'Eater of souls': CNN guest explains how Trump corrupts everyone around him

New Yorker reporter Susan Glasser on Friday told CNN's Alisyn Camerota that President Donald Trump has an unnerving power to make everyone around him sacrifice their dignity and integrity just to remain in his good graces.

During a panel discussion, Camerota quoted from Glasser's latest piece in the New Yorker that described the way that formerly respectable public officials have transformed themselves into mindless sycophants for the president.

"Getting inside this president's good graces appears to require an extra helping of public obsequiousness, groveling, flip-floppery, and over-the-top televised pronouncements," Camerota said, quoting from Glasser. "This unseemly aspect of the Trump era was on full display at Wednesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, where both... Lindsey Graham and Attorney General Bill Barr went out of their way to appeal to the president at the expense of their own credibility."

Glasser responded that much of what she had observed this week echoed similar observations made by former FBI Director James Comey in a scathing op-ed about the ways Trump corrupts people.

"He called Donald Trump an 'eater of souls,'" she said of Comey's op-ed. "That's a very dramatic rendering of it, but I think gets at this psychological fact of this Trump White House... why stake your credibility of this president so challenged with the truth?"

Watch the video below.