Fridays in Trumpland: 2.28.2025
It’s the Incompetence, Stupid, or Whoopsie! Ebola!
The first Trump administration was characterized by what had been, at least up until that point, some of the worst incompetence in government leadership we’d ever seen.
Who can forget Sean Spicer screaming about crowd size from the press briefing room? Steve Mnuchin holding up a page of printed money, glowering at the camera with his Bond villain level third wife? Trump’s own recommendation to inject bleach to combat Covid?
This time around, though, it’s way worse.
What has become clear this week is that almost no one in this cabinet has a clue what they’re doing– least of all the unelected, Appointments-clause-evading, non-head-but-definitely-head-of-DOGE Elon Musk.
This week, he ran an entire cabinet meeting despite not being in the cabinet, as actual cabinet members with some basis for their experience (like Marco Rubio) squirmed like boiling frogs for 50+ straight minutes of monologue.
In the middle of it, Musk let out a breathtaking confession: that one of the things his hatchet-job Nazi Youth Brigade had cut in all their ignorance about the functions of government was USAID’s Ebola prevention programs. Whoopsie!
He then claimed it had been restored, which turned out to be false.
And then there were cuts at the VA, which were quickly reversed when it was discovered that critical medical services for vets were among the cuts. This is not the first time they’ve cut things that mattered, allegedly without knowing what they were cutting, and it will doubtless not be the last.
In the middle of all this, Republicans in the House advanced a budget resolution that will slash Medicaid, which pays for 42% of all births in the United States, SNAP benefits which feed the poorest Americans, and possibly Medicare as well.
Just because they’re incompetent doesn’t mean they’re not also evil.
One thing that really bothers me about abject wealth– the kind of wealth that puts men above the law and men in positions of power they do not deserve and aren’t qualified for– is that it has a way of eroding common sense.
Surely to be so wealthy he must be a genius, or so the thinking goes. No one can get that rich without being smart.
I beg to differ.
We are a nation where white men fail up all the time, where “luck” is actually made through backroom favors and deals and old white boys networks, where those who were born into emerald importing and South African white apartheid get imbued with an aura of remarkable smarts without any proof.
Anyone looking at the trajectory of America over the last five weeks knows that Elon has no idea what he’s doing. I mean, does anyone think he’s actually qualified to “modernize” the FAA, as but one example?
That’s not stopping him though.
At least at this moment folks seem to be waking up. As unemployment rises and everyday government jobs are lost around the country, as life-saving benefits that disabled, poor and elderly Americans rely upon go onto the chopping block, more and more of us are becoming enraged– and not just on the left.
This week, on a phone call with a client, I heard a story about her work at a local food bank in a predominantly poor Black area of South Carolina. Last week, she said, there was a much larger than usual line, and in the line were many more white folks, some in MAGA hats, than she had ever seen before.
“They are angry,” she said of the white folks, as they wait in line for food they can’t afford to buy now. “Very, very angry.”
“At whom?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I wonder where all that anger goes.”
MAGA is armed to the teeth. And when they realize what’s been done to them at the hands of their leader– well, that’s going to be a powderkeg moment for America.
I want to be clear about this: It’s not just the incompetence of this Administration that will be its undoing. There’s no letting these folks off the hook for who they are and what they’re after.
This week, they banned trans folks wanting to travel to the US from obtaining visas. Period, no exceptions.
They banned all trans people from serving in the military. Period, no exceptions.
The State Department began returning passports to trans folks that reflect their assigned gender at birth rather than their correct gender, subjecting any trans people who travel to potential threat, persecution, and even death.
Blackwater made a $25 billion proposal to set up concentration camps for immigrants on US military facilities and for its own private police force (notwithstanding its murderous mercenary history).
The Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a Trump appointee in the first term, was fired for no reason other than an old video in which he described his experiences as a Black man in America and in the US military after George Floyd’s murder.
And Trump/Musk’s consolidation of power continued as the OMB demanded reductions-in-force government wide, with plans to be submitted by the second week in March, so that only loyalists remain.
They. Are. Fascists. Full stop. They are showing us that daily. Sometimes incompetent fascists, but bone deep evil fascists nonetheless.
Court decisions continue to rain down in an attempt to stop them, on so many fronts it’s hard to keep track.
But the long and the short of it is that we have yet to see how this all breaks open— what will happen to America when the rage, disease, poverty, hunger, raging inflation, rising unemployment, end to Medicaid and SNAP and veterans benefits, and the full-scale descent into what Musk this week referred to as a “post-Apocalyptic” nation becomes reality.
The incompetence won’t save them in the end.
“Just following orders” didn’t work at the Nuremberg trials either.
The Nazis did not run the Nuremberg trials. Big difference now.
Truman appointed Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert H Jackson to be the chief prosecutor.
Given what Trump has done to the Joint Chiefs and Bondi in DOJ, not following illegal orders will not be a colorable defense. It has been cooked into the pie.
As usual, tapping the collective anger of the American psyche for their incompetence. Powderkeg is a good way to describe our country righr now. And after watching the obscene meeting between 47, vp and President Zelensky, I'm ashamed and embarrassed to be an American. Absolutely disgraceful!!