25 Villains for ’25

This is the third annual PREVAIL “Villains” ranking. It is also, frankly, the scariest. In just thirteen days, the villains will have the run of the place, and there’s a non-zero chance that the MAGA Gestapo will bar me from compiling such a list for 2026. But egg prices, amirite? (“But egg prices” is the new “But her emails.” I’m already sick of it.)

In this age of madness and stupidity, figuring out who the worst Americans are, and determining which are worse than others, is a morbidly fun way of keeping sane. But the list also serves as a time capsule. When I released the first rankings two years ago, we were still waiting for Jack Smith to make his move. The special counsel made moves, certainly, but, like a running back caught behind the line of scrimmage, ultimately wound up losing yardage.

“Twenty twenty-four’s gonna be a doozy,” I wrote last January, as we were, as I noted back then, “waiting for four different Trump trials to kick off.” (Only one of them actually did; what were the chances?) Alas, I seem to have underestimated the level of dooziness 2024 had in store for us. It was the mother of all doozies, a doozy Mount McKinley.

And yet on the doozification scale, the year we just left behind will be dwarfed by the new, current year as surely as a tennis ball is dwarfed by the planet Jupiter. But no, that’s a bad analogy. In astrology, Jupiter is the Great Benefic, bringing good fortune to everything it touches. Twenty twenty-five is more like a cursed monkey’s paw. I guess what I’m trying to say is, you can look at the lists from 2023, 2024, and 2025 as “Doozy,” “Doozier,” and “Dooziest.”

Before we begin, a few notes on my methodology: While there are plenty of worthy foreign nationals who are as evil as they come—Vladimir the Puny for one, and Bibi the Butcher; who has bought more death and destruction than those two serial war criminals?—I’ve confined myself to U.S. citizens. Also, I’d like to apologize for the lack of diversity. Incredibly, the list of horrible Americans is populated in the main by white men—although, I’m pleased to report, there are more women this year! And MAGA will be heartened to know that these are not just DEI inclusions!

While the order is subjective, I tried to rank these miscreants according to how awful they are. For that, my primary metric is body count: how many people have suffered and/or died, or will suffer and/or die, because of their actions.

Finally, this is hardly an exhaustive list, nor is it meant to be. There are, alas, scores of wretched Americans I could have included. Please excuse the many other worthy (or rather unworthy) candidates I missed, and feel free to suggest omissions in the comments.

And now, on to the List…

There was a lot of turnover this year, owing to Trump’s atrocious cabinet picks, all of whom are well positioned to hurt a shit-ton of Americans. Therefore, a number of 2024’s villains did not make the cut, including Mike Davis (ranked 6); Aileen Cannon (10, and like Josh Allen, would go #1 in a re-draft); FBI turncoat Charles McGonigal (12); James Comer, who I just now realized is one letter away from James Comey (14); the MAGA media suck-ups Charlie Kirk (15), Nick Fuentes (17), and Scott Presler (18); Congressional pardon-seekers MTG (22) and Matt Gaetz (23); and washed-up ratfucker Roger Stone (24). In addition, two members of the Class of 2023 that didn’t make the cut last year reappear (I won’t spoil the suspense and say who).

25. Steve Bannon
—2024 rank: 8
—2023 rank: 15

For his entry two years ago, I composed a short poem:

Although convicted of a crime,
Sloppy Steve has done no time.

Happily, that is no longer the case. Bannon did indeed befoul a jail cell with his leprous presence. In 2024, I fleshed it out a bit:

In an election year—again: the most pivotal one this country has held since 1860—the failed screenwriter, sinister strategist, proud Leninist, fire-hoser of shit podcaster, and would-be dismantler of the administrative state takes on added importance. A good time to lock his leprous ass up to serve the four-month sentence for the crime he was convicted of last year would be August 15.

He reported to the hoosegow on the first of July, so I was close. But what does it matter?

No longer will Steve be a felon when
Trump pardons his sloppy ass again

24. The Pipe Bomber
—2024 unranked
—2023 rank: 18

Someone planted pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC the night before the insurrection, and the FBI seems to have no more clue who the perpetrator is now than they did in 2023. I sure hope it isn’t the wingless Mike Flynn flying monkey who maintains the Deep State Target List, and who styles himself the Secretary of Retribution, and who wears t-shirts saying same, and who lives not far from the scene of the crime, and who has explosives training, and who has a Russian first name and speaks fluent Russian, and who just this week was making threatening statements about Jamie Raskin and his wife. I hope it ain’t him, because I prefer to believe that that potentially dangerous and sure-to-be-pardoned-if-he-does-anything-violent individual, who shall remain nameless here, is all лаять and no кусать.

