There's one simple reason Trump is so much worse this time

The conventional explanation for why Trump’s second term is far more extreme than his first (which was extreme enough) is that the guardrails are now gone.

The people who occupied significant roles in the White House and Cabinet during his first administration — who talked him out of (or subverted) his illegal and unconstitutional cravings — are no longer there. In their places are loyalists who will do whatever he wants.

But this conventional view overlooks a more important explanation.

He’s more extreme this time because he’s attracted people around him who are also extreme and pushing him to new levels of malevolence.

I’ve served under three presidents and advised a fourth. In every case, I’ve seen the same pattern: A president acts as a magnet, drawing into the highest levels of his administration people who not only share his values but amplify them.

When a president wants to do a decent job — at the least, respecting democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law — the magnet produces an administration of people who respect our institutions of self-government.

But when a president is malevolent, those drawn to him are among the most fanatical and dangerous in the land.

Richard Nixon — the most malevolent president in recent American history before Trump — drew to the White House a collection of bottom-feeding crooks: H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Attorney General John Mitchell, Chuck Colson, Egil Krogh, G. Gordon Liddy, and E. Howard Hunt. They amplified Nixon’s worst paranoid and criminal tendencies.

Twisted people who surround a twisted president encourage his malevolence.

They also provide him a chorus of group-think approval.

They embolden one another as they destroy norms for how White House and Cabinet appointees are supposed to behave.

And they compete for his attention and praise by taking his twisted values to new levels of malevolence.

Trump didn’t know enough in his first term to surround himself with unethical people. He hadn’t been in politics long enough to have a network of vicious clones who were drawn to him because of his viciousness.

Then, after losing the 2020 election, he had four years to pull into his orbit some of the worst fanatics in the land — more loyal to him than to the United States, eager to extend and magnify his fanaticism, obsessed with white Christian nationalism, who are as, if not more, sadistic, cruel, and vindictive as their boss.

We are now seeing the result. Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant scourge. Russell Vought’s retributive targeting of universities, law firms, and the media. Kash Patel’s eagerness to investigate Trump enemies; Pam Bondi’s eagerness to prosecute them. Kristi Noem’s cruelty. Robert Kennedy Jr.’s paranoia. JD Vance’s misogyny. Marco Rubio’s and Pete Hegseth’s brainless sycophancy.

Throughout history, malignant leaders have been rendered more malignant by the malignant people they have attracted.

Think of Hitler’s top henchmen — Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz — all of them as, if not more, fanatical and sadistic than Hitler, eager to carry out his orders, wielding considerable power on their own to wreak havoc and sow destruction.

It’s not just that the guardrails are gone in Trump’s second term. It’s that the people who have been drawn to him and are now surrounding him are egging him on, competing for his attention and praise by doing even worse, eagerly destroying democratic institutions and turning America into ever more of a police state.

The good news is they will all but ensure that he will overplay his hand. The bad is that, by then, they may have demolished much that is good about this country.

• Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com