big meeting of high-ranking military officials that he and Trump held. Every one of those officials is a better man (or woman) than he is, yet he talked down to them as though he had some special knowledge or expertise or wisdom that they didn’t. All he has, really, is the ear of Trump.

Hegseth’s drinking was a big issue in his confirmation. He promised that if he were confirmed, he would give it up. It is hard to know if he really did. However, credible evidence from various women indicates that he was in fact subject to drunken rages in the past and so may have a hard time controlling his anger in the future.

Hegseth is clearly a decided misogynist. His efforts to get women out of the military are offensive and obvious. His mother famously upbraided him when he was breaking up with his second wife, calling him “abusive” and “despicable” and said that he had abused “many” women. She took it back when it went public – shame on her for doing so because public revelation of his misdeeds is the only thing that might make him reform. Anyway, she may have reproached him like that because his third wife (his paramour at the time) had a child by him while he was still married to the second wife. Today he is still married to the third wife, but it is early days yet and he has an incentive now to present a happy front with her. No wonder Trump liked him: they are both serial adulterers and marriers. It is also notable that his first three children, the ones he had with his second wife, live with him, not her: the reason why seems to be shrouded in mystery. Their divorce decree contained a “nondisparagement” clause; it is probably because of this clause that the second wife has never said anything one way or the other about Hegseth’s treatment of her. Her sister, however, claimed that the wife was in fear of her life during their marriage because of Hegseth’s alleged drunken rages, which Hegseth denied. Well, one thing we can say for sure is that the second wife likely experienced a big feeling of relief when the divorce decree was final and he was out of her life. Note that abuse of women is one way that weak men assert their masculinity, so if Hegseth wants to present as a strong man to other men, he had better treat the present wife right.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, is the weirdest person in Trump’s government circle. It is not just his nails-on-a-chalkboard voice – that is due to a medical condition that he can’t help, although his youthful drug use may have precipitated it – but also to his whole contrarian stance vis-à-vis normal medical knowledge and practice. He has projected the attitude that he knows more than doctors do, although he has been careful not to say so out loud. Kennedy has been set loose by Trump to wreak all manner of havoc in our national health, but why? I think it was a sop thrown to some of the fringe elements in the MAGA base.

Kennedy’s words belie his actions, e.g., he says he is for freedom for people to choose to get vaccinated, but oops! There goes the funding for mRNA vaccine development. Ditto the funding for tracking disease and deaths that could inform the best path forward for preventing disease and outbreaks in the future. He has made illogical statements on a wide variety of medical subjects, when he himself has no formal expertise in any medical area. Supposedly he is just stating what his experts tell him, but his choice of “experts” is revealing.

Picking Kennedy as the head medical guy seems cynical on Trump’s part, but it is also true that Trump himself is fairly superstitious when it comes to medicine; e.g., he takes super doses of aspirin that no doctor would prescribe, just because he thinks he gets free-flowing blood thereby. Trump is also hypocritical when it comes to medicine: he got a special experimental monoclonal treatment when he had a bad case of Covid in 2020. It was prescribed and allocated to him on “compassionate grounds” when others were dying for lack of any special treatment. I wonder if the doctors who managed to get it to him regretted it later, seeing what damage Kennedy and others have done to medical science since in Trump’s name.

Until recently, Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, was keeping a low profile compared to others in the administration, as befits someone in charge of national intelligence, despite the reports of her prior inappropriate associations with foreign powers. But lately we have seen that as a result of her fealty to Trump, she is getting into more and more hot water.

Let’s review. Interestingly, she is of the Hindu faith. She is an Army combat veteran, having served in the Army National Guard and Army Reserve since 2003. She was deployed to Iraq in a field medical unit and later to Kuwait as leader of a military police platoon. She ranks as a Lieutenant Colonel (Reserve) now and has been a battalion commander. She was a member of the Hawaiian state legislature and of the US House of Representatives, interspersing some of her reserve activities with these representative activities. Some veterans who served under her and with her respected her leadership and others didn’t. But she does seem to have potential as a national leader in view of her varied experience. One would think that, as an apparently committed military person and Cabinet person who has taken an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, she would refuse to do things that are not in her purview, such as superintending the removal of voting records in Georgia (2026), or that are against regulations, such as burying a classified report mentioning Jared Kushner and not reporting it to Congress as required (2025-2026). But she has done these things, apparently at the behest of Trump. So she has now also clearly demonstrated what a sellout she is.