23. Matthew Whitaker
—2024 unranked
—2023 unranked

Whitaker was the first of Trump’s Acting Attorneys General, serving after racist Keebler Elf Jeff Sessions left and before Opus Dei weirdo Bill Barr swooped in. He is best known for selling toilets for men with big schlongs. Donald has named him Ambassador to NATO, which means that Whitaker’s prime objective will be permanently dismantling the alliance system directly responsible for preserving the Pax Americana and (mostly) preventing war in Europe for 80 full years. In other words, rendering unto Putin what is now, apparently, Putin’s.

22. Russ Vought
—2024 unranked
—2023 unranked

In the dying days of the last Trump Administration, the West Wing was staffed in the main by three types of people: lunatics, grifters, and folks from Team Opus Dei. This last group tended to hold jobs of less renown with considerable power. Enter Vought, a Leonard Leo weirdo and Project 2025 bigwig, nominated to head the Office of Management and Budget, the same job he had the first go-round. Only this time, there won’t be as many guardrails, and he’ll enjoy a lot more leeway to impose his sick, twisted schemes.

21. Stephen Miller
—2024 unranked
—2023 unranked

It’s only appropriate that Deputy Chief of Staff Miller makes the list right after Nosferatu hits theaters. Word is, they plan to move the coffin he sleeps in to a closet down the hall from the Oval Office. Can the Germans please appoint Van Helsing as US Ambassador?

20. Pete Hegseth
—2024 unranked
—2023 unranked

Fox News yowler and predatory-college lobbyist who is an alleged rapist, an alleged drunk, an alleged white Christian nationalist, an alleged fraudster, and a confirmed dummy not qualified for a job that the Senate will by all indications confirm him to do. I’m not sure this side of beef can figure out how to split a bill at Hooters, let alone manage an $850 billion budget. Seriously, he thinks the Pentagon is the place where the UFC bouts are held.

19. Jared Kushner
—2024 rank: 1
—2023 rank: 11

As the top overall pick for 2024, Slenderman was (thank God) something of a bust. He seemed more interested in making high-yield investments for his Saudi whoremasters than killing off more Americans.

His father is the nominee for Ambassador to France, but we don’t yet know what role, if any, Jared will have in the new administration. Last time he was in charge of something, it was the “shadow” pandemic response; he engineered a Blue State Genocide that greatly exacerbated the spread of covid and cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. What’s next? It’s like when Christopher Cross won all those awards for his debut album: it’s hard to top.

18. Kristi Noem; Tom Homan (tie)
—2024 unranked
—2023 unranked

Trump won the election partly because, assuming the polls are accurate, a majority of Americans wanted mass deportations of quote-unquote illegal immigrants. Donald said he will remove 18 million; at the VP debate, JD Vance put the number at 25 million. There are maybe 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country, so either Couchfucker was exaggerating, or they plan to to forcibly relocate one in 13 residents of the United States.

From what I can gather, this task, if they actually undertake it, would fall to Noem, the dog-killer, and Homan, the lunatic “border czar.” Given that “mass deportation” is, in practice, a euphemism for “genocide,” there is, alas, vast potential for these two sadists to cause harm on a Third Reich-level scale.

17. Susie Wiles
—2024 unranked
—2023 unranked

Trump’s new chief of staff is the daughter of the late, great NFL broadcasting legend Pat Summerall(!), and I would rather not believe that the child of a man who brought me and millions of other football fans so much joy could play a starring role in the destruction of the republic. But facts is facts: Wiles has so many ties to Moscow and Beijing that my friend Zarina Zabrisky wrote a whole article for Byline Times laying out all the connections. Where do Wiles’s allegiances really lie? With Trump? With Putin? With Xi? With incoming Ambassador to the Bahamas and NFL great Herschel Walker? Does John Madden have a daughter, and if so, can she be COS instead?

16. Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton
—2024 6
—2023 13

Last year’s entry on these corrupt, evil motherfuckers:

Last year’s entry on these corrupt, evil motherfuckers:

The troika that rules the Lone Star State—and yes, I’m using troika because it’s a Russian word—is the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of pure evil. There are banana republics less corrupt. What with the voter suppression and gerrymandering, the fascistic anti-abortion laws so draconian they harken back to the Fugitive Slave Act, the extreme vaccine and mask denial, the preponderance of guns, and the state power grid pooping out every time it gets too hot or too cold, Texas exemplifies the GOP attitude toward the people: “Fuck you, die.”

