Why Trump built a staff of incompetent sycophants | Robert Reich

Last week, Trump officials reportedly left behind documents describing confidential planning for the Trump-Putin meeting in a public area of an Alaskan hotel.

That’s nothing compared with the actions of Emil Bove, Trump’s new nominee for the US court of appeals for the third circuit, who reputedly told subordinates at the Department of Justice that they should “consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’” and ignoring any court order blocking a planned deportation flight.

Then there’s Billy Long, a former auctioneer and Republican congressman who Trump nominated and was confirmed less than two months ago to head the Internal Revenue Service, with “little background in tax policy beyond promoting a fraud-riddled tax credit”. Long has already been fired after clashing with the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent. Long was the sixth person to head the IRS this year.

Let’s not forget EJ Antoni, whom Trump just nominated to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing former chief Erika McEntarfer for presiding over a disappointing jobs report earlier this month.

Antoni is that rarity who has drawn harsh criticism from economists on the right as well as the mainstream for being ignorant, unprincipled and incompetent. He recently celebrated that “all net job growth over the last year went to to native-born Americans”.

I haven’t even mentioned the towering ineptitude of Trump’s cabinet picks, such as Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Robert F Kennedy Jr and Kristi Noem.

How to explain the rise of so many incompetent and unprincipled people?

Easy. They could never succeed on their own merits. As soon as their incompetence became apparent – which was likely to be as soon as they took the first job that required some degree of intelligence and integrity – they were fired.

So they learned that to be rewarded with promotions, money and power, they cannot rely on the normal processes and systems of recognition for jobs well done. If they’re to make anything of themselves, they must instead become ass-lickers, lap dogs and sycophants.

They must latch on to someone who values loyalty above integrity or competence, someone for whom fawning obsequiousness is the most important criterion for being hired and promoted, ideally someone who cannot tell the difference between a groveling toady and a knowledgeable adviser.

Enter Trump.

History is strewn with the wreckage of dictatorships that have attracted and promoted incompetent people lacking talent or integrity. As Hannah Arendt explained in her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Early in his career, Trump apprenticed himself to Roy Cohn, an unprincipled lawyer who taught the young Trump how to gain wealth and influence through ruthless bullying, profane braggadocio, opportunistic bigotry, baseless lawsuits, lying, and more lying.

Yet as Trump’s “fixer” with politicians, judges and mob bosses, Cohn remained utterly loyal to Trump and his father, Fred.

Years later, in his book The Art of the Deal, Trump drew a distinction between integrity and loyalty. He preferred the latter, and for him, Cohn exemplified it. Trump contrasted Cohn with

all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who made careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty …. What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite.

Cohn died a disgrace, disbarred by the New York State Bar for unethical conduct after attempting to defraud a dying client by forcing him to sign a will amendment leaving Cohn his fortune.

People who climb upward by sacrificing their integrity to slavish subservience almost always fall on their faces eventually. Blind ambition trips them up. They cannot explain or defend their behavior by relying on principled competence because, like Cohn, they are unprincipled and incompetent to their cores.

The people they latch onto meet similar fates but for a different reason.

Leaders who value loyalty above all else find themselves surrounded by sycophantic crackpots and fools. As a result, they receive no objective or useful feedback about their actions – no warnings beforehand and no criticism afterward. All they get are commendations – “Wonderful idea, sir!” “Brilliant execution, sir!”

These cocoons of flattery seal off such leaders from the real-world consequences of what they do – which inevitably leads them to make grave mistakes. Some of those mistakes eventually cause their downfalls.

This perverse symmetry – the certain demise of grovelers because they’re incompetent and unprincipled and the inevitable downfall of those to whom they grovel because they never get useful and truthful feedback – marks the path of all totalitarian systems. It’s the path on which Trump now treads.

This is not necessarily cause for hope. If history is any guide, many innocent people suffer before the incompetent grovelers and the vain objects of their groveling meet their inevitable fates. America and the world are already suffering.

• Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now