We Have a New Member of the Uniquely Bad Trump Appointee Club
Are there members of the Trump Administration who are anything other than interchangeable parts in that creaking machine? That is, are there Trump appointees or advisors who create what economists call "value added" (although in this case the accurate term has to be value destroyed), doing such unexpected and nonreplicable damage such that getting them out of their jobs would in fact be a net boon to the world at large? Yes, although not many. As the title of this column indicates, however, we now have a new inductee into that shameful boys' and girls' club.
But what does it mean to say that someone is or is not interchangeable in this sense? In January of this year, before Donald Trump had dumped Kristi Noem as the (melting) public face of his cruel anti-immigration policies, there were some maybe-kinda-but-not-really-plausible rumblings in Congress about impeaching Noem. The hope was to remove her from her seat in the Administration because of the many terrible things that she had done at Trump's behest -- most obviously her enthusiastic support for the killings of innocent protesters in Minneapolis.
In response to those calls for Noem's impeachment, I wrote a column in which I argued in part (drawing on a nice piece by Jan-Werner Müller in The Guardian) that there were what I will now call second-order reasons to try to impeach Noem -- specifically the fact that the process of impeaching her would keep the media's fleeting attention on the terrible things that had happened, and it would also put a dent in the sense of utter impunity that pervades the Trump regime. That is, the importance of impeaching Noem was not to be found in actually getting her out of the government, which is of course what we usually think is the essential, first-order effect of an impeachment. Importantly, those good second-order effects would be achievable even if the impeachment vote or the Senate trial were to go in Noem's favor.
But my larger point was that in fact a good first-order effect of such an impeachment drive would not matter at all. Noem would immediately be replaced by an equally insane flunky, and things would not change. Why? Because Noem does not have the cleverness needed to be uniquely harmful in her role. We now have evidence to support my claim, in that former Senator Markwayne Mullin is filling her pumps seamlessly as Secretary of DHS. New fool, same results.
As it happens, I had discussed this broader question -- Is person X uniquely bad, or are they easily replaceable with someone who would do the same bad things that other people in Trump's world are telling them to do? -- in the first month after Trump's return to office. I argued in a February 2025 column that only Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. were capable of being inventively awful, such that getting them out of power would be a net positive for the world, because their replacements could not inflict nearly as much damage. Musk was not even replaced after he left a few months later, but even if he had been, his absence would have been a big plus.
That 2025 column, in turn, used Brett Kavanaugh as an example of someone who could have been swapped out for anyone else on the FedSoc shortlist for the Supreme Court. I considered but ultimately rejected J.D. Vance for the uniquely-bad rating, saying that "[h]ad he not been chosen as VP, the finance bro world would still be amply powerful in Trump's universe." In the February 2026 column, I quoted that earlier line and added: "Even though Vance has been more public-facing than I expected, trying to build his political brand, I currently stand by my earlier assessment."
It might also helpful to clarify a potential misunderstanding about what it means to be uniquely bad as a member of this Administration. The idea is not only that some individuals are uniquely capable of inflicting damage that would not otherwise have been inflicted. The additional question to keep in mind is whether some of those individuals would continue to wreak havoc even if they were not serving in an official capacity in Trumpworld. I returned to this question in a column last month, assessing Trump's top two economic advisors and concluding that both of them are utterly non-unique. (Notably, I wrote that entire column about US economic policy in 2026 with once mentioning -- or honestly, even thinking about -- Scott Bessent. That is how much of a non-entity our current Treasury Secretary is.) In that column, I argued that there is
a nearly universal rule of Trumpism: Nobody matters, because someone just as bad is always available to step in. I continue to believe that the only remaining exception to this rule is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., because his reign at Health & Human Services could almost certainly not be replicated by anyone else. That is, RJK Jr. is uniquely dangerous because of his government position, a position that his broken mind abuses in ways that even other nutcases in his world would not come close to copying. That is quite different from, say, Stephen Miller or Russell Vought, who would have Trump's ear no matter what, even if they (like, for example, Steve Bannon) were no longer officially part of the Administration.
Again, Kennedy continues to embody this so well because he meets both requirements: (1) He has uniquely terrible ideas, and (2) If he were gone, Trump would almost certainly not replace him with someone who would continue to do what Kennedy is doing. Kennedy's departure cannot come soon enough, and having a generic Trumpist in his place would be a huge improvement.
