Index: Bad Lieutenants
A review of some of the corrupt lickspittles of the Trump regime.
Donald Trump—creature of organized crime, Kremlin stooge, Epstein BFF, racist, racist, coward, thief, and traitor to the country—is doing his level best to take a wrecking ball to the United States. In the case of the East Wing of the White House, that’s not even just a metaphor.
But without his devoted inner circle of lickspittle lieutenants, Donald would just be another sundowning octogenarian FoxNews junkie bitching about reflecting pools. Here is a review of previous PREVAIL pieces on some of the most traitorous culprits of the Trump Redux:
Marco Rubio, Secretary of State
Of all the insult-comic nicknames Donald Trump has bequeathed his rivals in the last ten years, none has been as singularly appropriate as “Little Marco.” The correspondent Dorothy Thompson once described Adolf Hitler as “the apotheosis of the Little Man.” We might make the same claim about Marco Antonio Rubio.
That Rubio agreed to serve as Secretary of State for a President he once called a “con artist” and warned was “dangerous”—and not only to serve him, but to implement policies lifted from the Nazi playbook—all but confirms his teeny-weeniness.
There was Little Marco, cozying up to the World’s Coolest Dictator©, negotiating a Nazi-style deal to remand U.S. prisoners to El Salvador. There was Little Marco, okaying the destruction of USAID, long the means of expression of American soft power overseas. There was Little Marco, who not long ago called the invasion of Ukraine “Russia’s reprehensible aggression” and led Senate initiatives to punish Putin, sitting silently in the Oval Office as Trump and JD Vance insulted Volodymyr Zelenskyy and parroted Kremlin talking points. There was Little Marco, cancelling visas and condoning ICE’s illegal roundup of legal U.S. residents—even though his parents, his older brother, his wife’s parents, and his ex-drug-dealer and felon brother-in-law were all born in other countries.
He cannot plead ignorance. He knows more state secrets than almost anyone alive. Remember, Marco Rubio was on the Senate Intelligence Committee during Trump’s entire first term. He signed off on Volume 5. He knew then, and damned well knows now, what Donald Trump really is—and who he’s really working for.
But he’s serving him anyway. He’s carrying out Trump’s orders like a good little Nazi underling. Never mind that Donald Trump has more in common with Fulgencio Batista, the mobbed-up Cuban strongman, than any past U.S. president, of either political party. Never mind that the policies he’s enforcing at the State Department, if implemented in the 1950s, would have hurt his parents and his brother.
Is his ambition that great? Rubio has always prioritized his political career above anything else—including, it seems, his family; his wife, the introverted Jeanette, remarked years ago in a (rare) interview that she sometimes felt like he was “cheating on” her with politics—and that, at home in Miami raising their four children while Rubio was off in Washington, she sometimes felt like “a single mom.” All that sacrifice, to go down in history as the willing accomplice of a corrupt American Nazi: the dictator’s diplomat, a Ribbentrop for our time.
Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence
But Tulsi Gabbard is not, strictly speaking, a traitor. On the contrary: she’s always been the good solider. Indeed, she is arguably the most fiercely loyal politician in all of Washington. And that is what was so risky about making her the head of the eighteen agencies that comprise the U.S Intelligence Community.
Gabbard has no agency. She is a puppet, a zombie, a mouthpiece, an empty vessel sent to Washington to do the bidding of her master—a master she has not and likely will never betray.
Her master is not Donald Trump. And, while most of her actions throughout her political career, from her terms in Congress through her disastrous stint as DNI, have helped the Kremlin—although “Tulsi is a Russian puppet” has become a running joke—her master is not Vladimir Putin.
No, her master is a man named Chris Butler. He is the leader of her cult—the cult she’d grown up with in Hawai’i, and has been a part of her entire life.
[READ MORE]
Kash Patel, FBI Director
Kash Patel is like Capitol policeman Eugene Goodman—only, instead of diverting a horde of angry, violent MAGA insurrectionists from the Senate chamber, he diverted the American people from the truth. And instead of doing it just once, he does it on the regular—including on the topic of the January 6th coup attempt that Goodman helped foil.
Patel has, let us say, an uneasy relationship with the truth. In the ballots case, a Colorado judge found that the now-FBI Director “was not a credible witness,” writing that his “testimony regarding Trump authorizing 10,000-20,000 National Guardsmen” on J6 was “not only illogical (because Trump only had authority over about 2,000 National Guardsmen), but completely devoid of any evidence in the record.”
Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare described an “odor of mendacity” emanating from Patel during his January 2025 confirmation hearing. “I am not, to be clear, accusing him of perjury,” Wittes writes. “I am accusing him, rather, of showing a lack of candor in yesterday’s hearing.” Candor, he explains, “has specific meaning in the FBI,” and its demonstrated lack is often grounds for termination. “Patel failed to meet this standard—miserably and dramatically and repeatedly.”
Patel is the same guy who, when asked at that hearing if he was familiar with the rightwing extremist podcaster Stew Peters, said, “Not off the top of my head”—and then was reminded that he’d appeared as a guest on The Stew Peters Show not once, not twice, but eight times.1
He claimed that he had nothing to do with the dissemination of QAnon deza—which is perfectly true, if you don’t count all the times he did just that.
And, as Wittes points out, Patel
repeatedly misrepresented his own statements when confronted with them. He pretended they were taken out of context. He pretended senators were misrepresenting his meaning. He pretended they were mere “snippets” of a larger argument that had meant something else. In some cases, he refused to acknowledge having said or written the items at all, saying to the senators questioning him that he did not have the comment in front of him.
