It s hard not to wonder just how paranoid and/or dictatorial Trump really is. One would think that, since he s the one appointing his cabinet, that he d be able to trust those secretaries to do their jobs according to how he wants them done. Apparently, though, that s not the case. Trump is so ridiculous that he s appointed many White House aides whose jobs are specifically to spy on the cabinet secretaries.All of these people have the title of  senior White House adviser,  and their offices are very close to their secretaries  offices. The point literally seems to be ensuring the cabinet secretaries  loyalty to Trump, seeing as how they report to the Office of Cabinet Affairs and not to the secretaries.But that s not all. That would be bad enough, but the White House has names for some of them that aren t  senior White House adviser.  For instance, the officer who s spying on General Mattis over at the Department of Defense is literally called  the commissar.  That s a reference to Soviet-era Communist Party officials whose task was just to ensure their commanders  loyalty.These people are embedded in every agency from the Departments of Defense and Health and Human Services to the EPA, even to NASA. They are in constant contact with the White House.Obama, Bush and Clinton did not use this kind of spy method to ensure their cabinets did exactly as they were told.And that s nuts. But one former Trump adviser actually thinks this is smart, which just illustrates the level of paranoia and authoritarianism that has existed inside Trump s circles even before he was elected: Especially when you re starting a government and you have a changeover of parties when policies are going to be dramatically different, I think it s something that s smart. Somebody needs to be there as the White House s man on the scene. Because there s no senior staff yet, they re functioning as the White House s voice and ears in these departments. We guess the secretaries themselves just aren t good enough.The funny thing is that the Trump administration is all up in arms about  the deep state,  and the alleged  shadow government  that Obama s supposedly running to oppose Trump. Yet, they re creating their own shadow government with these  advisers  who are supposed to spy on leaders to make sure they remain properly loyal.If Trump can t trust even his own appointees to be loyal without spies like this, then he has no business running the U.S. government. But we already knew that, and this is just the latest thing to prove that Trump is trying to position himself as Supreme Overlord of the United States, or something.Featured image by Andrea Morales via Getty Images