U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance react as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as he attends lunch with Argentina’s President Javier Milei (not pictured) in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 14, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
During Donald Trump's first presidency, he bitterly clashed with a long list of traditional conservatives who pushed back against his proposals — from a secretary of state (Rex Tillerson) to a White House chief of staff (John Kelly) to a national security adviser (John Bolton) to two U.S. attorneys general (Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr). Even one of Trump's White House press secretaries (Stephanie Grisham) ended up giving Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris an enthusiastic endorsement at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
But Trump's second presidency is much different. This time, he has made a point of surrounding himself with unquestioning MAGA loyalists who are anxious to please him.
In an opinion column published on October 18, the New York Times' Frank Bruni stresses that desperation to please Trump is one of the things that makes his current group of allies so dangerous.
Bruni specifically points to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance.
"There’s no team of rivals around Trump, no constructive dissent, no battle of ideas from which the best one emerges," Bruni warns. "There’s just flattery and more flattery. Tribute upon tribute. Hyperbole atop hyperbole. Of course, telling bosses how effective, charismatic and visionary they are is a tried-and-true route to advancement…. But the sort of fanboy fan dances that Vance and Patel routinely perform? That's extreme. As was Attorney General Pam Bondi's pathetic effort, during a Senate hearing in which she was fielding questions, to make Democrats on the panel answer for their supposed crimes against Trump. How, she wondered, could they be so mean to him? How, I wondered, does she keep a straight face?"
Bondi, Patel and Hegseth, according to Bruni, are dangerous not only because of their extreme rhetoric, but because they are willing to back it up with actions.
"If that lip service were merely the ceremonial price that Trump's aides paid to be able to attend to the rest of their jobs in a serious manner," Bruni argues, "it would be little more than embarrassing. But it's part of a broader servility, a more profound humiliation. Their deeds must match their diction. So Bondi has either encouraged or indulged nuisance investigations and malicious prosecutions of Trump's enemies, including (former FBI Director) James Comey and (New York State Attorney General) Letitia James. Patel expanded polygraph tests at the FBI — to prevent pejorative portrayals of the administration from leaking out."
Bruni continues, "Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth channeled Trump's contempt for independent journalists and emulated Trump's attacks on the media by laying down new rules that essentially forced self-respecting reporters to hand in their Pentagon press credentials. The president was pleased: He wondered aloud about doing something similar at the White House. Maybe Patel and Hegseth were always this paranoid and petulant, but Bondi seems to have grown crueler and coarser in direct relation to her time with Trump. And Vance's cartoonish sycophancy is the convenient inverse of his past statements that Trump was 'America's Hitler' and an 'idiot.'"
Frank Bruni's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).