Greg Bovino is back to his Border Patrol sector in California, after leading bands of ICE/Border Patrol thugs across America. So good to see him go. But how did he get to be where he was? What capabilities or qualities did he display that made him the Head Thug? The story of that choice would be very interesting. One thing we can say for him: he always seems to be standing tall, i.e., very erect. Estimates of his height range from 5’-4” to 5’-7”, although people who have stood near him think the lower height is the more reasonable. He does seem to have a force of personality that has allowed him to hold his own among much bigger underlings. He has a master’s degree in public administration, but maybe those lessons in management vis-à-vis the public didn’t take. Based on his actions for the Trump administration, he is one who particularly ought to pay attention to the History and Heaven considerations.

Brooke Rollins’ appointment as the Secretary of Agriculture, unlike the appointments of so many others around Trump, does make some sense. She grew up on a farm and was in FFA; she has a degree in agricultural development from Texas A&M, plus a law degree. So far, so good. But in January 2026, she announced that the USDA was suspending financial grants to Minnesota and Minneapolis, ostensibly because of “widespread and systemic fraud associated with federal benefit programs”. Those two things don’t seem to be intimately connected, but in Trumpworld, connections can be claimed as needed to punish enemies. Supposedly she is an advocate for farmers, but as she is a Trump sellout, we can hope that farmers and ranchers don’t expect too much from her and her Trump-transformed department.

Chris Wright, the Secretary of Energy, is also somebody with some claim to expertise in the area he heads up: he has a master’s degree in engineering. However, he is a climate-change denier, a fracking fan, and a backer of connecting AI facilities to existing power grids, which automatically puts up the backs of woke folks and even some other folks everywhere. Reasonable people can disagree, but everybody has to be tactful when they talk about a polarizing issue if they are to make progress in resolving it. That includes being tactful with Trump, which Wright apparently sometimes fails to be. Wright has not been able to establish a free-flowing communications line with the White House. One reason may be that Wright came to DOE with a team of senior people who had been in the private sector and were not active in MAGA arenas, i.e. people with technical credentials and not political credentials.

Politico reported that Trump and his inner White House circle have been irritated by delays in DOE’s approval of natural gas exports because that was one of Trump’s campaign promises. They also complain that Wright was slow in cancelling billions of dollars in clean energy grants by the Biden administration, partly because Wright was defending the interests of some industries that needed those grants. It was Russell Vought and not Wright who announced that DOE was cancelling many of those grants, mostly in blue states; he preempted Wright in order to maintain leverage over Democrats in Congress before the first government shutdown. There was also a list of red-state grants that was not made public but that alarmed industry and red state congressmen alike; it is not clear who is making the decisions on those grants. Finally, Trump  wanted Wright to use emergency DOE authority to keep an unprofitable coal-fired plant in Arizona running; although Wright had done so in perhaps six other cases, Wright’s resistance in this case antagonized Trump. (The owners of the various power plants denied that the power was needed, so it was not an emergency, just a political preference on Trump’s part.) People knowledgeable about Wright’s situation don’t expect him to last since his heels are not round enough for Trump.

Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the Secretary of Labor, was a city councilwoman and mayor. After two failed runs for the Oregon House of Representatives, she won an election to the US House of Representatives. Although before the election she pledged to move into the district she was to represent, she did not actually do that, but rather continued to live outside it. So it was no surprise that she lost her seat in the next election. When Trump nominated her to be Secretary of Labor in 2025, it was because he needed labor support and possibly also Hispanic support (she is Hispanic). In the House she had supported right-to-work laws and right-to-organize laws. The president of the Teamsters supported her nomination. (Besides, her father had been a prominent teamster official.) Some business interest groups opposed her nomination, however.

