In the beginning
Remember when Trump said that he would only have the very best people working in his administration. Man! He said it lots of times. Yep he was only going to hire the best! Those were the days!
That never happened.
Recurring theme
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in the news awhile back. It seems that the State Department lost a $5,800 bottle of whiskey that the Japanese gave to him (Our government). He made a comment to a news outlet that I thought was telling and indicative of the entire Trump Administration.
“I assume it wasn’t ever touched. It never got to me. I have no idea how the State Department lost this thing, although I saw enormous incompetence at the State Department during my time there,” the former secretary of state said during an appearance on Fox News. “Had it been a case of Diet Coke, I’d have been all over it.”
I believe him that he didn’t steal the whiskey. But that isn’t the issue. Pompeo said that he saw “enormous incompetence” at the State Department during his time there. Not just your average old regular incompetence but “enormous incompetence” at the department that he was in charge of. He insulted the very people that worked for him.
Shouldn’t we have had some trickle-down best here? Shouldn’t he as one of the best have been able to bring competence? Did his enormously incompetent department headed by him negotiate the agreement with the Taliban?
That explains some things.
Easier said than done.
One of my first observations about the Trump Administration was the lack of quality in press releases and written communications from the White House. I’m referring to Trump’s staff not the clerks. And by lack of quality I mean just basic stuff like grammar and typos. I don’t say this as any kind of expert since I have a lot of help with the technical aspects of writing. For me though what we were seeing was a harbinger of the much larger picture that was developing of the administration.
Instead of hiring the best, President Trump had the highest turnover of people at all levels of his administration in Presidential history according to what I’m reading. I question that a little bit since the physical nature of government has changed so much over the years. But for sure we can go back as far as Reagan for a more accurate comparison. Trump is the hands-down winner for decades.
Not only did the “best” resign or get fired, sometimes in mere days, Trump then insults them as he is wont to do on their way out and after they’ve gone. They immediately become losers and incompetent in Trump-naming. Also a record number of the people that he eliminates come back and call him names right back, usually insulting his intelligence and competence.
Since they started out being the best …
… shouldn’t we believe them?
Back to themes
Another recurring theme is that the men and women that Trump put in charge immediately started taking apart the agency that they were put in charge of and making it worse. He put people in charge of departments that they were either antithetical to or unqualified to head. Dejoy, a Trump holdover still in charge of the United States Postal Service (USPS) continues downgrading the USPS and making it less able to accomplish the mission of delivering the mail in a timely manner. Devos was pro-school vouchers and anti-Department of Education for all practical purposes. Carson was an unqualified disaster as Secretary of Housing and Urban development as he gutted programs designed to help the poor. Another Republican theme.
We had four years of Trump and the Republican Death Cult (RDC) taking government apart, making it less efficient and basically not working. They were inept. For the RDC this was a success story.
Then the pandemic hit and the Federal response was desultory at best. The Federal response to the mishandling of the pandemic from the beginning bears sad witness to their success in dismantling our government and is a wretched testimony to their success that is measured in the hundreds of thousands of lives needlessly lost.
They are the best at death and denial.