U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi applauds as U.S. President Donald Trump walks past her at a roundtable on public safety at Memphis Air National Guard Base in Memphis, Tennessee, U.S., March 23, 2026. REUTERS Kevin Lamarqu
Conservative columnist Ross Douthat says it’s difficult to have a nice squishy sycophant and a smart person inside the same body.
“The seeming desire of [President Donald Trump] is for loyalty, sycophancy and TV-ready swagger,” said Douthat in the New York Times. “He wants to turn on Fox News and see his top officials performing like reality-show characters in the drama of his administration. He wants to sit in a cabinet meeting and listen to a litany of his accomplishments. He wants the decisions made in the West Wing or at Mar-a-Lago to be simply rubber-stamped in his departmental fiefs.
“He wants all that, but at the same time he also wants victory rather than defeat, and he definitely doesn’t want embarrassment,” Douthat added, while pointing out that “even inside his cocoon, Trump senses that things aren’t going well for him.”
It is then, said Douthat, that sycophancy fails.
“It doesn’t matter if you were acting on his orders; you will be punished for that unsuccessful service just as surely as if you’d tried to thwart his aims,” said Douthat. “… That’s the position [former Homeland Security head Kristi] Noem found herself in after the immigration enforcement debacle in Minneapolis. The fact that the sweeping crackdown in Tim Walz’s state and Ilhan Omar’s city was almost certainly what the president wanted earned the former South Dakota governor no political protection after it all went wrong.”
More recently, it was also the position Bondi found herself in, despite having dutifully carried out Trump’s bidding with the Epstein files and political prosecutions.
“The unpopularity of the former and the courtroom losses of the latter transformed her from sycophant to scapegoat, even though at every step she was expressing Trump’s own wishes,” said Douthat. “Likewise, when Hegseth reportedly told the president “let’s do it” in the run-up to the [Iran] war, he was merely being an enthusiastic yes man for a bellicose boss. But there’s no reward for being a loyalist if Trump’s grand plans don’t actually work out: In that case, you own the failure, not him.”
But Douthat said there were options for sycophants with a shred of intelligence.
“Hegseth, if he had the sense God gave a goose, could have tried to steer Trump to a purely military campaign against Iran — bombs and missiles without the strikes that targeted its leaders — satisfying the president’s hawkish impulse without putting the Iranian regime’s back against the wall,” said Douthat.
Bondi, instead of scatter-gunning a legion of hard-to-prosecute lawfare vendettas against Trump’s perceived enemies, could have focused her efforts on one particular political prosecution and lowered the goalpost enough to get the ball over.
“[But] these alternate scenarios are implausible, of course, because they envision hacks and yes-women suddenly discovering a different set of capabilities,” said Douthat.