It’s The Incompetence And Stupidity, Stupid
We all forgot how brutally dumb and incompetent this incoming administration will be.
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC – The other morning I woke up at around three, as many of us are. The authoritarian vision that kept me up was the thought of a memorial on the National Mall, lionizing the soon-to-be pardoned insurrectionists. I have no idea if a monument will really be a thing, but my brain and my existential fear for the potential loss of American democracy made me think it might be.
We’re all dealing with sleep-depriving thoughts like this.
Something happened on Tuesday, however, that went a long way toward altering my outlook on what to expect with this incoming fascist administration. Donald Trump appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to run a new government agency: the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE,” named for an annoying meme about a dog from 2013 that went on to become a popular crypto currency.
It’s a stupid name for a stupid non-agency agency run by two very hamfisted weirdos that hardly anyone actually likes. If they say they do, they’re probably lying.
It occurred to me that Elon and Vivek are highly incompetent and their efforts will likely lead to a great big nothing. Let’s start with the obvious: DOGE will be a new federal bureaucracy tasked with downsizing the bureaucracy, with two directors at the top when all other agencies only require one. Off to an excellent start, Donald.
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Any actions to privatize or eliminate government services will be met with vocal protests and a pile of lawsuits, many of which will likely succeed in blocking these two morons. According to CNN’s Steve Vladeck, who’s also a professor of law at Georgetown, “Not sure whether the Elon/Vivek "DOGE" frolic is going to raise more Anti-Deficiency Act issues (by doing stuff) or Federal Advisory Committee Act issues (by proposing stuff).”
DOGE is supposed to draft a report of its recommendations due on July 4, 2026. I’d wager if they deliver anything at all, it’ll be long after that. Meanwhile, Elon will be live-posting his ideas on his janky website for various bots and trolls to evaluate. This is kind of like getting the cast of Cuckoo’s Nest to weigh in on the physics of nuclear fusion. It’ll be a disaster.
Government spending is often based on intense lobbying from the private sector, not to mention very specific spending deals by members of Congress who need these programs to get re-elected. Senators and representatives would rather not go home to campaign during the midterms and find out their state or district lost a bunch of jobs because Elon and Vivek pulled the plug. Furthermore, as soon as regular Americans hear about job losses, potential cuts to, say, Social Security or Medicare, unregulated food and drugs, toxic factory emissions due to gutting the EPA, and so forth, there will be massive pushback. Just ask George W. Bush who tried to privatize Social Security at the beginning of his second term, only to be stopped cold.
I had this funny thought last night: what if Elon and Vivek propose to shut down RFK’s office at whichever health agency he and his brainworm decide to run?
Oh, and back in 2017, Donald assigned his android son-in-law Jared Kushner to do a similar task. Nothing ever came of it. Another thing that Donald promised his gullible fanboys and failed to deliver.
My point is that I completely forgot how brutally dumb and incompetent this incoming administration will be.
It’s just a matter of time before the in-fighting and backstabbing begins, too, with Donald being the worst offender. Remember those screens behind Rachel Maddow with the names of all the former Trump administration officials who were fired and subsequently hectored on Twitter by the former president? Expect that to happen again. Donald doesn’t change and neither will the shit show that follows him everywhere.
I’m in a place where I can’t stand being angry and upset any more. I can’t continue to endow this incoming coterie of Scooby Doo villains with leadership skills they simply don’t possess. Yes, there are going to be damaging things. It’s all damage. His very existence in politics is damaging, even if he didn’t do anything substantive. But sure, he’ll get away with terrible things and real people will get hurt in the process. Even the incompetence I’m talking about will inflict damage – see also the responses to hurricanes and especially the COVID pandemic.
But I’m trying not to get caught in the existential undertow and dragged into a frame of mind where I assume they’ll get away with everything. They’ll get away with a lot, but they’ll also undermine themselves. A lot. Trump always makes things worse for Trump. And my sincere hope is their ungainly failures will outweigh their successful attacks on democracy. It won’t take long for voters to notice the failures, the punitive elimination of government services, combined with the very real potential for higher inflation and economic instability.
Last time around, I compared the Trump administration to that Three Stooges episode where they’re hired to fix the plumbing in a snooty mansion. And of course before long, water spewed out of the stove and lighting fixtures while Curly trapped himself in a cage made of leaking pipes. There’s a strong chance it’ll be like that again. I don’t suspect Donald’s four year hiatus made him more competent. We’ve all seen the decline.
While we should remain extremely vigilant and prepared to confront the threat in whatever ways we can, we also shouldn’t allow ourselves to underestimate how out-of-their-depth and self-defeating they are.
Read an excerpt from the latest for Banter Members:
Vladimir Putin Has 'Kompromat' on Donald Trump
Putin's psychological games with Trump just took a very sinister turn.
by Ben Cohen
Despite an almost decade-long right wing effort to make the Trump-Russia collusion scandal go away, the fact remains that Donald Trump is, and always has been a compromised candidate.
This isn’t just my assertion, but that of the Senate Intelligence Committee that found in 2020 that Moscow posed a “grave” counterintelligence threat to the United States. More specifically, the committee found “breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives”. As former United States Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul wrote:
Far from a hoax, as the president so often claimed, the report reveals how the Trump campaign willingly engaged with Russian operatives implementing the influence effort. For instance, the report exposes interactions and information exchanged between Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik and then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. According to the report, campaign figures “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”
Republicans, the right wing media ecosystem, and Alt commentators like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald led a furious campaign of denial that successfully led to the story being dismissed by the public as a red-baiting “hoax”:
No matter how obvious the evidence, the pro-Trump media insisted what the public was seeing was not what they were seeing, and Trump got away with what would be considered an act of treason for any other politician.
The truth about Trump’s relationship with Russia however, is extremely well documented. And due to an extraordinary event on Russian television this week, we can now be almost certain that the Kremlin has incriminating evidence, or “kompromat” on the next president of the United States…
This is an excerpt from today’s Members Only post. To continue reading, get 50% off a Banter Membership and go here:
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I'm hoping the incompetence protects most. Good perspective, thank you 🙂
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thanks for being so eloquent.