Interchangeable Idiots and Sociopaths: Do Individuals Matter in Trump's World?

I have spent a fair bit of time over the past year or so pondering a surprisingly difficult and recurring question: Does it matter which specific people work for the Trump regime, such that personnel changes could make a difference in what happens to people in the US and around the world?

Last month, for example, I opined that removing now-former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem would make no substantive difference to the horrors of Trump's ongoing anti-immigration atrocities.  (To be clear, those atrocities are also being visited upon non-immigrant US citizens who are being racially profiled -- with the blessing of the Republican appointees to the US Supreme Court.)  In that piece, I wrote that "the question here is what would change if Noem were no longer in office (via impeachment or any other means, such as being fired for some reason).  The answer is nothing."

Over time, I have begun to think of this as 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.

Pretty much any functionary could carry out whatever those guys tell Trump to get done, which means that their poisonous influence is not office-specific.  And even though I argued last month that there were other reasons to hope for an impeachment effort against Noem (mostly as a matter of highlighting the terrible things that she was doing at Trump/Miller's behest), no one thinks that anything is substantively different under Noem's replacement, Markwayne Mullin.

Indeed, the story du jour of jaw-dropping gratuitous cruelty is ICE's arrest of an 85-year-old widow from France: "[I]mmigration agents arrested her in her nightgown at her late husband’s home[, and she] is now in a detention center hundreds of miles away in Louisiana, her own three children back in France unable to reach her and fearing for her health."  Similarly, when a young woman (who is not a US citizen but who has lived here since she was an infant) married a US Army sergeant and showed up with her citizen husband at his base to move into their new home together, she was arrested.  The New York Times reported:

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that Ms. Ramos had been arrested “after she attempted to enter a military base.”

“She has no legal status to be in this country and was issued a final order of removal by a judge,” the statement read. “This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.”

What kind of sociopath (and hypocrite) comes up with that one?  As The Times reported, "[t]he couple checked in at the visitor center, identification in hand, ready to complete the steps that would allow her to move into his home on the base."  Insinuating some kind of nefarious intent -- she "attempted to enter a military base" -- is exceptionally twisted, which means that whoever in DHS came up with that one might in some narrow sense be irreplaceable.  Even so, the arrest and the cruel and unjust underlying policy behind it are baked into this administration's rancid stew.  (She has been released, but only after having been forced to spend five days in a detention center.  And Kilmar Abrego Garcia's experience shows us that the Trumpists never let these things go, so her story is almost certainly not over.)

Immigration is one of the signature sociopathic policy obsessions of the Trumpists.  (Anti-trans bigotry is another.)  But what about economic policy?  Are those harmful decisions dependent on the specific people involved, or is that also on autopilot?  Economics seems to fit more readily into the it-doesn't-matter-who's-officially-doing-it category, like immigration, rather than resembling RFK Jr.'s truly unique war on science, health, and medicine.

After all, Trump himself has shown that he cares about one specific policy almost as much as he cares about being the center of attention at all times, and that policy is to increase tariffs.  He stubbornly refuses to believe that other countries have not been "ripping us off," that tariffs are almost entirely paid for by Americans, and that his attempts to use tariffs to punish other countries for sins such as refusing to allow him to take Greenland are creating volatility that is bad for the US economy.  Why would any of that change if there were turnover in economic advisors?

In my Dorf on Law column yesterday, I mentioned in passing a recent comment by Trump's chief economist, Kevin Hassett, who went on TV and tried to argue that prices could come down: "Imagine that, if oil prices start going back down, because the situation resolves itself, somehow, that you could be looking at ... at inflation close to zero."  Imagine!  That is not what a serious person would say.

And Hassett is not a serious person.  In a column last year, I poked fun at both Hassett and Trump's anti-China/pro-tariff zealot Peter Navarro, noting that both of them have pretty standard elite academic credentials (Ph.D.'s from Ivy League economics departments, some faculty appointments) but are also absolutely unhinged.  Because both of them deserve a pile-on, I will note one more source of merriment for each half of that disastrous duo.

In February 2025, The Bulwark published a piece by Jonathan V. Last, "Meet Kevin Hassett: Conservatism’s Invincible Ignoramus," which included this nugget early on:

I want to tell you two stories about Hassett, one tiny and one large, to illustrate what a silly man he is.

