The Trump Plan: Unchecked Power to Total Jerks

The Trump administration is claiming powers in both domestic and foreign affairs that vastly exceed those of prior presidents. He bases his claim on his unprecedented “mandate” in which he did not get even a majority of the votes. His popular vote victory margin was less than Hillary Clinton’s margin in her Electoral College loss to Trump in 2016. But facts mean little to Trump and his followers.

This is a big problem. We probably would not want to see unchecked powers going to any presidential administration, no matter how competent, but it is especially dangerous in the hands of incompetents who often do not have a clue.

The displays of incompetence in Trump’s first 80 days are endless. The most visible was the war-planning session, involving all the top military and intelligence officials (except Trump), conducted over Signal. And they apparently did not even know their guest list since they included a senior editor/reporter from Atlantic Magazine. This would have led to an immediate impeachment resolution and likely actual impeachment under Biden.

But this is just the beginning. We have Elon Musk running around with his chainsaw, wrecking one government agency after another.

Musk apparently could not be bothered to take even a few minutes to learn about the agencies he was sawing through. For example, he immediately offered buyout plans to encourage retirements even at agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration, which already had a serious shortage in many key positions, like air-traffic controllers.

He decided the entirety of USAID was waste, fraud, and abuse, seemingly without knowing that it supported an AIDS program in Africa (PEPFAR) that had saved the lives of tens of millions of people. Incredibly, Musk insisted that no one had died because of his cuts.

Musk’s greatest idiocy involves Social Security. He discovered their inactive files and immediately began screaming about tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security. This was absurd. The Social Security Administration (SSA) knew these people were dead and almost no one on Musk’s list was getting benefits. They didn’t clean up their files because it would cost millions of dollars to do it and cleaning the files would not affect the operation of the program. In the interest of efficiency, they decided not to waste the money.

Then Musk discovered that we have 4-year-old kids getting Social Security benefits, which he quickly touted as more evidence of fraud. Apparently, Musk didn’t know that children of deceased workers are eligible for benefits, a feature of the program that most of us think is pretty good.

Musk also got the brilliant idea of ignoring privacy laws and entering a number of legal immigrants as dead on the Social Security files. (These files are not supposed to be used for anything other than Social Security, except for some rare exceptions.) Being listed as dead makes it almost impossible for them to work, have a bank account, or credit card. The idea was to force these people to leave the country.

Supposedly these people were all suspected of terrorism or had criminal records. That doesn’t seem to be the case. One of the newly dead people was just 13.

Musk then went to look at the unemployment insurance system and did the same sort of idiocy. He found tens of thousands of obvious frauds, people who were well over one hundred years old. It turns out that these people had already been identified as having committed fraud and were not receiving benefits. The decision was made to keep them on file, with explicitly impossible birthdates, to protect against someone using the same phony identification that was initially used. Again, a few minutes of homework might have saved Musk much embarrassment.

(I’ve had many people point to Musk’s great business successes to tell me he is not an idiot. I don’t have any idea or interest in Musk’s IQ. The fact is, he does and says many idiotic things, which is what I am interested in.)

Musk’s co-president, Donald Trump is certainly no better. His latest tariff tantrum is the most obvious example. He was ostensibly planning his “retaliatory” tariffs for weeks. But when he finally presented them on “Liberation Day,” they bore no relationship to any tariffs or trade restrictions that countries imposed on our exports. In fact, Trump even imposed tariffs on uninhabited islands off the coast of Australia. Incredibly they even got the academic work they cited in their tariff formula wrong.

When the tariffs had the predictable effect on the stock market, Trump quickly retreated and reduced most of his tariffs, except the one on goods imported from China which he hugely raised. Trump then insisted he had planned to roll back his “Liberation Day” tariffs all along.

The worst incident of Trump’s incompetence is probably his deportation of immigrants to serve indeterminate sentences in a hellhole prison in El Salvador. Supposedly these people were ruthless gang members who had committed heinous crimes. Clearly this was not the case for many of them. At least one was sent there based on tattoos that had nothing to do with gang membership, and was here going through the legal process of applying for asylum.

If this person, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the others had the opportunity to have a normal immigration hearing, where they could present evidence, the mistake likely would not have been made. But that is not the way Trump and his team operate. They don’t care about the evidence; they just do what they want.

What makes the Musk-Trump’s team incompetence even worse is that they don’t know how to admit a mistake. Any normal person, when realizing the horrible error in sending a completely innocent person to a terrifying prison, would try to correct it as quickly as possible. Instead, these pathetic power-hungry men can’t even acknowledge the most obvious mistakes. (Musk still has not apologized for his idiocy about 20 million dead people getting Social Security.)

So we are left in a situation where we see completely incompetent people grabbing ever more power to do whatever they feel like. That is not good.