Her subsequent tenure in the Trump administration shows that she is very much an official in the Trump mold. She lauded Trump for firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the bureau published its discouraging July 2025 jobs report. In January 2026, an internal complaint charged her with drinking alcohol to excess in the workplace and having an extramarital affair with a security underling. She was also said to have made underlings run her personal errands. The New York Post said that she was credibly accused of making her staff set up unnecessary trips so that she could spend time with her family and friends. On one official trip she took her staff to a strip club; two of them – but not Chavez-DeRemer herself – were placed on administrative leave. In February 2026, her husband was barred from Labor Department headquarters because two female staffers claimed that he had sexually assaulted them. DOJ has declined to prosecute him even though one of the incidents was caught on tape. Meanwhile, The Labor Department has sent a strike team to California to look into allegations of  improper payments and alleged fraud within the state’s unemployment insurance program; California Governor Gavin Newsom is, of course, one of the chief critics of Trump. Chavez-DeRemer is not recorded as having opposed this scheme.

Tricia McLaughlin, 32, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, seems to have been appointed as the chief defender of DHS. More even than her boss Kristi Noem, she seems to be an able liar about the actions of ICE; for example, she was a vigorous exponent of the “domestic terrorist” theory of citizen protest. She was going to leave DHS in December 2025, but delayed her exit, allegedly in order to help out during the Renee Good and Alex Pretti kiilings – which didn’t occur until January 2026. It seems that DHS urgently needed for her to continue to serve as an attack dog. She is married to a man who is the head of The Strategy Group Company and when she leaves she is to join that company. Note that last year The Strategy Group Company received a $200M contract to produce an advertising campaign for DHS. So McLaughlin is heavily conflicted, as they say.

Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, claimed that analysts at the New York Federal Reserve whose study found that American businesses and consumers were paying 90% of the cost of the Trump tariffs should be disciplined. He said that the analysis “wouldn’t be accepted in a first-semester econ class”. A few days later, after much public criticism, he said he regretted his words (although not, apparently, their substance).

Back in early 2020 Hassett returned to the White House staff temporarily to advise Trump on economic policy, especially vis-à-vis that Covid pandemic. Hassett had no experience in infectious disease modeling, but he came up with a model that forecast far lower Covid deaths than actually occurred and provided dire predictions about adverse economic effects from overregulating Covid response, e.g., by controlling people’s proximity to one another. He urged the administration to open access in the economy. However, his results contradicted the predictions of actual experts in the infectious disease field.

In so many ways, Hassett has shown his willingness to twist logical/mathematical truth to conform to Trump’s preferences and prejudices. He is not dumb: he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in economics and earned a PhD in economics. He taught economics at Columbia University’s Graduate Business School and at New York University and he worked as an analyst (a research economist) with the Federal Reserve Board of Governors for years. He certainly knows the truth about the tariffs  — and yet he defends Trump for imposing them. So he is clearly one of the top sellouts in the Trump administration. With his fake smile he exemplifies the Shakespearean expression “And smile and smile and be a villain”. He had been one of those on Trump’s short list to replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell when his term expired in May, but now Trump has nominated another Kevin, Kevin Warsh. Hassett’s compromising his intellectual powers will preclude his ever getting a prestigious post in, say, academia or a future administration again. So much for the return on his investment of loyalty to Trump.

Elon Musk, who needs no introduction, is out of government now, but he seems to be weighing in from the shadows – every now and again we see his fine Italian hand operating to influcence Trump and his gang. As head of DOGE, he was an unmitigated disaster in terms of democracy and humane treatment of unfortunates. I believe that with great ability comes great responsibility to use that ability wisely. God gave Musk a huge intellect and he has used it not for good, but rather to enrich himself and to gain power for himself and others. When he claims to be doing things to advance science and technology, he is just fooling himself: he is doing it for self-aggrandizement and money. What I said above when talking about going to Heaven goes in spades for him.

