Why Is Trump's Administration So Packed With Losers? They Will Be Loyal

A great many of Trump's picks for government positions are obvious losers. Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Marco Rubio, and so on have all tried and failed dismally to make any kind of impact in their political careers. Many others on Trump's list are such nobodies that no one had heard of them until this moment. Why?

The explanation is quite simple: Trump prefers hiring losers because they have no better option than loyalty.

Tyrants - and wannabe tyrants like Trump - have an obvious interest in securing the loyalty of their underlings, but also face particular challenges in doing so. 

Tyrants are - by definition - bad people who set their own interests above what laws and democratic institutions require, and above the interests of the country however construed (success in international competition, advancing the welfare or values of the population, the endurance of the state itself, etc). No good person can be loyal to a tyrant because the whole point of being a tyrant is to position oneself against and above the good. Therefore, the tyrant can only recruit bad people, the kind of people who are not trustworthy and cannot be relied on to keep promises.

Yet this is also why tyrants have greater need for loyal servants than regular leaders. Because only a fool could believe they would be serving their country by serving a tyrant, the tyrant needs servants who are personally loyal to him, rather than to their country. In addition, the tyrant needs servants who will reliably choose to serve his interests over the country's interests or the demands of law or morality, even under great pressure. This is because the tyrant knows it is all too likely that their servants will be forced to make such choices, and that the tyrant's own survival will depend on them. For the tyrant has a great and rational fear of one day being forced from office and held accountable for their crimes, whether by good people or by a different set of bad people. While the democrat can leave power with much to regret but nothing to fear, the tyrant reaps the dramatic personal consequences of throwing out the rules that keep politics civilised.

Therefore every tyrant needs loyal servants. Yet there are different strategies for achieving this. 

The tyrant of Russia, for example, seems to appoint people he knows and trusts (literally - former bodyguards and members of his old judo club), and then is as loyal to them as he expects them to be to him. It seems almost impossible for Putin's cronies to get fired for incompetence. Even the worst cases, such as Defense Minister Shoigu, are only 'promoted' away to a role where they can do less harm. The only real crime is disloyalty to Putin, as Prigozhin found out the hard way after his 2023 mutiny. Unsurprisingly, this does not result in a particularly competent or honest government (though Putin can rely on some midlevel technocrats to keep the machinery of state working). For example, the Russian military was underprepared for the current war despite vast spending since 2008, and even now remains led by 2nd rate generals who owe their position to Putin's trust rather than to their extraordinarily costly military strategy of throwing hundreds of thousands of Russian lives at the Ukrainian lines. Putin is willing to sacrifice a great deal of other things he values in order to prioritise the loyalty of his servants, and hence his own survival.

Trump has to employ different strategies to securing loyal servants. For one thing he seems incapable of returning loyalty for loyalty. He routinely publicly humiliates and fires even his loyal servants, or leaves them rotting in prison for their complicity in his crimes. His style seems more like Hugo Chavez, the showman tyrant of Venezuela, though with far less energy. However, Trump has skills of his own. 

In Trump's first presidency he recruited a number of fools, people of some distinction who knew that Trump was bad, but thought they could still serve their country by serving in his government. Trump displayed an extraordinary ability to recruit such fools and to tie them to him by compromising their integrity (such as by getting them to support an absurd or awful thing he said or allowing themselves to be publicly humiliated). This induced a degree of loyalty among the fools by destroying their reputation and hence their alternative options if they were to try to leave Trump's service.

However, there aren't that many fools, and even fools aren't so stupid that they can't learn from others' mistakes. Trump churned through the available supply pretty fast. By the end of his first presidency he had switched almost entirely to hiring straight up losers, and this is what we are again seeing.*

Losers are people who would very much like to be winners - i.e. to be somebodies rather than nobodies; to hold positions of power and importance in society - but realise they have little chance of achieving this within the system. Some of these losers had some success in navigating lower levels of the modern cursus honorum, for example by attending prestigious universities, gaining a national media following or attaining state-level office, but fell off the track for one reason or another (often relating to their obnoxious personal qualities). Others may be pathological fantasists. Whether from ressentiment at being cheated out of what they feel entitled to or cold calculating pragmatism, such losers turn away from and against the mainstream institutions that disdain them and look about for alternative routes to the top. Think of the losers who joined the Nazi party in the early 1920s - failed soldiers, failed writers, and even a travelling vacuum cleaner salesman. 

