It's The Stupidity

The 'Very Stable Genius' Is A Danger To Us All

With all of the lying, the corruption, the self-dealing and the hypocrisy that the Trump administration demonstrates on a daily basis, it is sometimes easy to ignore the one overarching characteristic held by every single member of his inner circle. And that is the monumental, breath-taking, almost unfathomable level of pure stupidity that these people possess. From Linda McMahon’s confusion between AI and A1 steak sauce, to Hegseth’s claim that the Strait of Hormuz is open if you just ignore the Iranian gunfire, to Rudy Giuliani’s hilarious booking of a press conference at a garden supply outlet next to an adult book store instead of The Four Seasons, to the displaying of Australian flags around the D.C. area to honor King Charles - you know, the guy from England - their naivete, their obliviousness, and their cluelessness is as obvious as it is maddening.

At first, it’s just laughable. RFK, Jr. gets spotted swimming in sewer water. Alina Habba misses her deadlines or files papers in the wrong court. Trump claims to have made up the words ‘fake’ and ‘groceries’. Or he talks about the activity in the airports during the Revolutionary War. No big deal. It’s funny when stupid people do stupid things.

However, there is a larger concern here. Donald Trump may be the weakest, most insecure man on the planet. He can’t stand to be corrected. He hates being made to look foolish or inadequate. He won’t admit it when he makes a mistake. (Remember ‘covfefe’?) And therefore, he has surrounded himself with people who are just as ignorant as he is. Just as inexperienced in economic, governmental or military affairs. Just as uneducated and just as dismissive of earned knowledge and expertise of any kind. And so we have an entire Cabinet full of rank amateurs. Of course, this would not be an issue if he were simply operating a company, or a foundation or, more believably, a prostitution ring.

But he is the leader of the free world. The inept and spineless sycophants that he has chosen to put into positions of power are actually dangerous now. They were hired specifically for their lack of experience, or even interest, in their new jobs. They were hired to be highly-paid cheerleaders, nothing more. And this comes at a cost, my friends. An observable, definable human cost.

Hegseth has never run an organization in his life, much less one as gargantuan and complex as the US military. And just days into his term, he had already accidentally sent top-secret war plans to various unauthorized people via the Signal chat app. RFK, Jr. questions the efficacy of vaccines and suddenly we have the greatest number of measles cases in 30 years. ICE has arrested dozens of citizens in cases of mistaken identity and sent them off to confinement centers. When DOGE began its slash-and-burn campaign to cut costs, a group of untrained 20-somethings fired 8500 engineers and staff who were in charge of monitoring and maintaining the safe and secure operation of our nuclear facilities all across this country. (Within just a few days, they realized the danger they had put us all in and hired back virtually all of those specialists, in spite of the fact that they had already deleted their contact information from the computer files.)

Estimates are now coming in that as many as half a million people around the world have died as a direct result of the sudden and capricious defunding of USAID. And that number may rise dramatically now that there has been a new outbreak of the Ebola virus in the Africa. Trump, whose own professor in college called him ‘the dumbest goddam student I ever had’, has advised American citizens that bleach and horse tranquilizers can protect one from Covid.

All of these incidents are examples boneheaded missteps and failures that led to actual pain and suffering and sometimes even death for innocent human beings.

It has been said that there is nothing more dangerous than a moron who thinks he’s a genius. We are seeing that thesis unfold in real time. When a president thinks he knows more than the economists and places damaging tariffs on countries all over the globe, bringing financial chaos and economic destruction, that is the real-life danger of ignorance. When he thinks he knows more than the generals and ignores their warnings about the Strait of Hormuz, creating international instability and a worldwide oil shortage, it’s just not funny anymore. It’s often easy to think of Trump as a clown, as mere fodder for late-night comics and satirists, as a ridiculous aberration that will eventually fade away or just die from that long-overdue blood clot. But in the meantime, he and his cadre of colossally stupid minions are putting the entire planet in the gravest danger it has perhaps ever seen.