Emil Bove is an opportunist par excellence. He graduated summa cum laude from SUNY Albany and got a law degree from Georgetown University. He became a federal prosecutor in Manhattan. His temper was volcanic and he was domineering with his subordinates and agents. The US attorney’s office held an internal inquiry into his conduct and initially decided to demote him, but they did not after all, for reasons that are not clear. Bove is a real grudgeholder: supposedly he had a fight with a fellow prosecutor and afterward he refused to speak with the colleague or make eye contact in an elevator for years.

In 2023 Bove joined Todd Blanche’s law firm and almost immediately became part of Trump’s criminal defense team. He was second chair in Trump’s defense in state court and he represented Trump in the federal classified documents and election obstruction cases. After Bove moved to the Department of Justice at the beginning of Trump’s second term, he was part of multiple flaps at the DOJ: e.g., there was the criminal corruption case against New York mayor Eric Adams. He was said to have stated to DOJ employees that if a court tried to stop the deportation flights, DOJ might tell it “f…. you” and ignore it. He actually did tell planes in the air not to return despite a court order to do so, and the court ruled that the deportees had been deprived of due process. But somehow Bove escaped any consequences.

Still it seemed that the Trumpies thought it best for him to go. In June 2025, Trump nominated him to fill a vacancy on the Third Circuit. Over seventy-five former state and federal judges and over nine hundred former Department of Justice attorneys registered their disapproval of this nomination, but Trump was adamant that Bove was the guy he wanted in the slot. Bove was confirmed by the tame Senate in July. He is now a federal judge with a lifetime appointment, for heaven’s sake. But he seems to have skipped the Judge 101 class: after becoming a judge, he attended a Trump political rally in Pennsylvania, an act unheard of for a federal judge because they are supposed to be nonpartisan and to project impartiality. Well, federal judges can be impeached and removed from office, both for things they did before they became judges and things they did afterward, according to the Internet. Something for Bove to think about.

Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., Trump’s two oldest sons, seem cut from the same cloth as their father in terms of shady deals, but they do not seem to have his luck in brazening things out. It appears that only their father’s influence and clout have gotten them as far as they are, what with the bitcoin ventures and real estate deals.

Recently they reached a new height of entitlement: The New Republic reported that Eric and Donald Jr., in an interview with CNBC, expressed the opinion that “their blatant corruption was a kind of revenge on those who’d wronged them”. This was based on the fact that after the January 6 event, the Trump family was denied some financial services at Deutsche Bank, Signature Bank, Capital One, and JPMorgan. Furthermore, Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank stated that they would not work with the family any more. Regarding the corruption of Trump family ventures, Eric and Donald Jr. were asked by CNBC to explain why Trump suddenly decided to allow the United Arab Emirates to import advanced Nvidia AI chips after World Liberty Financial (owned by the Trumps) received $2 billion from an investment firm tied to a leading Emirates family. Donald Jr. declared that allegations of interest peddling were nonsense. He claimed that Trump himself was not involved and that the investment had nothing to do with the chip arrangement. So the Trump boys are going to go down swinging, apparently. They may one day join their father in wearing orange jumpsuits.

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Trump, keeps getting sent to foreign countries to negotiate on behalf of the United States even though he holds no official position in the government and is not answerable at all to the State Department. He does have Trump’s ear: in the first administration, after Trump had lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden and the January 6 insurrection began, Kushner was the family member that Representative Kevin McCarthy contacted to try to influence Trump to call for the insurrection to stop. Kushner seems to be trading off the Trump name much as Trump’s sons have done. Steve Bannon once remarked that investigators would probably discover money-laundering activities that involved Kushner and his family business (loans from Deutsche Bank). That does not seem to have happened, but financial records have a long life and it may yet happen once Trump is out of office.

