A regime of idiots: A complete inventory of Trump stooges
They will remain, festering, awaiting the next opportunity for soul-selling.
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While the end point is unclear, Trump’s would-be dictatorship is politically broken. And as Trump’s mental and physical dissipation increases by the day, it’s increasingly important to focus on the network of stooges that have built and sustained his regime.
After all, once Trump departs from the scene, stooges like them will remain, ready and waiting to be activated by another would-be dictator.
Accordingly, we offer for your consideration a complete inventory of the various ideal types of Trump stooges.
The Opportunist Stooge
Opportunism and stoogery are closely related. Whenever a leader offers the promise of a shortcut to wealth or power, opportunists will immediately appear — Todd Blanche being a signal example.
In April 2023, Trump was desperate to find a lawyer willing to represent him in a criminal fraud case brought by the Manhattan district attorney. He offered the job to Blanche, then a partner at the Wall Street firm Cadwalader, who came recommended by Trump pardoned felon Paul Manafort.
Blanche jumped at the opportunity, apparently attracted by the huge trove of contributions the candidate/defendant was offering to fund his defense, the certain public exposure, and the possibility of becoming a member of Trump’s inner circle. But Blanche’s partners rejected the representation, apparently recoiling at the prospect of being associated with Trump’s ostentatious disdain for the legal system lawyers are charged with upholding.
Blanche responded by resigning his partnership and creating an ad hoc law firm, along with another former federal prosecutor with a checkered past, Emil Bove, to represent Trump in what would soon become a plethora of criminal cases.
Blanche was hardly an effective courtroom advocate, and the Blanche/Bove team lost the New York case, the sole criminal one against Trump to go to trial. But Blanche proved to be an enthusiastic stooge, willing to fully debase himself as he mimicked his client’s utter contempt for anyone who had the temerity to suggest criminal laws might actually apply to Trump. And the Supreme Court, along with the ever Trump-solicitous Judge Aileen Cannon, ultimately effectively immunized Trump from federal prosecution, paving the way for Trump’s further abuses of power.
Trump rewarded Blanche by handing him the “prize” of the position of deputy attorney general, a perch from which he has effectively run, and destroyed, the Department of Justice since the beginning of the second Trump regime.
While Pam Bondi was, until recently, the public face of Trump’s legal stoogery, it has actually been Blanche, operating largely behind the scenes, who has done the day-to-day work of debasing and gutting the DOJ. And while Blanche has largely failed so far in moving forward with trumped up criminal charges against Trump’s declared enemies, he recently bragged that he has succeeded in fulfilling his master’s long-desired goal of firing DOJ employees who played any role in cases involving investigations of Trump. (Never mind that the DOJ has been rendered utterly ineffective as a result of the internal witch hunts Blanche has assiduously stooged for Trump by conducting.)
The Sub-Mediocre Stooge
The most common type of Trump stooge has long been the sub-mediocre. Both in business and politics, Trump has habitually singled out individuals whose lack of talent, amorality, and pervasive venality would — in normal course — have led them to dead end careers (if not indictment) for positions of responsibility.
But while Trump used to keep such third-rate flunkies — such as Michael Cohen — in the background, in his second term he’s put many of them in positions of prominence and power, including Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, and now Markwayne Mullin.
Trump’s attraction to sub-mediocre stooges is obvious — they have nowhere to go but down from their positions as Trump sycophants. Accordingly, their willingness to do what it takes to please and protect the Leader, no matter how embarrassing or illegal, is typically limitless, in contrast with flunkies who exhibit some level of intelligence.
During his first term, Trump repeatedly expressed frustration that intelligent underlings demonstrated limits, however minimal, in their willingness to do his bidding. Bill Barr, for example, marketed himself for the position of attorney general by writing a memo about how Trump could use the DOJ to go after his political enemies, and spent the period of time around the 2020 election pandering to Trump’s paranoia about Democratic “election fraud.” But to Trump’s strong disappointment and even rage, Barr proved unwilling to completely torpedo what was left of his reputation by going along with his post-election coup plans.
The downside of Trump’s reliance on sub-mediocre stooges, however, is that by installing pliant idiots as key managers of his regime, he’s ended up amplifying his own stupidity and spectacularly bad judgment. Very dumb stooges inevitably emulate Trump’s sadism, insanity, and sheer laziness, leading to a government marked by idiocy and sociopathology on a grand scale.
