On the strange economics of becoming Trump’s Joker goon and why the real joke is on everyone who decided serving a petty authoritarian was a smart career move.

Never work for Donald Trump. Don’t go there. You’re safer flipping hamburgers or wrangling small, shin‑kicking children than taking a paycheque from him.

At least the kids and the grease fire aren’t actively plotting to ruin your life in public.

Working for Trump has always been like signing up to be one of the Joker’s goons: you can see the man is a psychopath, but you talk yourself into believing that if you laugh on cue and hit your marks, he won’t turn the flamethrower on you. The whole arrangement runs on humiliation and fear, not respect. You don’t get hired because you’re competent; you get hired because no one else would touch you, and the boss knows you’ll do anything to stay near the chaos and the cameras.

That’s how authoritarian loyalty economies work. The leader rewards the most shameless sycophants, showers them with attention and access, and then keeps them in line with constant loyalty tests and public degradations. The second a henchman hesitates or disagrees, on a war, a grift, a line of propaganda, the strongman does what he always does: he flips, he smears, and he tries to erase the existence of the person he was praising last week. There is no “falling out” in this world, just the moment when the psychopath finally points the gun at you.

Trump’s latest tantrum over his own media pets fits this script perfectly. He’s now calling his once‑adoring surrogates “crazy,” “stupid,” “low IQ,” and “losers,” as if their only crime was suddenly becoming defective. But the truth is uglier and simpler: nothing about him has changed. He is the same low‑quality man he has always been, petty, vindictive, and transactional, and if you chose to build your career as his Joker goon, you weren’t elevating a great man. You were propping up a loser, and he’s finally spelling that out for you in his own vocabulary.