Morons Are Governing America
MAGA Ushers in the Idiocracy; Bashing Workers, Threatening Allies, Breaking Laws, Planning Trump Resorts in Gaza. Can We Resist Better This Time?
MAGA has a new meaning since Trump returned to the presidency: Morons Are Governing America. By prizing personal loyalty over expertise, experience, trustworthiness, or even basic competence, Trump has surrounded himself with sycophantic idiots rapidly making one bad decision after another.
These are the worst kinds of morons because they’re so blinded by ideological zeal and unearned overconfidence that they don’t even realize how badly they’re fucking things up. Or they just don’t care because they’re actively trying to wreck the country and its capabilities.
Take Elon Musk (please!) He’s certainly smart about some things, such as building up companies with venture capital from his cronies and massive taxpayer subsidies, using social media to manipulate financial markets, and gaining political power by backing a narcissistic, transactional presidential candidate.
But that doesn’t mean Musk knows how the government functions or that his aggressive social media trolling has any basis in reality, as he’s been demonstrating these last few weeks. Musk revels in breaking things, denigrating workers, and riding the edge of failure at his companies. But the stakes are far higher with the U.S. government bureaucracy that Musk boasts of “feeding into the wood chipper.”
Or maybe the richest man in the world is deliberately trying to hobble the federal government of his adopted country so it can never come after his wealth or scrutinize how badly his companies are ripping off taxpayers.
After all, it’s our Moron-in-Chief and the people he appointed to actual high-level government positions — those that require Senate confirmation and must abide by federal conflict-of-interest rules — who gave Musk and his young minions access to our most sensitive national systems and support for callously fucking with career civil servants.
Much of the illegal overreach by Trump and his cabal will be blocked by the courts, but Trump’s rapid-fire idiocy is doing real damage now. Smart, experienced federal prosecutors, FBI agents, military officers, inspectors general, financial regulators, and other key federal employees are being purged at a moment when America faces more threats than anytime in my lifetime.
Our foreign adversaries must be relishing watching Trump’s clown car of incompetents demonstrate their stupidity and ignorance about their own stupidity. It’s a textbook example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which finds that dumb people don’t know they’re dumb, because they’re dumb.
Trump’s surprise announcement that he wants the U.S. to take over Gaza, kick out its Palestinian residents, and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East” — without involving our military because of course everyone would welcome the project — is perhaps the dumbest thing any president in U.S. history has every said.
It’s really not even worth explaining why this is so dumb and wildly unserious and unrealistic, or how his America-first, no-nation-building platform somehow morphed into Make Gaza Great Again when he doesn’t even want to help rebuild Los Angeles after it burned down. It’s best just to slap your palm on your forehead, shake your head, and wait for the next dumb pronouncement.
Another example from this week: Trump ordered the draining of two reservoirs in California’s Central Valley to get more water to Los Angeles, even though no downstream waterways flowed that far and now farmers are pissed that the water they’ll need for irrigation this summer is now gone.
So dumb, but there just weren’t any smart or strong people around to tell Trump what a bad idea it was. So our naked emperor continues to run amuck in his birthday suit, confident that everyone else is impressed by his big brain and flowing golden finery, because all the suck-ups around him won’t dare question him.
Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China — which even the right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board called the “dumbest trade war in history” — were already starting to tank the U.S. stock market when Trump quickly rescinded them.
For all his tough talk, Trump trembles at the idea of rich investors losing money and withdrawing their political support. In fact, the stock market may be the only effective guardrail we have against Trump’s idiocy and imperial overreach.
But at some point, we’ll need to fight back.
Resistance 2.0: So what do we do to counter Trump’s corrupt, dumb, and mean-spirited attacks on government programs, public servants, immigrant communities, and all the other groups he scapegoats for our national decline?
It’s a question lots of folks are wrestling with these days, and there don’t seem to be many good answers. We’re just too dispirited by the dumbest half of this country returning Trump to power, shell-shocked by his blitzkrieg attacks on government, and unhappy with the Democratic Party and other opposition power centers.
It’s good to see anti-Trump protests erupting all over country, something we’re likely to see more of as the year progresses. And I like that many for the protests are taking aim at co-President Elon Musk and his out-of-control, unaccountable attacks on federal programs and workers. Musk is toxic, and increasingly unpopular with Americans, so Republicans should pay a heavy price for giving his so much power.
But sadly, protest seems kinda pointless against an administration that feeds off liberal criticisms and just doesn’t care what most people think. And we remember how the resistance movement against Trump last time ended up dividing leftists and feeding into the popular backlash that Trump rode back info office.
But writer Jill Filipovic penned an excellent analysis in Slate of what went wrong last time and how to improve our playbook called “Can We Resist Better This Time?” She’s critical of how full-time activists coopted the Democratic Party’s big tent, sideline the “wine moms” and other mainstream party supporters, and then divided us up with pointless purity tests and moralizing.
This time around, we need a broad-based resistance movement that welcomes everyone regardless of background, policy differences, or willingness to abide by the pet orthodoxies of various constituents groups of the left. Trump and his MAGA extremists are the enemies, period, and we shouldn’t sham, shun, or cancel any would-be allies.
Last time, identify politics dragged down the Trump resistance movement, and there was a popular backlash against things like stating our pronouns, welcoming all immigrants, declaring U.S. cities to be stolen land, pledging to “defund the police,” and other over-the-top lefty inanities. Progress takes time, and you can’t force it through shame and finger-wagging.
Luckily, Trump 2.0 is so dumb and excessive, so hostile to our government and others around the world, so destined to fail bigly, that we should all be able to agree that its agenda needs to be forcefully opposed by all good and reasonable people. So let’s just focus on that for awhile: what unites us, not what divides us.