I kind of like Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump. Before Trump was in office, she and her husband backed Democrat Cory Booker’s run for the Senate in New York. She has also backed causes such as stopping human trafficking, reducing food waste, providing medical help for sick children, etc. I.e., she actually seems to have a heart. Reportedly she was one of the people who was urging Trump to stop the January 6 insurrection as it happened. In June 2022, she told the panel of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack that she didn’t think that the 2020 election was stolen and that she believed William Barr’s statement that voter fraud claims had “zero basis”. It’s not clear why she isn’t doing anything official in the second Trump administration, but I like to think that she has had enough of the ugliness and corruption. We can hope that eventually she persuades Jared Kushner to leave it too.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s chief negotiator in the foreign arena, started out as a lawyer. But his heart was always in business and he shifted to real estate. He is also a Trump golf buddy. Trump trusts him because of their shared interests. Witkoff seems to be more successful as a businessman than Trump, but maybe Witkoff signals to him that he knows his place as a second banana. Witkoff is married, but he and his wife have been separated for years and he travels and attends social events with a girlfriend. Two of his three sons are in business (one died of a drug overdose some years ago). There is more than a whiff of corruption about Witkoff: one of his sons participates with a Trump son in business ventures and solicited money from a Gulf nation when his father was engaged in political negotiations there.

When Witkoff met with Vladimir Putin in Moscow in April 2025, he did not bring his own interpreter to the meetings, so the only translations he got were from Putin’s translators. This is of course not how it is usually done. It explains why Witkoff has said that Putin declared something that Putin later denied saying. Witkoff never seems to press Putin on any point and as Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said, it seems that only Ukraine is being pushed to make concessions and not Russia. Thus Witkoff appears to be representing only Trump’s preferences and opinions and not those of Congress or of the nation as a whole.

Peter Navarro seems to be a would-be master of manipulative, self-promoting behavior. In Trump’s first administration, he was promised a post that was given to someone else, then he got a post as head of a trade policy group, and then he became subordinate to someone else when the group got folded into another group. At this point, many competent people would just have concluded that their contributions were not valued and there was no place for them in the administration. But not Navarro. He kept on trying to get Trump’s ear, pushing tariff policy, for example.

In December 2020, the United States Office of Special Counsel ruled that during the 2020 presidential election, Navarro had violated the Hatch Act multiple times by badmouthing Joe Biden in his official capacity. He was one of the administration officials who opposed requiring Covid measures recommended by the CDC, but seemed to profit from the epidemic nonetheless. E.g., The Washington Post reported in March 2021 that a congressional committee was looking at claims that Navarro directed $1 billion in federal funds to medical supply companies he selected.

In 2021, Navarro published a book detailing how he, Bannon, and some others had tried to prevent the counting of election votes and certifying Biden’s victory. His candor boomeranged on him. The Select Committee on the January 6^th insurrection subpoened documents and testimony from him, and he refused to provide them. So he was indicted by a grand jury for contempt of Congress. He argued executive privilege, but Trump did not back him up on this. However, he claimed that Trump did foot almost half of his considerable legal bills.

In August 2022 Navarro was sued by DOJ because he refused to give the National Archives official business E-mails that he had created during his federal service; he agreed that he had the records but demanded immunity before he would hand them over. In March 2023 a federal judge ordered him to turn over the records; he appealed but lost. However, he was able to delay long enough that in June 2025 – during the second Trump administration – the government dropped the demand that he hand them over. So we don’t know why he threatened to invoke the Fifth Amendment over them.

For his loyalty to Trump, Navarro has been given prominence as an advisor in the second Trump administration. He is a chief advocate of an all-encompassing tariff policy. After he criticized Elon Musk, Musk called him a moron and “dumber than a sack of bricks”. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton said that “If you left Peter alone in a room and came back an hour later, he would be in an argument with himself”. In several of his books, he quoted an expert called Ron Vara – who turned out not to exist, Ron Vara being an anagram of Navarro.

This is a guy who started strong: he was a research associate at Harvard’s Energy and Environmental Policy Center for four years, he taught at UC San Diego and UC Irvine, the latter for more than 20 years. He received multiple teaching awards for the MBA courses he taught. Clearly he stopped playing his strong suit, teaching, in order to follow his ambition. Who would ever hire him to teach now, since he has the Trump stink on him?

