Alas

     One of the problems with figurative language is that you set out to describe a regime composed of cranks, crooks and grifters, and instead find yourself insulting noxious, loathsome toads, a largely harmless class of amphibians who benefit us by consuming deleterious insects.

     Linguistic flights of fancy can be great fun, but bad and dangerous people are what they are; comparing them to other dislikeable things only obscures the evil acts they enable and commit.

     If prominent members of the Trump maladministration would commit themselves to consuming at least their own weight in harmful insects every year, I might grudgingly find they were of some use.  This, however, is unlikely; they are indeed useless excrescences at best, like warts or skin tags.