Nothing has changed except the egregiousness of their corruption and the number of people they’ve harmed. Paxton, an outright crook, is on the short list for Attorney General in a second Trump term.

Paxton is not the nominee for U.S. AG, which is a good thing. But he and his colleagues were the authors of considerable pain, misery, and death in Texas last year. I shudder to think what might happen now that the White House will be cheering them on.

15. Jeff Bezos & Patrick Soon-Shiong (tie)
—2024 unranked
—2023 unranked

The only thing worse than a major legacy newspaper being owned by a loathsome, cheap, vain, self-serving, know-it-all billionaire is a major legacy newspaper being owned by a loathsome, cheap, vain, self-serving, know-it-all billionaire who has already kissed the ring on Trump’s tiny finger.

Eat the rich. With fava beans and a nice chianti.

14. Rupert Murdoch
—2024 rank: 21
—2023 rank: 2

What I wrote last year holds up:

As I wrote last year, this purveyor of disinformation, fake news, and bilious hate is “unequivocally one of the worst human beings to ever draw breath on this planet.” But he’s sold his controlling interest in News Corp, and, I mean, in March he’ll turn ninety-fucking-three. I know that evil preserves these malevolent old geezers, like severed body parts in formaldehyde, but even Kissinger didn’t live forever.

In March he’ll turn ninety-fucking-four. And Kissinger lived to a hundred. Maybe Lucifer is busy constructing a whole new ring of Hell for this all-time scoundrel?

13. Sam Alito & Co.
—2024 rank: 9
—2023 rank: 3

“Every time a pregnant woman suffers or dies because she is denied access to a safe, legal abortion, Alito is responsible,” I noted last January. “There is blood on his hands, lots of it, and there will only be more in 2024. His pomposity is exceeded only by his delusions of grandeur. In what horrible ways will he fuck us over in 2024?”

Let us count the ways! He and his corrupt colleagues killed the Trump criminal cases, decided that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t apply to an egregious insurrectionist, and, oh yeah, granted Donald immunity from crimes committed during presidential “official acts,” which for all we know could extend to sexual assault in the Oval Office.

Those three SCOTUS decisions may well end the American experiment. In what horrible ways will he fuck us over in 2025? Oh, they’ll come up with something.

12. Thought leaders of the NRx
—2024 rank: 16
—2023 unranked

It would have been nice to have lived my whole life without hearing the name Curtis Yarvin, or thinking about the theory of “The Cathedral,” or knowing what “RAGE” stands for.

11. Leonard Leo
—2024 rank: 19
—2023 rank: 7

A reprise:

Knight of Malta and loser from Central Jersey who was the prime mover behind the Dobbs decision now has pockets so deep he may never run out of cash—but like his old chum Ginni, Leo operates best in the shadows. Diligent reporters like Heidi Przybyla, Nina Burleigh, and the team at ProPublica have put him under the microscope—where, yes, he does bear a striking resemblance to Yersinia pestis—and will continue to make him famous in 2024.

Payoff Lenny is more famous now, thanks to the tireless efforts of my friend Tom Carter, and the great book by Gareth Gore, and more stories being written about him in the press. But as Tom will be the first to tell you, too many Beltway denizens have never even heard the name Leonard Leo. Given that Project 2025 has his pudgy fingerprints all over it, maybe that will change this year?

Read also: Leonard Leo and the Unholy Trinity (with Tom Carter)

10. Mike Flynn
—2024 rank: 4
—2023 rank: 11

The term “ugly American” refers to Americans in foreign countries acting like assholes. But when I hear “ugly American,” I just picture Mike Flynn’s face.

All joking aside: He is a scary, vindictive guy who knows how to use psy-ops to wreak havoc. And now he’s once again in a position of power. There he was an Mar-a-Lago, with Trump and the other crazies, the night of January 5—two days ago, I mean—celebrating.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

9. Marco Rubio
—2024 unranked
—2023 rank: 20

Last time he graced this list, I had this to say about him, which is all still accurate:

Don’t let his earnest countenance and yen for tweeting Bible passages fool you. This schmuck is a full-on traitor, and he doesn’t get nearly enough attention for it. He’s the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He knows more than almost anyone alive about what’s really going on. Yet he continues to spew Kremlin talking points, poisoning the discourse with bullshit. His enduring popularity with the Cuban-American population in Florida is both ironic and disappointing—they, of all people, should know how to spot a serial liar propped up by Moscow.