And that was while under oath! At his confirmation hearing! To be FBI Director! On his media appearances, and on his podcast, and in his interviews, his fidelity to the facts wavers even more.
I don’t trust Patel as far as I can throw him. Indeed, it speaks to the batshit-craziness of the current moment that this buffoonish individual with a yen for yarns and taste for tall tales has managed to involve himself in so many matters of dire national interest. Even if put on the stand, under penalty of perjury, he is unlikely to provide honest testimony, as the Colorado judge suggested.
Regardless, Kash Patel knows too much not to disclose more. He has a lot to answer for. And the American people deserve an honest accounting.
What I want is for Wonder Woman to bind him with her Lasso of Truth and ask Patel the following questions:
Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce
Lutnick is now 64 years old. He’s grown a beard, which neatly offsets the receding hairline, and the streaks of gray in his salt-and-pepper hair become him; he looks more distinguished now, professorial. Financially, he’s done very well for himself. He has a personal net worth of $3,000,000,000—give or take a few million. And he still speaks in the affable, heart-on-his-sleeve manner I remember from the Connie Chung interview.
Only now, we know that he’s a world-class gaslighter. If lying were an Olympic sport, he’d be partying with Kash Patel in Milan. Even in a West Wing ensemble that includes some of the most shameless, fork-tongued liars on the planet, Lutnick stands apart; he is the Meryl Streep of mendacity.
Case in point: In October of last year, Lutnick told Miranda Devine of the New York Post, on her “Pod Force One” podcast, about his first visit to the home of his next-door neighbor, Jeffrey Epstein—from whom he’d (indirectly) purchased his stately manse (of which, more later).
This made headlines for an anecdote he shared, which struck me in the moment as a story Lutnick’d told many times and delights in telling. Here is the Post’s synopsis:
The 64-year-old cabinet secretary said Epstein himself showed off his notorious “massage room” while giving Lutnick and his wife a tour of the infamous East 71st Street townhouse after the couple moved in next door to the since-disgraced financier in 2005.
“I say to him, ‘Massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?’” Lutnick recalled. “And he says, ‘Every day.’ And then he gets, like weirdly close to me, and he says, ‘And the right kind of massage.’”
Lutnick said he and his wife quickly excused themselves and left Epstein’s home, “and in the six to eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
When asked by Devine whether Epstein’s rich and powerful associates—including the likes of Prince Andrew and Microsoft founder Bill Gates—“could hang around him and not see what you saw, or did they see it and ignore it,” Lutnick responded, “They participated.”
“They get a massage, that’s what his MO was. ‘Get a massage, get a massage,’ and what happened in that massage room, I assume, was on video,” the commerce secretary went on. “This guy was the greatest blackmailer ever, blackmailed people. That’s how he had money.”
Again, Lutnick seemed completely sincere in that interview—and especially convincing because, in bringing up the subject of Epstein at all, he appeared to be touching the third rail of the Trump White House.
The thing is, that story? It’s complete horseshit. He and his wife, Allison Lutnick, were so put out by that “disgusting man” that they [checks notes] visited the creepy pedo on his private Caribbean rape island.
Melania Trump, First Lady
We’ve known Melania Trump for over 20 years—including four and a half as First Lady of the United States—and yet she remains an enigma.3 Although she’s been in the public eye for two decades, and is married to the most famous human of the 21st century,4 she’s still the same mysterious Slovene who emigrated to the country in 1996.5
Melania is everyone and no one, famous and anonymous, powerhouse and cipher, the First Lady and the Invisible Girl. “She is like a ghost,” the photographer Jarl Alé de Basseville, who took her pictures when she first arrived in New York, told Mary Jordan for her 2020 biography, The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump. “Everyone knows her, but no one does.”
This is, to some degree, intentional—cultivated. Melania remains aloof on purpose, as she explains in her 2024 memoir, Melania: “I have chosen to maintain a more discreet presence in the public eye, in stark contrast to Donald. I have always prized my privacy and opted for a more selective lifestyle.”
Bet.
Prizing privacy and embracing a “selective” lifestyle—whatever that means—has its advantages. Melania is a blank canvas, a (ghostly?) white silkscreen on which, during the 2016 presidential campaign and the subsequent transition especially, we projected our own cares and concerns, our own principles and prejudices. Back then, we couldn’t conceive of how an attractive, reasonably intelligent woman with even a modicum of self regard could choose to be with him. That she confined herself to the Trump Tower penthouse, like some Slovenian Rapunzel; that she seemed to recoil in his presence; that she sat out so many events—and was even rumored to swap in a “Fake Melania” body double from time to time—only reinforced the prevailing belief that she was being held against her will. FREE MELANIA, the signs of protest read—as if the former Melanija Knavs wasn’t exactly where she wanted to be.
Photo credit: I have had Photoshop fun with a still shot from the Bela Lugosi Dracula movie. Patel is Renfield here.
PROGRAMMING NOTES
There will be a new Five 8 on Friday, but I will be off from PREVAIL until Tuesday July 15. Thank you!
Thank Greg. Every villain has a supporting cast, frankly none as reprehensible as those you list supporting the trump epstein felon. Another list, the shadowy behind the curtain villians headed by Miller, Vought and Leo. The third, the money men topped by Musk and Thiel. Last but not least, six assholes called Supreme Court Justices. Let's not forget the outsiders, Vlad the war criminal the ring leader. The web is so complex which is the scariest part.
Enjoy your vacation!
You have to give the felon some credit here, he’s the supreme conman that seduced even his harshest critics so he can slowly devour their self worth.