Of Course We Knew, or Should Have Known, This Was Coming

Frank Bruni nails it.

NY Times, Frank Bruni, 27 Mar 2025: Trump’s Crackerjack Cabinet Is a Fiasco Foretold [gift link]

It’s been pointed out time and again that Trump’s choices for his cabinet were among the least qualified people to hold those positions, ever.

Who could have imagined it? That Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, of all peacocks, would commit an egregious error in judgment, display a complete lack of professionalism and be sloppy enough to divulge war plans in a group chat that included a prominent journalist?

Sure, there were reports of Hegseth’s gross mismanagement of the veterans’ groups that he once led. There were accusations of public drunkenness and a violent temper. But how many of the men who previously held his job could rock a bright blue suit the way he did? Or pose shirtless to such fetching effect?

What he lacked in rectitude he made up for in pulchritude. Give that man a big say in military operations and a Signal account. What could possibly go wrong?

Trump and MAGA disdain expertise; all Trump cares about is loyalty, and an inclination to wreck things. One more:

And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s immunity inanity — I mean, no one saw that coming. When the Senate held hearings on his fitness to be the secretary of health and human services, he assured lawmakers that his vaccine denialism was overstated. That his views were measured. That his words and deeds would be cautious.

Then came a measles outbreak in western Texas, and he sagaciously decreed: Hey, this isn’t a failure of inoculation. It’s a failure of diet. If those sickly children were just eating better — and maybe taking some cod liver oil — they’d be superheroes resistant to these vestigial viruses. And bird flu? Here’s a thought: Let it run rampant through affected flocks. Yes, it might mutate and spread catastrophically among humans, but perhaps we’d glean important insights along the way. Think of the approach as a new, microbiological season of “Survivor,” only with pathogens in the mix and countless lives on the line.

And then an overview:

As President Trump’s crackerjack cabinet settles in and unsettles any sentient American, we are not beholding a series of discrete embarrassments and outrages. We are witnessing iterations of the same horror story. Trump chose people for senior administration positions not because they had demonstrated the skills and disposition that those jobs required, not because they had paid their dues, not because they had proved their mettle. He wanted provocateurs. He wanted sycophants. He wanted to test his supporters’ compliance and send his detractors into a tizzy.

Competence didn’t enter the equation, so competence isn’t among the results. He got exactly what he paid for, and now a nation is paying the price.

Further examples: Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio.

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Another take. About the corrosion of discourse under the current Republican administration. (Not surprising: they’re the very opposite of intellectuals.)

The Guardian, Emma Brockes, 27 Mar 2025: Let’s put it in language the Signal leakers will understand: what a bunch of pathetic sleazebags, subtitled “The leaking of top-level military secrets was bad enough, but I’m obsessed with Maga’s fratboy lexicon”

The Maga-fication of American political discourse, which started, arguably, with Donald Trump mocking a disabled reporter in 2015, peaked this week with news of Pete Hegseth referring to European countries in the leaked Signal chat as “PATHETIC”, and enjoyed a detour last Tuesday when Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and former running mate of Kamala Harris, appeared at a town hall in Wisconsin and called Elon Musk “a dipshit”. (This is not the first time he has referred to Musk this way. Right before the election last year, Walz told a crowd: “Look, Elon’s on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit.”)

Parking for a moment the perfection of the phrase “skipping like a dipshit” to capture Musk’s very particular style of movement and speech, the range of what can and can’t be said in politics has clearly, radically changed. When you look back on the phrase that caused Hillary Clinton so much trouble in 2016 – “basket of deplorables” – it sounds like a quote from an 18th-century novel. “Take that, sir! You and your basket of deplorables!” Now we have Trump referring to Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor mistakenly added to the Signal chat, as a “sleazebag”, and Hegseth, the US defense secretary, telling JD Vance that he fully shares the vice-president’s “loathing of European free-loading”. We are millimetres away from someone shouting “asshole” across the floor of the Senate.

Further down:

It’s not the rudeness, of course, it’s the flippancy that terrifies. The tone of the messages flying between the most powerful people in the world via an unsecure messaging app and on subjects of vital national security was that of someone idly texting with one hand while throwing and catching a hacky sack in the other.

Again, this is no surprise.

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And the second point to nail is this.

NY Times, Jill Filipovic, 27 Mar 2025: The Group Chat Saga Exposes a Stunning Hypocrisy [gift link]

The writer recaps the story so far. Then:

By the end, it’s hard to figure out what to be most disgusted by. The recklessness? The incompetence? The danger? The use of prayer emojis before weapons were launched?

Add to the list: The mother lode of hypocrisy. After the Trump administration denied that any classified material was shared in the group chat, The Atlantic published the conversation nearly in full, redacting only the name of a C.I.A. employee. If the story was bad before, it’s now worse. And one thing is clear: In Trump world, the rules often — maddeningly — seem to apply only to other people.

The obvious comparison here, already made on repeat, is the Great Hillary Clinton Email Scandal of 2016. (“But her emails!”). As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton ran some of her emails through a personal server, a violation of protocol and a security risk, although one that the State Department later said was minimal. (“There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information,” was the ultimate conclusion from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security after a three-year investigation.)

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Washington Post, Philip Bump, 27 Mar 2025: What the lack of consequences for the Signal scandal means, subtitled “The point of accountability is to reinforce that bad things are bad.”

By the time the Atlantic published nearly the entirety of a group chat in which senior Trump administration officials were presented with detailed plans to strike targets in Yemen, a consensus opinion had emerged: No one from the administration was likely to face any consequences.

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Short items.

Slate, Christina Cauterucci, 27 Mar 2025: The New Lavender Scare, subtitled “The McCarthy-era purge of gays and lesbians in the American government was a uniquely dark episode. Some federal workers see chilling parallels now.”

In the early 1950s there was a campaign by Joseph McCarthy to root out “communists” in the US government, and also homosexuals. This was the Lavender Scare. Recently dramatized on Showtime, in Fellow Travelers (miniseries) with Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey.

Now, it’s about transgenders.

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Dadgum.

JMG, 27 Mar 2025: GOP Rep: Defund NPR And PBS, “They Hate Our Lord”

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Via Nature.

JMG, 27 Mar 2025: POLL: 75% Of Responding Scientists Mull Leaving US