With changes in the Administration and new evidence of bad ideas and bad behavior arising every day, however, we need to be alert to the possibility of new contenders to keep RFKJr company in the clubhouse. As it happens, today's news includes a minor story about Trump's nominee to run the National Science Foundation (NSF). That is not a cabinet-level role, of course, but because it is in today's papers, I can use this guy (whose name I will not even bother typing) as an example of someone who is nowhere close to being in Kennedy's category. This guy has no science background at all, making it worth a minor headline when the science community announced its very understandable skepticism about his appointment, but an article in The New York Times provides the key information for my purposes here:
N.S.F. is widely seen as an agency in turmoil. It has had no director for more than a year and is facing budget cuts as Mr. O’Neill awaits Senate confirmation. The administration has canceled or suspended hundreds of N.S.F. grants and recently fired the members of an independent board that oversees the research agency.
That guy is not a unique problem. The Trumpists will continue to do to science what they have been doing, with him or without him (largely, I should add, because of RFKJr).
A more serious possibility is Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Professor Dorf's column today on Verdict assesses the "weaponization" slush fund that Blanche helped to create and is eagerly (and dishonestly) defending. I consider Blanche to have genuine potential (in the worst sense) here, but what he has done thus far seems to differ only in style from what Pam Bondi did before Trump fired her as A.G. last month. Blanche does seem to have the desire to be a supervillain, but he is not there yet.
So who is the new member? Almost immediately after I wrote my February 2025 column (the one where I said that Musk and Kennedy were uniquely capable of doing damage but Vance was not), I suddenly remembered that I had said nothing about then-new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. I thus amended that column by adding this:
[Update: I completely forgot to mention the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who is loathsome but in no way differs from his potential replacements on policy. If anything, he is a perfect example of a cardboard cutout who will do nothing that he is not told by others to do.]
Ahem. For his first year in office, Hegseth lived down to my expectations. He, like all of the other clowns in that circus, did have signature moments that we associate with them -- Bondi's "slam book" congressional testimony rants, Noem's "ICE Barbie" weirdness, Kash Patel's inability to stop posting incorrect information about investigations, and on and on. Similarly, Hegseth's "no weirdos and no beardos" speech to the military brass and his insistence on saying that he heads the Department of War (even though neither he nor Trump have the legal authority to change the name of the Department of Defense) were surely not identical to what an alternative DoD secretary would have done, but those things were not supervillainous.
Even his more damaging moves, like blocking promotions for officers who are women or men of color, were about what one would expect from anyone in Trump's world. I thus have a difficult time imagining that Trump's next pick would have substantively differed from Hegseth on anything that we might truly care about. Until now.
What has changed is that we now know that Hegseth seems to have been the person who made the difference in pushing Trump into the invasion of Iran. Yes, there are other people to blame (most obviously Netanyahu), but "[w]ithin the cabinet, Mr. Hegseth was the biggest proponent of a military campaign against Iran," according to reporting in The Times. That Hegseth prevailed over Vance's apparently quite strenuous opposition to the invasion is further evidence that Vance is not uniquely effective in doing anything (and in this one instance, it is truly a tragedy that Vance failed to get what he wanted).
Hegseth was already known to defend war criminals, so his "maximum lethality, not tepid legality" rap-poem was not a surprise. It is, however, difficult to think that even the Trumpiest of alternatives to Hegseth would have gleefully committed mass murder on the high seas. More generally, he makes it clear that he is simply bloodthirsty.
Hegseth is also a fierce advocate of one of the most extreme versions of Christianity that I have ever come across. He actually wrote a book called American Crusade, where the word "crusade" is not used metaphorically. He loves the Crusades. A profile of Hegseth by David Smith in The Guardian includes this:
The defence secretary attends Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a church linked to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a denomination co-founded by the pastor Doug Wilson, who has openly advocated a theocratic vision of society in which wives should submit to their husbands and women should be denied the vote. Wilson recently led a worship service at the Pentagon at Hegseth’s invitation.
Robert P Jones, president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington, said: “This is not one or two comments. It’s not a kind of one-off behaviour. This is like a longstanding publicly demonstrated orientation that Hegseth has. It’s not just a glorification of violence but a glorification of violence in the name of Christianity and civilisation.”
The Hegseth-as-drunken-buffoon era is over. If he had not been in office, many bad things would still have happened, but not nearly as bad as all of this. And if he ever leaves, there is no reason to think that he would continue to be a shadow advisor to Trump. Out would mean out.
So it is time for RFKJr to move over, because there is a new menace to society at the door. And while they are getting Hegseth setttled, they should leave space for Blanche or some other current unknown to break into The Show.
- Neil H. Buchanan