Incompetent or Evil: A False Dichotomy

Trump’s people can be and are both

The amount of damage the second Trump administration has already done on many fronts, from foreign policy to public health to America’s economic prospects, both for the months ahead and in the long run, is astonishing. And they’re just getting started.

But whenever I talk with other people about one of these disasters, I find them arguing about how to think about what’s happening. Are we looking at mind-boggling incompetence on the part of what Dan Drezner, using the technical language of international relations theory, calls “the dumbest motherfuckers alive”? Or are we looking at a sinister plot to destroy America as we know it?

The answer is “yes.” These people are both incompetent and evil.

The big disaster of the week (so far) has been Trump officials accidently sharing secret war planning with the editor of The Atlantic. Somehow including Jeffrey Goldberg in the Signal chat was clearly a fuckup, and an incredible one.

But why were they sharing highly sensitive information over a private messaging app rather than using secure channels? The most likely explanation is that they wanted to evade accountability: texts between government officials are supposed to remain part of the record, while Signal texts can be and in this case were set to disappear. As Phillips O’Brien notes, war planning aside, what the group chat reveals is top officials’ contempt for and hostility toward Europe; some of them opposed an operation against the Houthis because clearing the shipping lanes might help our (erstwhile?) allies.

So the disaster reflected both stupidity and bad intentions. And the same is true of other ongoing disasters, including the shockingly rapid collapse of the Social Security Administration.

As I hope you’re aware, Elon Musk’s DOGE, which is supposedly rooting out fraud and waste, has made Social Security a special target. Musk has done this even though it’s one of the federal government’s cleanest, most efficient programs, and has done an immense amount to reduce poverty among the elderly:

Source: The Conversation

Why is he doing this?

One answer is incompetence. Musk sent his child programmers into the agency and they, not understanding how its databases worked, wrongly reported to him that millions of dead people were receiving benefits. He immediately went big with that claim, and his immense but fragile ego won’t let him admit that he messed up so badly on something so big. So he just keeps making wilder and wilder assertions about Social Security fraud, and in the name of preventing fraud and reducing waste has been rapidly degrading the agency’s ability to serve America’s seniors.

An alternative answer sees the damage to Social Security as part of a deliberate scheme to undermine public faith in government, and to create an opening for lucrative privatization schemes. (It remains notable that DOGE hasn’t so much as hinted about doing something about overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans run by private insurers, which we know are costing taxpayers tens of billions a year.)

On this view, Musk and company see crippling the Social Security Administration as a feature, not a bug, part of their overarching plan to undermine the safety net and make America safe for profiteering.

Which of these views is right? My answer is both. Musk is incompetent and evil. He suffers from billionaire brain — that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything, no need to do any homework. But he also clearly detests anything that makes life better for non-billionaires.

And he shares these traits with Donald Trump, which makes them allies, although I keep wondering when their egos will collide explosively.

Anyway, at this point we should assume that the same combination of incompetence and bad intentions that afflicts national security and budget policy applies to everything the Trump administration touches. Incredibly, quite a few investors and journalists still believe that there’s deep thinking underlying the administration’s trade and currency policy. I guarantee you, there isn’t.

I’ll delve into the “Mar-a-Lago accord” and all that over the weekend, but let’s just say that it’s quite clear, if you know anything about international economics, that these guys have no idea what they’re doing. And all of us will pay the price.

MUSICAL CODA

Or in the case of Pete Hegseth — who is somehow claiming that it’s The Atlantic’s fault — blame Jeff