Office Hours: Who’s the Worst of the Worst in Trumpworld? Robert Reich Sep 10 Friends, As we learn ever more about how the Trump regime is destroying America, it’s useful to take stock of Trump’s key henchmen. History shows a tendency for sick tyrants — sociopaths and malignant narcissists who rule through fear and ignorance — to attract people with similarly twisted personalities. The sadistic Roman emperor Caligula (37 to 41 AD) relied on a handful of demonic loyalists to implement his cruelty. Adolf Hitler depended on propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, SS leader Heinrich Himmler, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring, and Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann. On whom is Trump most relying? And who is the worst of the worst of them? Let me give you four candidates, along some of their recent outrages: 1. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump and his other aides and advisers cheered RFK Jr.’s combative performance at a Senate hearing last Thursday — casting it as the fiery display RFK Jr. needed to solidify his standing following days of controversy. In truth, RFK Jr. came off as the dangerous crackpot he is — alarming even chronically unalarmed Republicans. As the person in charge of the American public’s health, RFK Jr. has already endangered it — abruptly firing the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention less than a month after calling her “a public health expert with unimpeachable scientific credentials” and causing most of the leadership of the CDC to leave in her wake. More than 1,000 current and former Health and Human Services officials have demanded that Kennedy step down, saying he is “endangering the nation’s health by spreading inaccurate health information.” At last Thursday’s hearing, RFK Jr. initially refused to say Covid-19 vaccines had saved lives or acknowledge that more than 1 million people in the U.S. died from the disease. He has also imposed new restrictions on Covid-19 vaccine eligibility. When Senator Elizabeth Warren said, accurately, that it was becoming harder for people to get Covid shots at pharmacies, Kennedy denied it. He also claimed mRNA vaccines “cause serious harm, including death, particularly in young people,” though the CDC has found “no increased risk of death” from the shots. 2. Stephen Miller. The major architect of Trump’s push to eliminate undocumented immigrants from America, Miller has also emerged as a key enforcer of the federal occupation of Washington, D.C., since Trump federalized the local police department and deployed thousands of National Guard troops to patrol city streets. Miller persuaded congressional Republicans to expand ICE’s budget by $30 billion (making ICE the largest paramilitary force on American soil) as part of Miller’s plan to deport 1 million immigrants each year, confine them to detention camps, or send them to other countries — even without full hearings on whether they were in the U.S. legally. Miller is also behind Trump’s planned moves to “crack down” on crime in Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, and Oakland, California. He recently called the Democratic Party a “domestic, extremist organization” for its alleged failure to deal with crime. “I would say to the mayors of all these Democrat cities, like Chicago, what you are doing to your own citizens is evil. Subjecting your own citizens to this constant bloodbath and then rejoicing in it is evil,” Miller said on Fox News last week. “You should praise God every single day that President Trump is in the White House.” 3. Russell Vought. White House budget chief Russell Vought is the mastermind behind the Trump efforts to usurp Congress’s authority over spending. Last week Vought claimed to be following the law despite illegally withholding an estimated $410 billion of congressionally approved cash from low-income housing services, education assistance, medical research grants, and other programs approved by Congress. “If Congress has given us authority that is too broad, then we’re going to use that authority aggressively to protect the American people,” Vought said to attendees at the National Conservatism Conference. Vought — the lead writer of “Project 2025” — also laid out his case for strengthening the executive branch over the “woke and weaponized bureaucracy” by using a maneuver called the “pocket rescission” to unilaterally claw back funding Congress already appropriated without needing lawmakers to sign off. The White House recently transmitted a pocket rescission package that will delete $5 billion in foreign aid — a move Democrats, some Republicans, and the Government Accountability Office have said is against the law. 4. Pam Bondi. Bondi is in charge of Trump’s injustice department and has proven an eager enabler of his cruelty and vindictiveness. On Thursday, Bondi sued Boston and its mayor, Michelle Wu, over a city ordinance that limits local police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. To support her baseless claim that Wu has “lost control” of Boston — one of the safest major cities in America — Bondi cited a trio of grisly crimes, all of which took place far outside Boston’s city limits where Wu has no jurisdiction. Bondi recently oversaw the firings of at least 20 Justice Department attorneys and employees who investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified records. Those who lost their jobs were not just prosecutors but paralegals, finance staff, administrative support staff, and United States Marshals. (Bondi had established a so-called “weaponization working group” as one of her first acts as attorney general.) So today’s Office Hours question: In your view, which of these Trump henchmen is the worst of the worst?