The point isn’t to clown on Hassett—the world is full of silly people—but rather to demonstrate how bankrupt the conservative intellectual world has become. Because no system based on any kind of merit would elevate a man like Hassett to the ... heights he has reached.

The second of Last's two stories was about Hassett's co-authored book called Dow 36,000, which I described in detail in my column last April and again more briefly in yesterday's column.  Last points out that the right-wing thinktank world shielded Hassett from criticism for that ridiculous book.

The first story, however, provides an even more important insight into Hassett's practiced stubbornness.  Hassett once asked a very stupid question masquerading as contrarianism -- "Why don’t sophisticated money managers and operating companies invest in comic books?" -- and then simply refused to understand that he had made a fundamental economic error.  Last described his attempt to engage in good faith with Hassett in direct conversation:  "Your argument, I said to Hassett, amounted to: If you only pick stocks that go up, then stocks are a great investment.  Hassett was unmoved. Utterly and completely. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand me; it was that he didn’t want to understand. Invincible ignorance."

Navarro had an even rougher go of it when The New Yorker in late December 2025 published Ian Parker's "Peter Navarro, Trump’s Ultimate Yes-Man: The tariff cheerleader established the template of sycophancy for Trump Administration officials."  That piece ran to 27 printed pages, and it was a hoot -- at least for those who can ignore the damage that Navarro has wrought on the US political system, far beyond the tariff stuff.  (Some readers might recognize Navarro for his so-called "Green Bay Sweep," which was supposed to keep Trump in the White House on January 6, 2021.)  Parker's essay is one of those gems that offers quotable bit after quotable bit, each one somehow more head-slapping than the others.  I will content myself with just one:

Navarro, long rejected and unelected, made no attempt to set professorial boundaries in his new advisory role. He threw himself into every campaign argument. Trump hadn’t hired a kooky, maverick academic who happened to agree with him on tariffs, as has often been suggested. Rather, he’d found someone with no compunctions about performing agreement. Navarro, in his ethnic scapegoating, quickness to anger, and difficulty with noncompliant women, may have been temperamentally aligned with the MAGA movement he was joining.  

OK, two:

Long-term service to Trump requires both egomania and its opposite: self-annihilation. The man whom Navarro likes to call the Boss seems to value insincere, or bought, obeisance—the flapping and fussing of a maître d’—more than heartfelt fandom, which lacks the piquancy of humiliation. This work environment has clearly suited Navarro, whose sense of his own worth, though strong, seems to be divorced from allegiance to his own ideas, and who had long craved [large] audiences ... . He was ready to do whatever.

It is worth adding as well that Parker presents a very convincing case that Navarro's Ph.D. dissertation was the product of academic dishonesty, but that probably caught my attention simply because of my institutional and professional interests.  But the larger point from Parker's piece is that Navarro is a former political independent whose prime motivating force has always seemed to be an aching sense that he is not as important as he is certain that he deserves to be.

Contrasting Navarro with Hassett is thus interesting, at least in the sense that Hassett has been an absolute right-wing hack from the get-go.  (For details, see my piece from last April.)  Hassett apparently likes being on the news -- so much so that he is willing to say things that would embarrass a less oblivious man -- but his long-term commitment has always been to the Republican Party.  Hassett is the ultimate partisan and ideologue.  Navarro is the ultimate dilettante and egomaniac.

Even so, that difference would not seem to matter when assessing the question at the heart of this column: Would either man's departure from the Trump Administration matter?  It is true that Hassett might be more important than he seems to be, given that his title is "Director of the National Economic Council of the United States," which generally is not a power center, suggesting that somehow he has made himself less dispensable than others in his position would be.  Similarly, Navarro's title -- "Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing" -- is not usually high-profile.

Again, however, neither of these guys brings anything to his job that even remotely resembles unique or irreplaceable skills or innovative ideas.  That we can tell entertaining stories about them makes them no different from Noem, former AG Pam Bondi, or the guy at FEMA who believes that he has been teleported multiple times.

Trump's world is a machine -- not a well-oiled machine by any means, but a perpetual motion machine nonetheless -- that will replicate itself as needed until and unless the US somehow pulls a Hungary.  In the meantime, at least some of Trump's minions provide the world with inadvertent comic relief.

- Neil H. Buchanan