'Plundering and degrading': NY Times columnist sounds bleakest warning about Trump allies

Former President Donald Trump will allow a cadre of "nihilists, destructionists and even criminals" to take over every level of the federal government if he is allowed back into power, Frank Bruni wrote for The New York Times Thursday.

In Trump's first administration, the government was rocked by scandal after scandal, with a long series of resignations by various high-ranking officials for abuse of public office.

All of this will play out again on an even larger scale, wrote Bruni — and to see this, you need only look at the kind of people gravitating toward Trump's campaign now.

"Much of the fallout of a Trump victory is unknowable," he wrote. "But this much is certain: Returned to the White House, Trump would get input from — and award key positions to — a bestiary of nihilists, destructionists and even criminals unlike any collection of advisers that any other president assembled. They’d be unscrupulous in all fashions but one: unswerving loyalty to Trump. He fumed about what he saw as a lack of that among his previous cadre of helpmates. The coming coterie would affirm Trump’s worst impulses, nurture his nuttiest ideas and gleefully carry out his orders."

Tech billionaire Elon Musk, for example, who has spent months promoting Trump through his X platform and has sunk $75 million into a super PAC trying to run his ground operations, is likely to advise a new committee on how to fire "unnecessary" government workers — making the massive layoffs he did at the former Twitter a prelude.

Likewise, anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who endorsed Trump after ending his own independent campaign, would likely get a slot of his own: "A public health conspiracy theorist would be reborn as a steward of public health," wrote Bruni.

And meanwhile, many of the most fanatical figures in Trumpworld who served in his administration last time but got pardoned from criminal charges could re-enter the mix, wrote Bruni.

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"To Bannon, Manafort and Navarro, add Roger Stone, who was convicted of seven felonies but had his sentence commuted by Trump just days before he was supposed to report to a federal prison for a 40-month term. Add Corey Lewandowski, who has faced battery charges, which were dropped in one instance and resolved through a deal with prosecutors in another."

Indeed, he added, Trump's felony conviction in Manhattan "didn’t differentiate him from his posse. He just blends in all the better now."

"What’s to stop those flatterers from plundering and degrading the richest and most powerful country on earth?" concluded Bruni. "Certainly not Trump. He’d be too busy admiring their initiative and accepting their compliments."