Trump fought the law and Trump won
Administrative competence is trumped by total lawlessness.
I’m on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel Picks and Shovels. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND’S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND (May 2, 6PM) and WELLINGTON (May 3, 3PM). More tour stops (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.
The saving grace of the first Trump administration was its administrative incompetence: for every terrible thing Trump I and his henchmen pulled off, ten more awful plots were thwarted because they were so bad at being evil.
Remember the Muslim Ban? It died because Trump repeatedly, publicly said he was banning people from his disfavored “shithole” countries because of their religion. The courts took one look at that and said, “Nope, you can’t discriminate against people on the basis of their religion, it’s right here in the First Amendment.” In court, Trump’s lawyers insisted that they were banning people due to something something security something mumble mumble, but then the other side’s lawyers would just play back the tape of Trump gleefully celebrating the move as a way to keep Muslims out of America.
Trump’s most effective henchmen understood this. Mitch McConnell, for example, played the senate’s procedures like a virtuoso in order to deny Obama a Supreme Court pick, preserving a seat for Trump to fill with a credibly accused rapist.
Then there was Ajit Pai, Trump’s loathsome FCC chair. When Pai wanted to kill Net Neutrality on behalf of the telco monopolists who had funneled millions into the GOP, he didn’t just declare the Net Neutrality rule to be dead. Instead, he worked with the telcoms cartel operatives who flooded the docket with millions of fake comments opposing Net Neutrality, plausibly crossing all his tees and crossing his eyes so that the whole plan had at least the a superficial appearance of legitimacy:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies
But for every Pai and McConnell in the Trump menagerie, there were a dozen Sloppy Steve Bannons, shooting their mouths off in between ads for prepper chow, gold bars, and contaminated testosterone supplements, loudly trumpeting their mens rea into every microphone they could find. And of all the people whose big dumb fucking mouths screwed up Trump’s plans, Trump’s big dumb fucking mouth was the biggest, the dumbest, and the fuckingest.
When the first Trump admin lost the election, Trump found himself repeatedly dragged into court, where his big dumb fucking mouth became a perennial liability, as his own words were used as Prosecution Exhibits A-Z. It seemed like Trump might be getting a lesson in why other people don’t lie, bullshit, and continuously admit their own guilt in public.
No one believed Trump when he disavowed Project 2025 on the campaign trail. I mean, obviously he didn’t read it (Trump doesn’t read anything more challenging than a Fox News chyron) but he definitely was aware of some of its broader contours and was absolutely planning to elevate its architects to positions of real power. The question wasn’t whether Trump supported Project 2025 — it was whether he would have the executive function to implement it in his second term, keeping his big, dumb fucking mouth shut as he did, so that he didn’t create the basis for more court losses.
Of course, Trump has not kept his big, dumb fucking mouth closed. He has vomited up an endless stream of confessions, like when he livestreamed the fact that he’d tipped off his billionaire buddies ahead of a tariff U-turn so they could make billions insider trading:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/officials-explosive-allegations-trump-brags-195506345.html
Trump and his cronies have not acquired even a smidgen of administrative competence. Instead, they’ve embarked on a frenzy of out-of-control, chaotic motion, literally snatching random people off the streets and shipping them to forced-labor camps. Trump isn’t just running a purge on America at large: he’s also busily purging the conservative movement and the GOP of anyone with a hint of administrative capacity.
Far from than figuring out how to do terrible things without technically violating the law, Trump II is a lawless administration, prepared to violate laws, procedures, norms, and the US Constitution.
There are plenty of people of all political persuasions who respect the law, institutions, procedures, courts, and yes, even norms. Many of these people identify as conservatives — a movement with a long history of insisting that it is the home of rule-followers. Trump is the enemy of anyone who values these intangibles.
For Trump, these things are stupid games played by the weak.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/16/weaponized-admin-incompetence/#kill-all-the-lawyers