That phenomenon is evident most everywhere in the current Trump regime, whether it be through illegal tariffs that hit hardest upon the industrial workers and farmers Trump claims as part of his “base,” full-scale wars against immigrants that rapidly blew the political inroads with Latinos that were key to Trump winning back the White House, or now a war against Iran that is eating away at his popularity with Republicans, who were, until a few weeks ago, his only remaining solidly supportive cohort.
Sub-mediocre stooges are inevitably disastrous, but they may also be the least dangerous type of Trump stooges. They enhance the failure of the regime, rather than strengthening it, as figures like Barr and John Kelly previously did.
The nation is therefore probably lucky that, even as Trump has begun to lash out and fire sub-mediocre stooges like Noem and Bondi (with Hegseth probably soon to face the chopping block), Trump predictably replaces them with other flunkies. A good example of this is Mullin, who distinguished himself by being the only (self-proclaimed) former MMA fighter in the Senate, and confirmed his idiocy by willingly giving up a Senate sinecure in return for a likely short, and near certain to be disastrous, stint as DHS secretary.
So while there will never be a shortage of sub-mediocre stooges to serve the future would-be tyrants who emerge after Trump, they are hardly the greatest of dangers to the republic.
The Career GOP Politician Stooge
Career Republican stooges remain one of the foundations of Trump’s gutting of the United States.
Going back as far as the 1964 Goldwater campaign, the GOP has welcomed what many Republican politicians called the “crazies,” including bigots, conspiracy theorists, and religious extremists, in a bid to return what had long been a minority party to sustained governing power. But the cretins who emerged as Republican “leaders” during the Trump era — such as Mike Johnson — have made being willing to advance each and every extreme or wacky position taken by Trump a mandatory requirement for maintaining a career as a Republican politician.
As Trump remade the GOP into a cult of personality, and routinely embarked on career-ending assaults on even obscure backbenchers who had the audacity to oppose him, it rapidly became clear that the only way to win a Republican primary for nearly any office, in nearly any part of the country, was to be a full-throated cultist.
As former Rep. Peter Meijer recalled, in the days surrounding the January 6 insurrection, one of his Republican congressional colleagues expressed fear their life would be in danger if they crossed Trump. But the explanation of why Republican politicians (with few exceptions) have remained reliably compliant even as Trump’s popularity craters is far more mundane: they don’t want to lose their jobs.
It is the very mediocrity of most Republican politicians that has proven to be their most dangerous attribute throughout the Trump era. They have tied themselves to Trump because doing so has been and remains essential to winning primaries. And given that most of these individuals would amount to absolutely nothing without holding elected office, they won’t risk ending their stooging — even if the cost of retaining Trump’s support is starving the poor, backing irrational wars against American cities and foreign nations, or nullifying democracy.
While many of these Republican officeholders are all but certain to lose in upcoming elections as their hold on power weakens along with Trump’s, that will be no indication that the danger of the career politician stooge is disappearing. To the contrary, we should expect the same phenomenon to reappear when someone like Tucker Carlson or JD Vance manages to take Trump’s place as the cult leader atop the Republican Party.
The Billionaire Stooge
The easiest to explain type of Trump stooge is the billionaire variety. These are individuals who hold themselves in the highest of regard, but are also extraordinarily unprincipled, particularly when presented with opportunities to enhance their already outsized wealth and power.
Despite the fact that their money offers them a level of autonomy most human beings cannot even conceive of, the billionaire stooge is willing to blithely submit, inevitably for a price Trump is entirely willing to pay — whether it be his approval of a monopolistic merger, the termination of consumer or environment protecting regulations, or his grant of serial pardons for felonies.
It is all but inevitable that a number of the most shameless billionaire stooges — including many of the tech titans who joined Trump during his inauguration last year — will flit away from Trump with the same ease with which they became his plaint tools once the Leader’s fall is complete. Their devotion to him is grounded on entirely unbound self-interest and greed, not ideology, and certainly not principles.
For example, Jeff Bezos, who was an avid opponent of Trump in court and elsewhere during the first term, would almost certainly not hesitate to reverse course again if it suited his bottom line. The same likely goes for Facebook (or Meta, or whatever) CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
But it is the utter lack of principles of the billionaire stooge that stands to make this type particularly dangerous in the future. Having seen that it is possible not simply to buy favors from the US government with their wealth, but to literally buy the government, these profoundly venal egotists are all but certain to demand the same payoffs from future presidents. That means it’s likely they would again freely offer crucial support to a future would-be dictator, regardless of how evil they may be.
