By David Brooks / The New York Times
If a single moment of mind-boggling incompetence could demonstrate the signature flaw of this administration’s first 100 days, it would be the day some of the highest officials in our nation started sending war plans to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic via a Signal chat.
If you create an organization in which everybody has to flatter the ruling narcissist, then stupidity will be the result. If you appoint TV hosts to key government positions, then stupidity will be the result. If you ignore expert opinion — left, right and center — on tariffs, constitutional safeguards, policy toward Ukraine and much else — then stupidity will be the result. If all the members of the administration know they have to suppress unpleasant facts because the narcissist in chief regards unpleasant advice as disloyalty, then stupidity will most surely be the result.
I have to confess, administration officials are not incompetent at everything. They are very good at figuring out where their leverage points are. They can control law firms by threatening their security clearance. They can control the nonprofit world by clawing back grants. If they can control the Department of Treasury payments system, they can control the financial lifeblood that flows through agency after agency.
So they possess a kind of destructive genius. But when it comes time for normal policymaking, improving people’s lives, we are being ruled by people who just don’t know what they are doing.
How do we know? Because prices are still going up. Because chaos is slowing the economy to the point that many economists are predicting a recession. Because China now has an incentive to cut us off from its rare-earth metals, ruining our ability to make a vast array of products. Because government services — on everything from processing food stamp and Social Security payments to renewing passports — are getting worse. Because we are on the verge of losing the race to lead the world in biomedical research.
These are realities that will soon be evident to people who don’t pay much attention to politics. What kind of administration could perpetuate these kinds of blunders? The kind of administration that would put a journalist on a bunch of national security messages, day after day, and not even notice.
Governing, like surgery or hitting a curveball, is hard. It doesn’t matter what your governing philosophy is if your competence is lacking.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c. 2025.
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