Trump's Circus of Sycophants | Opinion

There are few things in this world more dangerous than an extremely powerful man who cannot be told he's wrong.

All of our best presidents chose to surround themselves with helpful dissenters—those who were willing to disagree with them, and sometimes vehemently so. George Washington gained insights from the debates between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson; Abraham Lincoln had his famed "team of rivals," and Frederick Douglass to contend with; Vannevar Bush was able to convince the hesitant FDR to invest in the Manhattan Project; Lyndon B. Johnson would have strong disagreements with Martin Luther King about how best to ensure the success of the civil rights movement. Even Donald Trump's latest idol, Republican President William McKinley, accepted Theodore Roosevelt—someone who had often voiced differences with the president—as his vice president and made a Democrat, Lyman Gage, his secretary of the Treasury.

A good president listens to see how he might be wrong. Donald Trump is only willing to listen to those who continually praise him and tell him exactly how right he is—every time about everything. Cabinet meetings have become worship sessions. Department members are being asked to answer loyalty questions. The president has surrounded himself with media figures less likely to ask him difficult questions and more likely to criticize Volodymyr Zelensky's sartorial proclivities. That same reporter, Brian Glenn, was on Air Force One with Trump right after his physical (which he had no questions about), telling him how amazing healthy and "energized" he is at his age.

Yet this is more than just disconcerting; it has real and genuine consequences. When Trump came out onto the White House Rose Garden with a board on April 2 that supposedly explained his tariff calculations, it quickly became apparent that no one had bothered to tell him that his figures were based on absolute nonsense. Or that his tariffs were wrongheaded and likely to cause nothing but headaches and unnecessary turmoil.

No one has told Trump that his constant bashing of Zelensky and his policies toward Russia are wrong either. Instead, his vice president, secretary of State, and just about every Republican in Congress, including Trump ally Lindsey Graham, have told him that he was right to attack Zelensky.

In fact, after the infamous Oval Office ambush, Graham said, "I have never been more proud of the president." Meanwhile, as Trump's efforts to resolve the war have utterly failed, and as he's continued to cozy up to Vladimir Putin, even accepting a portrait from the Russian dictator, Russia has violated every effort at peace, just as Zelensky predicted, recently attacking Ukrainian civilians and murdering 34 people, including 15 children, in Sumy.

Likewise, no one in Trump's administration has questioned his flagrant civil rights abuses, which include revoking people's visas without notice, imprisoning foreigners for exercising dissent, and shipping off Venezuelans to what essentially amounts to a Salvadorian gulag without any reasonable semblance of due process. And when they send someone there in complete error, like they did with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, no one will admit they made a mistake. Because that would mean Trump has made a mistake, and that can't happen.

Trump is dismissing government scientists even as the avian flu continues to rage and could potentially cause a pandemic, has threatened the sovereignty of Greenland and Panama, and has proposed expelling the Palestinian people from Gaza and turning it into the "Riviera of the Middle East."

And who in his inner circle is willing to go against the president, point out the lunacy of many of these plans, and make counterarguments? No one, of course—and few outside of it either. Because there is an atmosphere of fear. "We are all afraid," Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said to her constituents last week.

It was perhaps the most honest admission we've heard from any Republican in a long, long time, and it does not bode well for the nation. We now have a president who has been empowered by the Supreme Court and his own party to do away with all moral, constitutional, and practical constraints and simply do as he pleases. The emperor has no clothes, yet he does not hear even the slightest peep in objection.

Whatever they might say behind closed doors, none within the president's circus of sycophants has the courage to disagree with Trump to his face. He'll never hear the words, "Mr. President, you're wrong on that one." Because Trump can't ever hear he's wrong about anything.

And that's what's so wrong about him.

Ross Rosenfeld is a frequent political writer. Follow him on Bluesky and check out his Substack.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.