The Soul Selling Stooge
The most noxious, and perhaps most dangerous, form of Trump tool appeared in the months following Trump’s 2024 victory: the soul selling stooge. This type sells the most valuable asset they have — their reputation and legitimacy — to the dictatorship.
Among the most notable examples of the phenomenon are the leaders of the law firms of Sullivan & Cromwell and Paul Weiss. Until the 2024 election, Trump, deservedly, had increasing difficulty convincing “high tier” lawyers, banks, and other institutions to associate themselves with him, as reflected by Blanche’s fate at his former Wall Street firm.
Yet in January 2025, S&C, the ultimate “white shoe” law firm, announced it was going to represent Trump in the appeal of his New York criminal fraud conviction (following the Blanche/Bove trial loss). Furthermore, the co-chair of the firm, longtime “establishment” GOP lawyer Robert Giuffra, publicly, and enthusiastically, joined in Trump’s grievance-based arguments, stating to the press: “The misuse of the criminal law by the Manhattan DA to target President Trump sets a dangerous precedent.” S&C thereby, and quite deliberately, added its institutional support to Trump’s full bore assault on the rule of law.
Soon thereafter, S&C’s Giuffra reportedly involved himself in the negotiation of an even more debased instance of soul-selling stoogery — the “settlement agreement” Trump entered into with the law firm of Paul Weiss, through its former chair, Brad Karp. The “settlement” of non-existent Trump claims effectively required Paul Weiss to terminate its long-standing tradition of providing pro bono support to a range of progressive and civil rights causes in favor of providing free legal services to whatever causes, persons, or entities Trump might favor.
As Trump’s white shoe lawyer Giuffra likely hoped, the Paul Weiss “settlement” immediately became a template for similar arrangements that Trump reached with several other large law firms last year. But almost as rapidly as some law firms rushed to be on the vanguard of “elite” soul-selling deals, the collateral cost of such stoogery became evident. Though it may have briefly appeared that stooging for Trump was, as Karp claimed in leaked emails, a business necessity, the opposite has proven to be true.
For decades, Paul Weiss’s reputation had been distinguished by the firm’s association with lawyers who have government backgrounds, particularly as distinguished prosecutors. But after Karp struck his Trump “deal,” many of those esteemed lawyers took to the exits, as did the firm’s pro bono director, who recently became the head of Mayor Mamdani’s law department.
Meanwhile, far from paying a price in the legal marketplace, the firms who defied Trump’s extortionate demands, and faced retribution in the form of “executive orders” seeking to punish them, have repeatedly prevailed in court and are now marketing themselves as institutions willing to stand up to illegal bullying — a pitch that appears to have attracted some clients. For example, Microsoft fired Simpson Thacher (a Trump stooging firm) and hired Jenner & Block (a firm that successfully sued the Trump regime) to represent it in high-profile litigation. Meanwhile, Karp was recently forced out of his role as chair of Paul Weiss after emails revealed he was chummy with Jeffrey Epstein (albeit not as chummy as Trump), further indicating that selling one’s soul may not be good business after all.
The future of stoogery is the future of the US
Examining the various species of Trump stooges is of far more than academic interest, since such willing tools for authoritarians won’t disappear when Trump leaves or is forced from office.
To the contrary, they will remain, festering, and awaiting the next opportunity to pander to another leader in return for whatever rewards they are offered. Anyone who cares about the fate of the nation should be keeping a watchful eye on them.
In the meantime, Trump’s current crop of stooges will abide for as long as their Leader remains in place. Blanche, for example, has made it plain he wants Trump to name him “permanent” AG. Toward that end, he’s already been doubling down on the witch hunting, including reportedly by assigning the DOJ’s “civil rights division” — which recently has been focused on ending civil rights — to a scheme to persecute Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House staffer who had the temerity to reveal some of Trump’s most repulsive conduct on January 6.
Blanche’s continued, assiduous effort to move up the rungs of Trump stoogery seems particularly pointless, given how quickly the Trump regime is collapsing, and how damaging it inevitably will be to what’s left of Blanche’s reputation. But it is a measure of how determined stooges can be, both to debase themselves and destroy our country.
That’s it for today
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I can claim no illustrious ancestry nor am I progeny of great wealth but the hot blood of the revolutionary runs in my veins. If the men and women who besieged Boston and forced the British out with the rudimentary means at their disposal, we the people can do the same by the rules upon which this country was founded. Vote or die is the rallying cry.
Comic book villains who, within just two years, have not just reduced this country to Vietnam era ridicule … but surpassed it. All for, let’s not forget, a sexual abuser of women and girls, and a consummate liar.