Todd Blanche, Attorney General, attended night school at Brooklyn Law School in order to get his law degree, graduating cum laude. This might lead one to conclude that he could see the point of view of the common man – but that doesn’t seem to be the case. He is for Trump all the way. His wife, who has a PhD, runs a center called the Investigative Healing Center and Spa; it “combines traditional healing practices with a holistic approach to health care”, whatever that means. Curiously, Blanche was a registered Democrat in New York as late as 2024. Obviously he is for hire, no questions asked.

After clerking for judges, Blanche became a federal prosecutor in the celebrated Southern District of New York. Ironically, he worked on cases of bank and wire fraud, public corruption, and racketeering. He later worked at two law firms before founding his own. During his private work, he represented not only Trump (during his New York trial for falsifying business records), but also Rudy Giuiani and Paul Manafort.

 Trump had wanted Matt Gaetz to be the Attorney General, but the Senate balked. So he appointed Pam Bondi, with Blanche as her deputy. Blanche pledged to divest his cryptocurrency holdings, but soon after he took over the job, he issued a memo pledging to end Biden-era enforcement against cryptocurrency firms. He divested by transferring his holdings to family members, which is held to be insufficient by experts.

In July 2025 Blanche held a briefing meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficking confederate of the late notorious Jeffrey Epstein. This was very suspicious because usually it would not be the #2 at DOJ who would be conducting such an interview, but rather one or more DOJ lawyers who had worked on the case and were very familiar with it. The tape of the meeting was released, but it may not have included all that was said; clearly there were some introductory interchanges that were omitted and Blanche might also have had earlier meetings with Maxwell’s lawyers. So Maxwell of course knew what was expected of her and she denied all knowledge of any nefarious doings, including by Trump. Later, she refused to talk to Congress (taking the Fifth) because her appeal for clemency was pending. This was news to many – is Trump really considering pardoning her? Anyway, this whole episode shows that Blanche is Trump’s loyal henchperson through and through. I expect that someday the ins and outs of this episode will become known from those DOJ people who, once Trump is out of office, will dare to speak freely.

In January 2026 Blanche announced that there would be no investigation of the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The DOJ has hedged somewhat about that since then, but it is clear that the DOJ is helping to hide the misdeeds of ICE and the Border Patrol in American cities.

Dan Bongino, former deputy director of the FBI, has perhaps seen the light – not the moral light, but the self-interest light. It was clear to him (and everybody else) that he was going to damage his “brand” permanently if he stayed in the administration. Besides, it appears, it wasn’t fun for him any more – he was actually in law enforcement once (NYPD and the Secret Service) and presumably he knows how it should operate. By the way, Bongino’s wife is an immigrant: she was born in Colombia.

Bill Pulte is the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and also (by self-appointment) the head of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. You would think that any one of those would be a full-time job, but Trump has confidence that he can do all three. Well, he is only 37, so maybe he doesn’t need that much sleep. He got next to Trump by offering to donate two cars to veterans if Trump retweeted one of his posts.

Pulte is famous for using his position to access mortgage loan records for New York Attorney General Letitia James, Representative Adam Schiff, and Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook and from there pushing to prosecute the three for mortgage fraud. Hence he has jumped with both feet into Trump’s retribution regime. He also seems to be very arrogant and ambitious, even trying to stab other members of Trump’s team in the back; he had a shouting match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over Pulte’s alleged bad-mouthing of Bessent to Trump. The Government Accountability Office is investigating Pulte for using his office to launch attacks on Trump’s perceived enemies (e.g., the aforementioned James, Schiff, and Cook). His partisan actions are exemplary in terms of Trump’s expectations that all of his appointees and associates will do the same.

