Trump's Pretzel Lackeys

A Documented Inventory of the Contortions Performed by Those Who Have Decided Their Dignity Is a Fair Price for Proximity to the Orange King

Let us begin with the sleeping.

The president, by multiple documented accounts, nods off in meetings, at events, in the front row of cage fights he personally organized, and during classified intelligence briefings of the kind that require a cleared room and a cleared conscience. This is not disputed. It is on video. It is on multiple videos. The appropriate response to a president who falls asleep at his own birthday party is, by any normal standard of political self-preservation, a cautious silence or a subject change.

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, went on television and said the president never sleeps. He does not mean this in the sense that the president experiences insomnia or suffers from a medical condition. He means it as praise. He means it as the evidence of superhuman vitality, the implication being that the president is so engaged, so energetic, so relentlessly focused on the nation’s business, that sleep itself cannot get a meeting on his calendar. This is the same president whose staff convene in the Situation Room specifically to prevent him from learning about crises they are managing on his behalf, because telling him creates additional crises. He never sleeps. He also cannot be told things. These two facts coexist in the Rubio account without tension.

Jim Jordan, Representative from Ohio, has been performing a slightly different contortion for approximately a decade, which is the specific physical feat of being in a permanent state of outrage about things that are not outrageous while remaining entirely serene about things that are. He has held more hearings about Hunter Biden’s laptop than about the thirteen Americans who died in the Iran war. He has screamed about weaponization of the Justice Department while the Justice Department is being weaponized by the administration he supports. He has accused Democrats of doing precisely the things the Republicans are doing at the moment of accusation, with the specific timing that suggests the accusation is the defense rather than the observation. He is very loud. He has never once been correct about anything he is very loud about, and he has never once stopped being very loud about it, and the combination of these two facts has made him, in the current ecosystem, extremely useful.

James Comer, Representative from Kentucky and chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has spent three years investigating the Biden family with the specific determination of a man who is certain the evidence is about to materialize and the specific results of a man whose evidence has never materialized. He has promised bombshells. The bombshells have not exploded because they have not existed. He responds to this situation by promising additional bombshells, which also do not exist, in a cycle that has now been running long enough to constitute a career rather than an investigation. In between the bombshells he praises the president’s strength, his vision, his leadership, his unprecedented achievements, in language that would embarrass a middle school valedictorian, and he does this with the conviction of a man who has decided that the investigation and the praise are both in service of the same project, which is the project of being James Comer for as long as possible.

Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce, arrived in the administration from Cantor Fitzgerald and brought with him the specific energy of a man who has spent his entire career in rooms where someone is always trying to sell something to someone else, which turns out to be excellent preparation for this particular role. He has described the president’s tariff policy as the greatest economic masterstroke in American history, which is one way to describe a policy that triggered a market crash, a credit rating downgrade, a bond market crisis, and inflation at 4.2 percent, though it is not the way that the data would describe it if the data were consulted. He consults the president instead. The president’s assessment of the president’s economic policy is more favorable.

Kash Patel, Director of the FBI, has described Donald Trump as the greatest president in American history. He has said this repeatedly, in interviews and in his book and at events where saying it was the professional expectation. The FBI under Patel’s direction has investigated the people the president wanted investigated and has declined to investigate the people the president did not want investigated, which is a description of a law enforcement agency that has stopped performing the function of a law enforcement agency and started performing the function of a loyalty instrument, and Patel has overseen this transition with the specific enthusiasm of someone who regards it as an improvement. He wrote a book called Government Gangsters, about the corruption of federal institutions by political actors, before becoming a political actor who was appointed to lead a federal institution. He does not appear to have noticed the irony. Or he has noticed it and regards it, as he regards most things, as an achievement.

Todd Blanche, Acting Attorney General, has praised the president’s commitment to justice and the rule of law. This is the same Blanche who spent two years as the president’s personal criminal defense attorney through the cases that ended in thirty-four felony convictions, who then became the deputy attorney general and then the attorney general, and who has used that position to close investigations, manage the Epstein file release in ways that protect the president from its contents, personally interview Ghislaine Maxwell, and oversee the transfer of Maxwell to a minimum-security facility. He has praised the president’s commitment to justice. The president has thirty-four felony convictions. Blanche argued them. He now runs the Department of Justice. The rule of law, by Blanche’s account, has never been in better hands.

Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury, has described the president’s economic policy as a historic restructuring of the American economy, which is accurate in the same way that a demolition is a restructuring of a building. He says this in press conferences while the dollar fluctuates and the markets recover from tariff announcements and the bond market has episodes and inflation sits at 4.2 percent and the credit rating has been downgraded for the first time in American history. He nods. He reassures. He uses the word “historic” the way a man uses an umbrella in a flood, which is to say with conviction and without adequate coverage.

JD Vance, Vice President of the United States, has called the president a transformational figure, a great leader, a man of the people, the only person who can fix what is broken in America. He has said these things in speeches and interviews and at rallies and on the floor of the Senate. He said privately in February 2016 that Trump was either a Nixonian cynic or America’s Hitler. He has not reconciled these positions publicly. He appears not to feel the need to, which is either a sign of tremendous psychological flexibility or of a man who has decided that the private assessment and the public assessment are simply different products for different markets, and that the market for “America’s Hitler” is smaller than the market for “transformational figure,” and that the market is the thing.

Pam Bondi, former Attorney General, spent her tenure praising the president’s strength, his leadership, his vision, his commitment to the American people, in language that grew warmer as the Epstein file pressure grew more intense, until she was replaced by the man who had personally defended the president in the criminal cases she was supposed to be overseeing independently. She gave interviews after her departure praising the administration she was no longer part of. The transition from inside to outside the circle changed nothing about the content of her praise, which is either evidence of genuine conviction or of a woman who has decided that the praise, unlike the job, is indefinitely renewable.

There are others. There are always others. There is always another man in a too-tight suit behind a lectern saying the words, calling the president a genius, a visionary, a once-in-a-generation leader, a man who works tirelessly, who never sleeps, who is always thinking about you, the American people, always, even now, especially now, never sleeping, always thinking, the greatest, historic, unprecedented, beautiful, perfect.

The president, at this moment, is probably eating a well-done steak with ketchup, or throwing away some silverware, or posting about Dumocrats at two in the morning, or nodding off in a classified briefing, or doing one of the many other documented things that the men behind the lecterns have decided not to see, because not seeing it is the contortion, and the contortion is the job, and the job is the proximity, and the proximity is the protection, and the protection is the only reason to be a pretzel.

They are all pretzels.

It is not a comfortable shape for a human being. It was not designed to be.