President Donald Trump is undercutting the authority of his top-ranking officials by demanding lavish praise from them, according to one analyst.
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni noted that Trump's highest-ranking officials, from Vice President JD Vance to FBI Director Kash Patel, give away their own dignity by proclaiming the president's majesty in every public appearance.
"Trump stood just feet away, an emperor gorging on his encomiums," Bruni wrote.
"He’s insatiable, and the prevalence of his attendants’ gooey hooey has not only turned it into something expected but also obscured its strangeness — and its cause for concern," the columnist added. "There’s no team of rivals around Trump, no constructive dissent, no battle of ideas from which the best one emerges. There’s just flattery and more flattery. Tribute upon tribute. Hyperbole atop hyperbole."
Bruni was particularly disgusted by Attorney General Pam Bondi's "pathetic" testimony in a recent Senate hearing where she challenged Democrats to explain why they opposed Trump and his agenda.
"How, she wondered, could they be so mean to him?" Bruni wrote. "How, I wondered, does she keep a straight face?"
"I guess practice makes perfect, and she’s a veteran of those cabinet meetings and Oval Office events that are essentially television roasts turned inside out," he added. "The person at the mic doesn’t hurl insults at the guest of honor in the hopes of laughter. He or she lavishes the head of state with praise so overwrought it’s unintentionally hilarious."
Trump requires "profound humiliation" from his subordinates, according to Bruni, and he wondered how much that cost them.
"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,'" he wrote. "He and Bondi are demonstrating a scary talent for deference, a spooky willingness to bend any which way to win and hold on to Trump’s favor. They want so badly to be in the room where it happens that they’re content to be throw pillows."
"I’m stumped," Bruni added. "If you owe your lofty station to your lax scruples and if your power hinges on your obeisance, what power do you really have? What pride?"