Why put this spineless worm at State? Easy: Lil’ Marco knows how to publicly humiliate himself, and he knows how to performatively capitulate—two things he will be doing a lot of in this position in the next four years, or however long he lasts. Plus he’s short and will make Putin look taller.

8. “Speaker Mike” Johnson
—2024 rank: 2
—2023 unranked

I threw out a bunch of questions twelve months ago:

Two heartbeats from the presidency is a Christian nationalist zealot with a backstory that may as well be the redacted pages of the Mueller Report. Who is this guy? What’s up with his adopted Black “son?” Why does his wife think being gay is akin to bestiality? What techniques does Kelly Johnson use to “help” gay kids who use her counseling services? Does she use those techniques on her hubs? Why does he not have a bank account? When does he believe the Rapture will happen? How does that belief affect his style of governance? We’ve got a full year of Speaker Johnson to find out. Hallelujah.

Update: A year later, we still don’t know the answer to any of those questions about the Speaker of the Fucking House. Don’t worry, I’m sure the crack legacy media journalists will get on in, as soon as they finish normalizing Trump’s quixotic plans to invade [insert sovereign nation here].

7. Pam Bondi
—2024 unranked
—2023 unranked

When this airhead was the Florida State Attorney General, she accepted a $25k campaign donation from Donald Trump and almost immediately kibboshed a case against Trump University. Quid pro whoa! So not only is she bought and sold, she came cheap. What does Rick say in Casablanca? “I don’t mind a parasite; I object to a cut-rate one.”

6. Tulsi Gabbard
—2024 unranked
—2023 unranked

The Director of National Intelligence is a relatively new position; this is who the heads of all the agencies in the Intelligence Community report to—at least on paper. I’d like to think the powers that be in the CIA and the NSA and the DIA and so forth know how to obfuscate, and won’t give this cultist, homophobic Putin-fluffer any actual intelligence, knowing it will wind up at the Kremlin almost immediately. Ric Grenell held this job once upon a time, remember, and the republic stood.

But then, I would also have liked to think—and indeed did think—that by now, the powers that be in the CIA and the NSA and the DIA and so forth would have exposed Trump as an asset of Moscow, or done something concrete to, you know, thwart what the Russian intelligence services have been doing to us since, like, forever. Seriously, what’s going on at Langley? Is anyone home? Bueller? Bueller?

5. Kash Patel
—2024 rank: 7
—2023 unranked

Sorry, but I’m out of jokes. This dude is vengeful, insane, and extremely dangerous. And now he’s armed. Last year, I wrote:

On Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel, whom Trump would likely install at CIA, DOD, or a similar institution with a lot of power, a huge budget, and beaucoup weapons, promised that the incoming MAGA team would make vengeance a priority:

We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.

We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminal or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical.

Weaponizing the DOJ and the civil courts would supercharge the demise of our democracy. Political rivals would be rounded up and jailed pending trial. Media companies would be sued into paralysis. Like, if the Trumpers start doing this on January 20, 2025, the United States as we know it would be toast by next Thanksgiving.

Well, the Trumpers have already begun suing media companies into paralysis—or, worse, capitulation. The likes of Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) and Patrick Soon-Shiong (LA Times) have already bowed down and licked the fascist boot.

Donald may have to wait until Patel and Bondi are confirmed before he can weaponize the FBI and the DOJ and start rounding up political rivals. But that won’t take long. I hope Liz Cheney has her go-bag packed.

4. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
—2024 unranked
—2023 unranked

This gross, handsy, whale-beheading vaccine denier is the most likely among Trump’s hideous Cabinet appointees to not get confirmed. That would be good, because the last thing we need in this country is more diphtheria outbreaks. Let’s maybe not Make Polio Great Again.

3. Whoever Trump Picks as VP (Peter Thiel JD Vance)
—2024 rank: 3
—2023 unranked

I nailed this one last year, and the ranking remains the same. JD Vance occupies the spot in the Venn diagram where the radical-Catholic Leonard Leo weirdos, the libertarian eugenics-loving tech bros, the NRx Dark Enlightenment crew, and the world of finance converge. He has already proved willing to say literally anything, anything at all, to please his whoremasters, but at heart, he is a fascist—potentially Putin to Trump’s Yeltsin.

