As the bottom falls out of Donald Trump’s second term, I find myself trying to imagine what’s going through the minds of his collaborators during the endgame. Not so much the thugs, mad dogs, buffoons, and rabid ideologues like Hegseth, Miller, Patel, and RFK Jr. — their conscience-free inner swamps leave nothing to the imagination. What’s more intriguing are the elites among this gang who did have some reputation for probity, independence, or at least sanity before enlisting in MAGA Republicanism: Cabinet members like Todd Blanche, Scott Bessent, Doug Burgum, and Jay Clayton and Trump’s billionaire cheerleaders on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. These guys — they are mainly guys — used to be thought of as the adults in whatever room they occupied (with the exception of Elon Musk, that is). You’d think they would have wanted to protect the good names they had once worked hard to build.

The room these collaborators find themselves in now is a bunker retrofitted to serve as a toddler’s gilded playpen. The lame-duck president they cater to is running amok in a second childhood of ceaseless tantrums and slobbering irrationality. He is most often found playing with his treasure chest of toys: the ballroom, the supersize Barbie dollhouse he calls the “National Garden of American Heroes,” the South Lawn helipad, the Kennedy Center, the Reflecting Pool, the Qatari Air Force One, the “championship level” golf course in East Potomac Park, the expanding Trump product line of government currency, cryptocurrency, and passports. Do his supplicants recognize this reality? Do they care? If they did, they might speak out about the destruction his presidency inflicts daily on his own country and its allies. If they don’t have the guts or principles to rise to that patriotic occasion, they at least might make a dash for the exits to avoid self-incrimination. But loyal they remain.

They stay despite knowing that if either or both houses of Congress change hands in the midterms, they will be ensnared in nonstop investigations in the New Year. They are operating as if that tomorrow will never come or, if it does, they will escape any consequences for their allegiance to a gangster president. Perhaps they assume preemptive pardons or their money and the legal firepower they can buy with it will insulate them from serious jeopardy. After all, it took just a $5 million donation to the Republican 2026 electoral effort from Howard Lutnick, timed to his appearance before the House Oversight Committee, to shut down any investigation into why he lied about his visit to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island or what he did there. It may cost Lutnick a lot more to deflect forensic probing into any correlation between his Commerce Department dealings and the swelling coffers of his former firm Cantor Fitzgerald (now controlled by his sons) and the 40-some other companies he has. But maybe he’s just too rich to care. His $5 million donation was a mere bagatelle for a guy worth $7.2 billion per Forbes (up from $3.2 billion in 2025).

Or maybe he and his peers are counting on another potential escape hatch — Democratic political malpractice. A third Trump-impeachment show could drown out any targeted reckoning for the president’s top tiers of enablers and accomplices.

Most of all, I suspect these elites are telling themselves that they’ve done nothing wrong and that Trump’s presidency is controversial but not a dumpster fire for the ages. As they rationalize it, any sins have been inflated by the opposition’s Trump Derangement Syndrome, by a woke Establishment press, and by the president’s own stubborn (but in their view harmlessly performative) refusal to control his shit fits on-camera and online. “Trump is just being Trump,” this apologia remains, and it’s your fault if you are still hyperventilating every time he (or Natalie Harp) tosses a hand grenade on Truth Social. It’s not as if Trump were Hitler, his allies can reassure themselves. And so they see little risk of punitive blowback, legal, financial, or reputational, once their autocrat-in-chief passes from the scene.

They are correct in this at least: Trump is not Hitler, no matter how insistently the comparison has been made over the past decade. It’s not for want of trying on Trump’s part. In Hitler’s People, the 2024 addition to his long-running chronicle of Nazi Germany, the British historian Richard J. Evans pointedly steers clear of making any direct analogies between the two leaders even as he unfurls a long list of similarities, from Hitler’s botched military and economic leadership down to his dream to build a new city called Germania that would have included, among other “overblown constructions,” a “triumphal arch larger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.” (Evans presciently completed this book more than a year before Trump proposed his own arch.)

For all those parallels, though, Trump is a bus-and-truck stand-in for the real thing. He cuts a buffoonish figure that more resembles the singing-and-dancing Führer in Mel Brooks’s The Producers. The kitsch décor of Mar-a-Lago makes Berchtesgaden look as austere as Camp David. And Trump does not match his predecessor in heinous deeds. The now-defunct Alligator Alcatraz was not Auschwitz. The more than 200 detention centers where ICE has inhumanely stashed immigrants are not executing a genocide. Despite his efforts, Trump has not yet shut down the courts or the press or ignited a new world war.

This exercise in moral relativism, nevertheless, cannot stand. That Trump falls short of Hitler does not let his collaborators and enablers off the hook. To use the Third Reich as a yardstick to measure a government’s criminality is to define deviancy down. Trump’s White House is a crime scene even if the likely sum of its felonies hasn’t approached the high bar set by the Nazis.

By most non-Nazi measures, the Trump administration is off the charts. Its Department of Justice, which pursues the president’s personal vendettas in lieu of protecting anyone’s human, civil, and voting rights, has enabled a kleptocracy that might make Suharto and Marcos look like shoplifters. The wholesale corruption and theft have exponentially increased not only the net worth of the president and his family but that of the large cast of cronies and grifters who have been cut in on the rackets rife in every corner of our government. Just a shortlist of the likely roster of criminal operations would include 24/7 insider stock trading; quid pro quo–driven real-estate deals in the Middle East, Europe, and even Yosemite National Park; no-bid government contracts handed out to favored vendors for federal boondoggles; crypto grabs engineered by Trump’s sons with the sons of his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff; prediction-market investments benefiting Donald Trump Jr.; the direct and indirect purchase of presidential pardons; and the curbing of antitrust and IRS enforcement for well-connected fat cats. It will take an army of sleuths just to track down the untold taxpayer dollars expended during the extravagant joyride of the ousted Bonnie and Clyde of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski.

That 6 million detainees have not been exterminated in the ICE incarceration network doesn’t neutralize the reality that in Trump’s second term, an estimated 57 have died in government custody under circumstances shrouded in secrecy. Every one of those lives counts, too. So do the lives of the uncounted scores of ICE deportees being treated like animals — shackled, abused, and beaten — on government flights speeding them to often unspecified international hellholes where they face torture by authoritarian regimes. Many of ICE’s domestic dungeons for immigrants are run by private contractors such as the Geo Group, which in July handed over $1.4 million to a Trump PAC after securing $165 million in government work. (The Geo Group’s holdings include the notorious Delaney Hall in Newark, the site of three known deaths.) It just goes to show that if you crack open any Trump scandal, you’ll find another nesting inside — a bottomless procession of Russian dolls reeking of dirty and sometimes blood-soaked money that might impress even Vladimir Putin. In........

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