Almost without exception, those who enjoy the great honor of serving President Donald Trump have ultimately collided with two all-consuming dictums. The first is that Trump’s underlings must always elevate his personal interests above those of the institutions they run. The second is that they will always fall short of honoring the first, incurring his inevitable wrath.
Two big events late Thursday—Trump’s firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s axing of a top military official—demonstrate the deep perils of what political theorists refer to as “personalist” rule. This mode places one charismatic leader’s vainglory and self-enrichment, unbound by procedural neutrality, at the center of all decision-making. Flattery, tribute, attunement to the Big Man’s ever-shifting whims, and the effective humiliation of his enemies are what secure one’s place in the highest circles of glory.
The president’s banishment of Bondi tightly followed this template. An illuminating tick-tock from The Wall Street Journal tells us that Trump was “incensed” at her failure to prosecute his enemies, and her inability to bury the Jeffrey Epstein files left him “frustrated.” In both cases, Bondi deeply corrupted the institution she purported to serve in a fruitless effort to please Trump.
For instance, in bringing cases against numerous Trump foes—including Democratic Senators Adam Schiff and Mark Kelly, among others—her handpicked prosecutors twisted the law and Justice Department protocols so badly that the efforts buffoonishly fell apart while prompting resignations from career officials.
The Journal reports that after Trump berated Bondi in a Truth Social post that he reportedly intended to send privately, she grew upset and called top White House officials. Surely Bondi protested that she was trying very hard to be corrupt on Trump’s behalf, but he was demanding the unachievable: prosecutions untethered from law or fact. No matter: The absurdity of Trump’s demands could not be the problem. Only the failure to meet them could be.
Similarly, on Epstein, Bondi argued internally for keeping many of the files buried, per the Journal. That’s also a corrupt act. Yet Trump blamed her for failing to keep the story out of the news, even though his own stonewalling—and the presence of his name all over the files—were the real reasons for the unflagging media attention.
Here again, Bondi was cast from grace after deeply corrupting the institution she served but failing to achieve an impossible Trumpian demand—erasure of the unalterable record of his deep entanglement with Epstein. The crowning humiliation: As the end grew near, Bondi flattered Trump in self-debasing ways and performatively dressed down Trump enemies in public to assuage the Audience of One. None of it could save her.
Hegseth’s firing of a top Pentagon official also follows elements of the “personalist” pattern. The New York Times reports that Hegseth removed Gen. Randy George, the chief of staff of the Army, angering many senior officials. George and his allies clashed with Hegseth over the latter’s controversial derailment of the promotion of four officers—two Black and two female—potentially due to their race and gender. Hoping to resolve the situation, George asked for a meeting with Hegseth, but it was refused.
Hegseth has fired numerous other top military officials, which Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, describes as an unprecedented purge. “No secretary of defense has ever fired this many high-ranking senior people in his first year on the job,” Smith told me.
Most officials believed George had been doing a good job in modernizing the military in various ways, the congressman said, but George seems to have fallen victim to a “personality clash” with Hegseth. “It seems like Hegseth got into a pissing match with him over blocking promotions,” Smith said, adding that this is “undermining confidence in leadership” right “in the middle of the Iran war fiasco,” which “makes it worse.”
These are all glaring leadership abuses and failures. Yet Hegseth is well suited to surviving them—because he knows how to navigate Trump’s personalist rule. Hegseth is intensely loyal to Trump, and his willingness to bend or break laws to humor Trump’s whims is unquestioned. After Trump threatened, during this week’s prime-time speech, to vault Iran “back to the stone ages,” Hegseth obsequiously repeated Trump’s language, tweeting: “Back to the Stone Age.”
In short, Hegseth will gleefully carry out war crimes at Trump’s direction. Hegseth also regularly threatens the Iranian enemy with a level of bloodlust and sadism that’s plainly designed to minister to Trump’s anger over Iran’s refusal to capitulate to him, which has denied him the rapid, glorious military triumph he is entitled to.
What’s more, it’s beyond obvious that Hegseth’s skillful reading of the despot’s pathologies is enabling him to survive potentially career-ending episodes. First, he weathered his text-sharing of highly sensitive military information with a reporter. Now he seems to be surviving his staggering failure to anticipate the global consequences of Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz.
It’s all crying out for more scrutiny, and Smith says that if Democrats control the House next year, the Armed Services Committee will seek testimony from George and other officials fired by Hegseth. The committee will also probe whether George’s objections to Hegseth’s actions against Black and female officers played a role. How the defense secretary “manages personnel” is “one of the issues that we’ll want to examine,” Smith told me, which will entail trying to “talk to the people who he’s fired” to “get some insights as to why.”
That would be welcome. Yet it bears stressing that all these degradations flowing directly from Trumpian personalist rule portend something more grave than fleetingly terrible leadership. They are also clear indicators of democratic decline.
First, this sort of cultish fealty to Trump is itself a symptom of that deterioration, as political scientist Brendan Nyhan points out. After White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt laughably described Trump on Thursday as “the most well-read person in the room,” Nyhan observed that signaling “loyalty to the leader” by “making obviously false claims in public” about them is a hallmark of “officials in authoritarian regimes.”
What’s more, political scientists are particularly concerned with precisely the things we’re seeing in the Bondi and Hegseth narratives. A new survey of these experts by Bright Line Watch finds that many of them see the prosecutions of Trump’s enemies and the clear politicization of U.S. military leadership as especially glaring harbingers of decline, and the use of the military to intimidate political opponents—as in Trump’s military invasions of U.S. cities—as obvious symptoms. Hegseth, in clear displays of loyalty to Trump, has eagerly carried out both.
Yet as bad as all this appears, these stories also suggest that Trump’s personalist rule, at bottom, is failing him. Trump fired Bondi precisely because he could not prevail on her to corruptly bury the Epstein files or prosecute his opponents successfully. The war on Iran is heinously killing unbearable numbers of innocent civilians, but when it comes to Trump’s grand designs, the bombing is creating large piles of rubble and nothing more. Hegseth’s invasions of U.S. cities, enthusiastically undertaken on Trump’s behalf, have been undone by the courts and have utterly failed to intimidate occupied populations into complicity.
Flattery, slavish loyalty, self-debasement, and a willingness to engage in extraordinary corruption—none of these things can ultimately bend reality to Trump’s will. But his demands upon reality cannot themselves be faulted. They can only be failed by others, and when this happens, it is they who inevitably pay the price for it. Bondi has learned this the hard way. It’s only a matter of time until Hegseth does too.