Facts: Donald is almost eighty years old and pounds overweight; is under enormous stress; looks like complete shit; eats garbage; does drugs; can’t control his bodily functions; and is believed to have been suffering from dementia for a few years now. He has already survived one assassination attempt, and he is about to take a job where one in eleven of his predecessors were murdered on the job, and where, if we count Wilson, exactly one in five have died in office.

Ask an actuary what the chances are that Trump’s still kicking four years from now. Then reverse that number, and that’s the probability that JD Couchfucker will be our 48th president. Not being a lifelong criminal and asset of the Kremlin, Vance may well be an improvement over Trump. And yet, as Hamlet so eloquently (and soliloquy-ly) put it, fear of the unknown “makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of.”

2. Donald Trump
—2024 rank: 1
—2023 rank: 9

Let’s check last year’s blurb:

What’s the worst thing a former president of the United States could do? I don’t know, but selling stolen nuclear secrets to the people who did 9/11 has to be up there. If Jack Smith alleges and then shows, beyond reasonable doubt, that Trump peddled hot intel to the Saudis, how many of his supporters would be persuaded not to vote for him? They’ve stuck with him through the serial rape, the racism, the embrace of white nationalism, the Hitler comps, the insurrection. Would that be enough to puncture the Fox News bubble and move the needle? And if it wasn’t—how would our country survive?

Merrick Garland cooled his jets for a full year before appointing Smith; Aileen Cannon and SCOTUS torpedoed the criminal cases; the legacy media memory-holed the objective fact that his presidential failures cost hundreds of thousands of lives, normalized the insurrection, and sane-washed him at every turn; the Dem establishment shivved Joe Biden and has now apparently completely collapsed; and here we are.

And to answer my own question: The worst thing a former president can do is return to the White House without having to worry about re-election, sell off our state secrets, dismantle our institutions, plunder federal resources on a Mogilevichian scale, lock up his political rivals, crash the global economy, invade Greenland, start a nuclear war, and end American democracy.

How will our country survive? We’re about to find out.

1. Elon Musk
—2024 rank: 5
—2023 rank: 8

In 2023 I wrote:

Once the world’s richest person, still the worst’s boringest, Epic Threadlost $200 billion last year. That’s a fuck-ton of apartheid emeralds. I’ve written extensively about this Pretorian fraud, and made many jokes at his expense, but let me be clear: his ownership of Twitter—and his failed ownership of the libs—will result in countless innocent people dying, in the U.S. and around the world.

That holds up. And last year, this:

Musk has successfully dismantled the most important communication network we had, dispersed the forces working against Trump, shadowbanned his enemies, and promoted his Nazi pals. Already bad, in an election year “X” will only serve to spread disinformation, much of it of the Kremlin variety.

Also spot-on. Now? He’s the richest man on earth; he is an enthusiastic booster of technologies that accelerate climate change; he is besties with Putin, Xi, and MBS; he ardently promotes authoritarian regimes in Germany, France, Great Britain, and the U.S.; he is a soulless husk who lacks even a trace of human empathy; he platforms and amplifies Nazis because he (ostensibly) agrees with them; he (allegedly) abuses ketamine; and he’s the de facto President-Elect, soon to be at the controls of the greatest military the world has ever seen. Elmo is the most dangerous man in the country, the most dangerous man in the world, and quite possibly the most dangerous man in the history of the world.

It’s like this: Musk acquired Tesla; the cars explode. He acquired Space X; the rockets explode. He acquired Twitter; the stock price explodes. Now he’s acquired the United States. You don’t have to be a real genius to spot the pattern and extrapolate what’s likely to happen next. Hell, even Elon could do it.

Happy New Year . . . and Heaven help us in 2025!

Greg Olear (@gregolear) is the L.A. Times-bestselling author of the novels Totally Killer (2009), Fathermucker (2011), and Empress (2022), as well as Success Stories of a Failure Analyst (2023) and 2018’s Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia, which Salon called “required reading for all Americans.” His first two novels have been translated into other languages and have been optioned for screen. His latest book is ROUGH BEAST: Who Donald Trump Really Is, What He’ll Do If Re-Elected, and Why Democracy Must Prevail, now available in paperback and ebook on Amazon and as an audio book at Audible.