Steve Bannon, FOTD (Friend of The Donald): This guy! He is such a joke because of his extreme and logic-challenged statements. But so many MAGA folks think he hung the moon. I think that the reason is the same as one of the reasons why MAGAs love Trump: he is a forceful and seemingly authoritative personality. It is notable that when ordinary MAGA people (rather than MAGA leaders) are interviewed, they often say that they are for Trump, or Bannon, or Charlie Kirk all the way, but they can’t give a reason why, except that Trump, etc. are going to “save our country”. How or from what, they can’t articulate. This is the “strong man worship” syndrome, which in its way could be called a Trump Derangement Syndrome since the folks involved are suspending all judgment and reason in order to continue believing no matter what. This is a very alarming phenomenon, but of course the world has seen it before, from Caesar to Hitler: people don’t have to support the leader and on the evidence shouldn’t support him, but they do nevertheless.

Bannon served four months in prison for contempt of Congress because he refused to answer questions or produce documents regarding the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Among MAGA folks, this is evidence of his being a stand-up guy, He pleaded guilty to state charges regarding a fundraising scheme to build the immigrant-excluding wall in the Southwest, but was given no jail time. Even though Bannon served his four months, he is appealing his conviction to the Supreme Court (presumably now that Trump is in office) and the DOJ is trying to get his conviction overturned also. This is all confusing, but the bottom line seems to be that he will be exonerated if Trump and his gang have anything to say about it. There is no question that he did defy Congress – his recent efforts just seem to be in service of rewriting history.

Wikipedia says that Bannon worked at a junkyard during summers when he was in high school and college; that may account for his junkyard dog stance on everything. He  is a veteran and has an MBA from Harvard; he is obviously not stupid, but his enjoyment of the limelight has made him use his powers for ill. His treatment of subordinates wherever he has worked is legendary and not in a good way; he seems to have a very low frustration/irritation threshold. Many dirty tricks are ascribed to him.

Like so many other Trumpies, he has been married three times (and divorced three times). He has three daughters, one by his first wife and two by his second. The oldest one is close to Bannon and supported him in public during his prison term; the second and third are twins who were born three days after Bannon and his second wife got married. The twins took their mother’s maiden name after Bannon and the second wife divorced, implying that they were not close to Bannon. There was a significant contretemps after the second wife tried to send the twins to a private school; Bannon told private and public schools that if they enrolled the twins, he would be picking them up and taking them away. Eventually they went to a public school and then to a private school; a court made Bannon pay for their schooling as part of child support. The second wife told the court that he objected to her sending the girls to a school with too many Jews in it. He once told a gathering of French right-wing politicians to “Let them call you a racist….xenophobes….nativists….wear it like a badge of honor”.

It is not altogether clear why Bannon left or was fired from the first Trump administration, but later he remarked that investigators would likely uncover money-laundering involving Jared Kushner and his family business loans from Deutsche Bank. He was also quoted by Michael Wolff as saying to the proposition that Trump had run what resembled a semi-criminal enterprise, “I think we can drop the ‘semi’ part”. Wolff said that Bannon opined that investigations into Trump’s finances would be his political downfall: “This is where it isn’t a witch hunt – even for the hard core, this is where he (Trump) turns into just a crooked business guy….just another scumbag.” Now he seems to be back in Trump’s good graces. One wonders what if anything Trump has promised him; it may be just that Bannon retains popularity in MAGA and so Trump wants to stay close to him for his influence.

In conclusion, Trump and his gang are people without the conscience that most other Americans have. Duty? Honor? Fidelity? Trump swore an oath to support the Constitution of our country, but he lied, knowing that he had an agenda that was all him and his obsessions. The gang is violating that oath in order to turn their talents to supporting Trump in his morbid pursuit of historical revisionism, money, and bullying and badmouthing of those he considers his enemies. If they put an image to illustrate the word “greed” in the dictionary, it could be a picture of Trump – it fits so well. Ditto “abuse of power”.

All these people could repent and reform before Trump leaves office and they could thereby aid in restoring democracy and the rule of law, but they won’t. They know they are doing wrong, but they continue down their destructive path because some are cowards and the rest are opportunists. As I have said before with regard to these people, they should look to History and Heaven. History is not going to treat them well; their focus on the short-term time horizon makes them look away from “someday”, but they are going to have a rude shock in the future as they see how they are portrayed in the history books that will be written. As to going to Heaven, I would not presume to speak for the Deity, but I have to say it does not look good for any of them.