Trump's Confederacy of Incompetents

The three scariest words in the English language right now are “Three more years.”

But I hasten to point out that Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 36 percent, and we were reminded this week that he has not exactly staffed his Administration with anything like the “best and the brightest.”

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Trump’s Confederacy of Stooges

The Trump Admin has obvious and well documented problems with brutality, venality, dishonesty, extremism, racism, and recklessness. The president himself seems to be in some sort of cognitive decline.

But another nagging problem was also on display this week: The gang’s festering competence deficit.

Consider:

• The High School Mean Girl who melted down before Congress is presiding over a DOJ packed with hacks because she can’t find competent lawyers to befoul themselves. (This is a DOJ that relied on former beauty pageant contestant Lindsey Halligan to go after the former FBI director; and a “dance photographer-lawyer” to try and fail to indict six sitting Democratic members of Congress.)

• A bombshell story in the WSJ describes how Kristi Noem and her deplorable paramour, Corey Lewandowski, wrangled over missing blankets, as the Department of Homeland Security descended into backstabbing and chaos (and a shutdown).

• The invasion of Minneapolis ends in shambles and an ignominious retreat that reminds us that history may not repeat itself, but that sometimes it rhymes.

Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.

Meanwhile, speaking of Bumbling Chodes:

• Pete Hegseth, the staggeringly incompetent SecDef who added Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a secret group chat discussing a military strike, lurches from one culture-war distraction to another.

• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is bumbling through his lies about Jeffrey Epstein.

• RFK Jr. — the man in charge of the nation’s health — told us, “I’m not scared of a germ; I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.” (Quips David Frum: “And that’s the kind of smart decision-making now governing the health of your children.”)

• Meanwhile, anytime we get on a plane, we get to white-knuckle the cluelessness of Sean Duffy, the former MTV star turned Secretary of Transportation.

• The goggle-eyed Kash Patel continues to face-plant at the FBI.

In other words: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse turn out to be a Bunch of Asses and a Nag.

**

Even so, (because a clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower) they can continue to do massive (and perhaps irreversible) damage: “Trump Repeals Key Greenhouse Gas Finding, Erasing EPA’s Power to Fight Climate Change” - The New York Times

President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.

The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.

Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.

It’s a rejection of fact that had been accepted for decades by presidents of both parties, including Richard Nixon, whose top adviser warned of the dangers of climate change, and the first President George Bush, who signed an international climate treaty.

Exit take: Sh*t flows downhill. Just yesterday, “Trump Defends Video Depicting the Obamas as Apes: ‘Very Strong Piece’.”¹

**

The Noem Story

You really need to read this whole thing: “A Pilot Fired Over Kristi Noem’s Missing Blanket and the Constant Chaos Inside DHS” - WSJ

Noem’s FUBAR blame-shifting:

“For months, Noem and Lewandowski had demanded that ICE capture its arrests on video for social media—the more dramatic, the better. But more than a week after Pretti’s shooting, Noem and Lewandowski berated Todd Lyons, the acting ICE director, for videos that emerged in Minnesota showing federal officers continuing to tangle with protesters, according to people familiar with the conversation.

Her jealous obsession with Border Czar Tom Homan:

“Noem routinely berated staff if she saw Homan on TV and kept track of both their appearances to make sure she was on TV more than him, according to people familiar with the matter. On at least one occasion, she asked aides to ensure she drew a bigger crowd at a conference than Homan, who was speaking on a different day, one of the people said.”

Corey Lewandowski’s gun fetish:

In an incident last year that rankled some senior staff at the agency, Lewandowski made it known to top ICE officials that he wanted to be issued a law-enforcement badge and a federally issued gun, according to people familiar with his push. Officials are typically only issued a badge and a gun after undergoing law-enforcement training.

The administration was preparing to bring on Tom Feeley, a former top ICE official in New York, as its new director when Lewandowski asked Feeley if he would be willing to issue him and several other political officials badges and guns. Feeley declined, and he was subsequently passed over for the top job at ICE.

Lewandowski next turned to ICE’s legal office for help writing him a legal justification to be issued the badge and gun. A top ICE lawyer, Ken Padilla, also declined to sign off, and days later he was placed on administrative leave. He was later demoted and moved to FEMA, the people said. Padilla declined to comment.

Lewandowski eventually persuaded other lawyers to sign off. The ICE director’s autopen was used to sign the paperwork, the people said.

Noem’s paranoia:

Within DHS, Noem and Lewandowski frequently berate senior level staff, give polygraph tests to employees they don’t trust and have fired employees—in one incident, Lewandowski fired a U.S. Coast Guard pilot after Noem’s blanket was left behind on a plane, according to people familiar with the incident.

And about that blanket…

In the blanket incident, Noem had to switch planes after a maintenance issue was discovered, but her blanket wasn’t moved to the second plane, according to the people familiar with the incident. The Coast Guard pilot was initially fired and told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination. They eventually reinstated the pilot because no one else was available to fly them home.

Exit take: This feels like a kind of simulation: What would possibly go wrong if you named a puppy-killer to head up the nation’s Department of Homeland Security and let her bring along her erratic and creepy boyfriend?

Now we know.

Nota Bene

Russell Moore: “Jeffrey Epstein and the Myth of the Culture Wars” - Christianity Today

Maybe one reason is that Jeffrey Epstein figured out the deep, dark secret of this moment: The people who fight culture wars often believe what they say, but the people who lead culture wars often don’t.

The heiress Leona Helmsley, when accused of defrauding the government, famously said in a moment worthy of Marie Antoinette, “Only the little people pay taxes.” Maybe the Epstein class is telling us, “Only the little people have culture wars.”

David French: “Mass Detention Gets a Lift From the Courts” - The New York Times

Two judges from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a ruling that, if allowed to stand, could result in the indefinite detention of millions of immigrants in inhumane, overcrowded facilities scattered across the United States.

Even worse, these indefinite detentions are in civil proceedings, not criminal, meaning that the people under lock and key are not serving prison sentences for criminal offenses. It’s as if we’re throwing people into overcrowded jails for the legal equivalent of failing to pay a credit-card bill or losing a lawsuit — immigration detention as the new debtors’ prison.

Even worse still, we are subjecting human beings to extended confinement in detention facilities that — if human rights groups, detainees and whistle-blowers are to be believed — are often not up to the standards of America’s prisons or jails. They aren’t even up to the standards we set in my regiment for detaining suspected insurgents in Iraq.

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The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution is one sentence long: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” This single sentence is a pillar of the American constitutional commitment to fundamental human rights.

Tragically, there is now considerable evidence that the administration is violating the Eighth Amendment at scale. We don’t deny bail to criminals who aren’t a flight risk, aren’t missing court dates, or who pose no serious danger to their communities. We let them out while they await trial.

Finally

Friday dogs

We had a visitor last night. (Coyote captured on trail cam.)

Eli is on watch.

1. Trump Defends Obama Ape Video, Staffer Hasn’t Been Punished

Mr. President, have you fired or disciplined that staffer who posted the video from your account that included the Obamas?” asked CBS’s Weijia Jiang.

Trump replied, “No, I haven’t. That was a video on, as you know, voter fraud, and a fairly long video, and they had a little piece that had to do with ‘The Lion King.’ It’s been very well—it’s been shown all over the place, long before that was posted. But that was a very strong, and I’m sure you saw it, very strong piece on voter fraud. And the piece that you’re talking about was all over the place many times, I believe for years.