The End of Governance?
By The Trump administration has finally decided on an authority for reimposing tariffs. It has decided that every major trade partner is failing to follow U.S. standards for landing goods made by forced labor, and thus must be subject to the same 10–15 percent import duties that the Supreme Court previously struck down. Marco Rubio defended the decision to exclusively admit white South African refugees on the grounds that “everything we do has to be geared by the national interest, and it is in our national interest if we are allowing people to enter our country — be people who can quickly assimilate into society and be successful.”
The Secretary of Defense is personally limiting the promotion of officers who lack the “warrior ethos,” i.e., women and black people:
Mr. Hegseth had been pressing senior Army leaders, including Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, for months to remove the officers’ names, military officials said. But Mr. Driscoll, citing the officers’ decades-long records of exemplary service, had repeatedly refused.
Earlier this month, Mr. Hegseth broke the logjam by unilaterally striking the officers’ names from the list, though it is not clear he has the legal authority to do so. The list is currently being reviewed by the White House, which is expected to send it to the Senate for final approval. A few female and Black officers remain on the list, military officials said.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon “appointed a rioter convicted for his role in 6 January, 2021 insurrection to a sensitive national security role dealing with counterterrorism, overriding insiders’ concerns about his past record.” But at least Elias Irizarry, who graduated from the Citadel after his conviction, has some hands-on subject-matter expertise. The only qualification that our new acting Director of National Intelligence brings to the table is his unwavering devotion, one unconstrained by such minor inconveniences as federal law, to persecuting Trump’s enemies. At least his appointment may “jeopardize the passage of a key government spy powers renewal just as lawmakers were closing on a deal.”
In a post chronicling the collapse of the U.S. federal workforce, Daniel Drezner notes that the CIA apparently stopped sharing its reports with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence while Tulsi Gabbard was still DNI.
Here is the tell about the decline in the quality of Trump’s second-term team: in most of these reports, Ratcliffe comes across as the sober, reasonable one. During Trump’s first term, however, Trump had to withdraw Ratcliffe’s nomination to be the Director of National Intelligence in 2019 due to skepticism in the intelligence community and the U.S. Senate about his qualifications. He eventually squeaked through a year later, but a brief glance at his Wikipedia entry shows that he was accused of using his position at ODNI to declassify documents that attempted to impugn Hillary Clinton.
Everywhere one looks, the U.S. government is imploding under the weight of incompetence. The U.S. played a key role in containing past Ebola outbreaks. After destroying USAID and ending routine cooperation with the World Health Organization, the Trump regime has little to offer except bad policy decisions. Trump, perhaps in an effort to pressure Iran to come to terms, told CNBC that “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly… I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less,” as “the protracted discussions [had] ‘started to get very boring.’” Soon after, Iran launched a wave of attacks on U.S. allies.
Paul Krugman surveys the accumulated wreckage and concludes that “Trump has given up on governing.” He writes that:
Pulte is a bumbling hatchet man: so far none of his attempted lynchings have succeeded. But for Trump, willingness to engage in unethical behavior is all that matters.
What will Pulte do as America’s senior intelligence official? You might think that even someone like Trump, who has no desire to serve the national interest, who sees wars only as ways to enrich himself and distract from his domestic woes, would want accurate intelligence. After all, if you’re going to wag the dog, you don’t want the dog to bite back the way it has in Iran.
But Trump appears to have given up on governing — even governing aimed at consolidating his own power and legacy. He wants to punish everyone he imagines has wronged him but has lost all interest in making the government work, even for nefarious purposes. So he don’t need no intelligence, just someone who will indulge his rage. And that will be Pulte’s job.
Krugman is right on the merits. As he puts it, the far-right ideologues on the administration continue to implement their agendas, but “Trump himself is, at this point, little more than a festering ball of anger and hate.” The problem with his analysis is straightforward: this is what governance looks like in a regime that combines personalism, kleptocracy, and fascism. The people running the country into the ground don’t believe in “the public interest” — or at least one that the majority of Americans would recognize as such. A different MAGA regime might be less personalist and less kleptocratic, but it would still promote oligarchic rent-extraction while ruling in the name of the herrenvolk.
Today is the last day of the fundraiser, which is apparently going pretty well. This worriers me. I am trying (once again) to return to regular posting, yet all evidence suggests that LGM does better without my sorry contributions. Help prove me wrong!