Trump is pretty clearly also a loser. An abject failure as a business man and as a human being he was shunned by the political and business establishment of New York for decades (although, as he noted, the politicians would still take his money). Before 2015 the closest Trump had come to being a somebody was appearing on Forbes' rich list and playing the role of a winner on a popular TV show. He had no path to success within the political system and therefore ran as a populist - against the system itself. Other losers collected around Trump's campaign, attracted to the long shot possibility of unconventional advancement he offered. MAGA became the project to Let The Losers Have Their Chance. 

On the one hand, these losers are contemptible parasites, despised even by the loser in chief. On the other hand they are very useful to Trump because they provide an unlimited supply of the one-sided loyalty he needs to rule. For the great thing about losers is that they have nothing of their own - no significant talents or accomplishments or integrity or political constituency. That means their status as somebodies depends entirely on retaining their patron's favour, and they know it. Such people have no future without Trump, and so will serve him as faithfully as their limited abilities and toxic personalities allow. Moreover, they are entirely disposable because they can always be replaced with other desperate 3rd raters. 

How far can such a government of losers go? Strangely enough, not as far in a democracy as in a fully fledged dictatorship like Putin's Russia. Democracy still sets the limits - especially the term limits and succession requirements - for Trump's government. That means that - even apart from considerations about Trump's psychological and physical health - the loyalty of his servants has a best before date. Trump's band of losers are rather ghastly failures as human beings, but they are not so completely stupid that they cannot read a clock counting down Trump's political value to zero. So while they are strongly motivated to keep their jobs as long as possible, and hence to do whatever it takes to please the loser in chief, they also need to think about extracting as much as possible from their position so as to remain somebodies when Trump's time runs out. 

We should expect three things of Trump's 2nd government. 

First, incompetence in the federal government that will reach much further down than in Trump's first administration. The fools have been replaced with losers, who have no idea how to do their jobs and little ability or interest in learning. Moreover - unlike in a proper dictatorship - competent people in America have other options than government service and they will increasingly take them up as agencies become increasing politicised and loserfied (including the military, which was relatively immune last time around). This means the middle-ranks of government administration will also be stripped of people who know how to get things done, and care about doing them well. America already scores towards the bottom of the rich world in international rankings of government effectiveness. It will probably fall further towards Latin American/Caribbean levels, and this is something that will likely take decades to undo even if 2028 sees a return to normal politics.

Second, a vast amount of corruption as people with no loyalty to principle or country exploit their time-limited opportunities for self-service by building out their commercial influence networks. Since Trump is operating within a free society, the media (if not the Department of Justice) will cover these unrelenting scandals thoroughly (mainstream media corporations like the New York Times will do very well for themselves). Unfortunately, the result is likely to be further dramatic decline in public trust in government, and further cynicism and withdrawal from the democratic political process. These undermine the legitimacy of government in general, and hence its authority and effectiveness. 

Third, the losers will also prepare for the loss of their leading light. We will probably see the completion of the conversion of the Republican Party from the party of the establishment, animated by conservatism and the smug confidence of winners raised to rule (the Mitt Romneys and George Bushes of times past), into a self-serving club of losers animated by a spirit of populism and ressentiment against the establishment. Such a Trumpist party would be reminiscent of the Peronist coalition of chancers and self-dealers that spent decades degrading Argentina's political and economic institutions (the only country ever to fall back from rich country status back to middle income status). Such a transformation would institutionalise populism and prevent a return to normal politics.

Notes

*Not quite everyone in Trump's new government is a loser. Another kind of fool is also represented - the narcissistic opportunist who believes they can use Trump to achieve their own projects (think of Heidegger pretending to be a Nazi in hopes of taking over the German university system as part of his bizarre anti-modernity project). Elon Musk seems an example of this, though he might just be trying to keep the trade war with China from blowing up his Tesla fortune.