Reich draws on Hannah Arendt's observation in The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

People who climb upward by sacrificing their integrity to slavish subservience almost always fall on their faces eventually. Blind ambition trips them up. They cannot explain or defend their behavior by relying on principled competence because, like [Trump's mentor the odious Roy] Cohn, they are unprincipled and incompetent to their cores.

The people they latch onto meet similar fates but for a different reason.

Leaders who value loyalty above all else find themselves surrounded by sycophantic crackpots and fools. As a result, they receive no objective or useful feedback about their actions " no warnings beforehand and no criticism afterward. All they get are commendations " "Wonderful idea, sir!" "Brilliant execution, sir!"

These cocoons of flattery seal off such leaders from the real-world consequences of what they do " which inevitably leads them to make grave mistakes. Some of those mistakes eventually cause their downfalls.

This perverse symmetry " the certain demise of grovelers because they're incompetent and unprincipled and the inevitable downfall of those to whom they grovel because they never get useful and truthful feedback " marks the path of all totalitarian systems. It's the path on which Trump now treads.