Trump admin made up 'sniveling losers' and 'crybabies' putting on 'tough guy act': analyst

President Donald Trump holds a Cabinet meeting, Wednesday, April 30, 2025, in the Cabinet Room. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)

In an article for The Nation published Monday, Katherine Krueger, a contributing editor for Current Affairs, argued that the Trump administration is governed by men who imagine themselves as Nietzschean Übermenschen, but in reality are insecure, performative, and deeply flawed.

She claimed that these figures, especially those at the heart of the administration, project strength and dominance while signaling anxiety, neediness, and a compulsion to overcompensate.

"They effectively control our fates, but deep down, they know they’re sniveling, pathetic, and inadequate, and it eats them up, the article said.

Krueger contended that these so‑called winners are “huge losers and crybabies,” despite controlling levers of power. She argued that their contradictory behavior — insisting on total authority while revealing inner fragility — undermines their claim to superiority.

She noted that the Trump era is marked by governing elites who posture as dominators but expose themselves as desperate for validation and unable to withstand dissent or embarrassment.

To illustrate this, Krueger discussed the public personas of President Donald Trump's advisor Stephen Miller and tech billionaire Elon Musk, who was part of the administration until recently. She described how Miller’s early remarks targeting janitors signal a longstanding impulse to dominate weaker others, and how his later political role amplifies that pattern.

She portrayed Musk’s maneuvers — his takeover of social media, his public pronouncements, and his efforts to control narratives — as signs of someone relentlessly striving to manufacture influence rather than embody it.

Krueger also highlighted how these men react to challenges or criticism. She pointed to the response following right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

"Their impulse to tell on themselves has been on full display in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Conservatives who normally never shut up about cancel culture instantly formed a roving cancellation mob, running around to get dozens of educators, government workers, and journalists fired for being insufficiently mournful or a bit too honest (among those fired were MSNBC senior political analyst Matthew Dowd and Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah). Some particularly sad sacks even went around hassling local businesses to lower their flags in honor of Kirk," she wrote.

The author added: "These losers aren’t hemmed in by the laws of the land or human decency, but they’ll never be MacArthur or Truman, and we’re never going to buy the tough guy act they’re working so hard to manufacture and impose on us. It should be enough to simply rule the world in their image, but that would demand a shred of confidence—and faces that didn’t all look like that."

From Your Site Articles