All the President’s Sycophants | The New Yorker

“No dissent,” Donald Trump recently posted on social media. Antonia Hitchens reports on the brazenly transactional ecosystem he has built, which rewards flattery and lockstep loyalty. And then:

Antonia Hitchens 
Hitchens has been writing about politics for The New Yorker since 2018.

Presiding from a balcony at the White House this morning, President Trump, alongside a human-size bunny, welcomed thousands of American children to the annual Easter Egg Roll. For the first time in the event’s century-and-a-half-long history, he also welcomed a number of corporate sponsors who had been pitched on a “branding activation.” Amid nearly thirty thousand colorful eggs that were strewn about the South Lawn was a “Bunny Hop Stage” sponsored by YouTube and an “AI-powered Experience and Photo Opportunity” courtesy of Meta. An Amazon-sponsored “Reading Nook” featured storytelling from Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Even before Trump took office, his Inauguration fund raised a record-setting two hundred and thirty-nine million dollars, including donations from the leaders of the aforementioned Egg Roll sponsors. They, as well as other tech barons, seemed to want to publicly embrace the man many of them once spurned. Washington has always been a transactional town, but Trump, in his second term, has taken things to new heights. For the past couple of months, I’ve been spending time around the Capitol, reporting my story in this week’s issue—talking to diplomats, members of Congress, political consultants, the new social-media influencers inside the White House briefing room, and many more—and piecing together the workings of the flattery-based ecosystem that’s taken hold in the new Trump era. The carnival-like, sugar-high atmosphere of the White House exists, of course, against the backdrop of an Administration that is teetering on the edge of defying the Supreme Court. And the more the outside world criticizes the President, the more those close to him offer lavish praise. As one source put it, “It’s North Korean bootlicking.”

Recently, a group of prominent Republicans and members of the first Trump Administration signed an open letter comparing the President to a “royal despot.” The insult, however, may not have landed with Trump, who, on February 19th, posted “LONG LIVE THE KING,” referring to himself. But praise for a king often comes, at least in part, from a sense of fear over the power he wields. “We are all afraid,” Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska, said last week at a meeting with nonprofit leaders. “I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” When I asked people in the President’s camp about this fear—and the deference it inspires—they insisted they had no idea what I was talking about. In their world, the favor-trading is faultless. “It’s not, ‘if I cozy up to Trump I’ll get something,’ ” one person told me. “It’s, ‘maybe I’ll get to save my country.’ ”

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