(REUTERS)

Today’s Office Hours discussion question is particularly difficult to answer. After more than 10 months of this catastrophic Trump regime, who has emerged as the worst person in it, other than Trump himself?

There are so many candidates for this distinction that’s it been hard to narrow down the finalists, but I’ve done the best I can to identify the most dangerous. All have caused extensive damage. This isn’t to excuse Trump, of course. He appointed them and continues to support them. His rantings and ravings have encouraged them.

Which of them in your view is the worst of the worst?

Pete Hegseth. Trump’s secretary of defense (or of “war” as Trump and Hegseth want to call it) has created more chaos, infighting, and likely war crimes than any defense secretary in living memory. The former Fox News host reportedly gave a verbal order to kill everyone aboard vessels suspected of smuggling drugs, which led a military commander to carry out a second strike to kill those who had initially survived an attack in early September.

Senator Mark Kelly this week called Hegseth “unqualified” for his job. “He runs around on a stage like he’s a 12-year-old playing army. And it is ridiculous, it is embarrassing, and I can’t imagine what our allies think of looking at that guy in this job, one of the most important jobs in our country…. He is in the national command authority for nuclear weapons. This is the secretary of defense. This is not a serious person. He should have been fired after Signalgate. And then every single day after that.”

Pam Bondi. Bondi has turned the Justice Department into Trump’s private law firm — going after his enemies and pardoning his friends. When Trump demanded that she prosecute former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Bondi didn’t hesitate. She has purged many lawyers for being inadequately loyal to Trump. DOJ has lost thousands of experienced attorneys. Even the elite Solicitor General’s Office has lost half of its staff.

Last week a federal judge found that Bondi’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan to the post of U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was illegal and threw out the cases she had brought against Comey and James. Federal judges have also ruled illegal the appointments of U.S. attorneys for the Central District of California and the District of Nevada. This week a federal appeals court rejected Alina Habba as U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey and instead selected Desiree Leigh Grace, an experienced prosecutor, to lead the office. Bondi then fired Grace and maneuvered Habba back into control of the office.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. RFK Jr. has almost single-handedly destroyed public health in the United States. His war on vaccines poses a clear and present danger. He has decimated the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health — substituting anti-science fanatics for health experts. He has caused the U.S. to be less prepared for the next pandemic.

On Tucker Carlson’s podcast in June, Kennedy falsely claimed that the hepatitis B birth dose is a “likely culprit” of autism and said the hepatitis B virus is not “casually contagious.” Wrong on both counts. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory panel appointed by Kennedy is scheduled to discuss and vote on the hepatitis B birth dose recommendation during its two-day meeting starting December 4, likely no longer recommending it for newborns.

Stephen Miller. Miller is the most powerful force behind the regime’s cruel and unconstitutional expurgation of immigrants from the United States. It began with a promise that it would target only undocumented immigrants who had committed terrible crimes here; then spread to all undocumented immigrants; then to many green-card holders and others here legally; and has now encompassed almost everyone who has immigrated to the United States.

Miller has turned the Department of Homeland Security into a domestic police force and the State Department’s visa and refugee operations into a personal fiefdom. He is overseeing efforts to separate families in which one parent is here legally, to detain people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, and is sending others to prisons in foreign countries, all without due process of law. He and Trump are turning America into a nativist den of bigotry and hate.

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Hence, today’s Office Hours question: Who in the Trump regime is the worst of the worst?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.