Yves here. This short Dean Baker post says even more than he intends. Why has there not been more uproar about the jokes masquerading as administrators that Trump has installed in the Cabinet and other top posts? Because, as we and others (particularly Aurelien) basic managerial “put one foot in front of the other” skills have been catastrophic decline over the last two decades. I am stunned to now look somewhat charitably upon the likes of Hank Paulson, Timothy Geithner, and Ben Bernanke in the runup to and after the financial crisis. Even though they flailed about and sought only to address proximate problems so as to preserve a rotting status quo, they did so with some appreciation of what they were up against and so eventually were able to stumble their way through to an end-state that worked for them. We have nothing like even that limited level of skill operating anywhere at senior levels.
And why has that become acceptable? The only thing I can fathom is fear in the ranks of the press and the business community. I recall having readers say during Brexit that the business community held back from expressing their considerable, fact-based reservations about the way Brexit was evolving into the hardest form possible out of fear of retaliation by the Government. The press has also become cowardly. The Conversation has a new article, ABC’s and CBS’s settlements with Trump are a dangerous step toward the commander in chief becoming the editor-in-chief, which details how both networks capitulated to Trump suits when the odds of them prevailing in court was very high. The piece also points out how past Presidents tried to muscle the media and got less far. A lesson here is that the press is more than ever run like a business and not with a sense of editorial mission, which would result in relishing fights with power where the publisher has a winning case. The press that published the Pentagon Papers is long dead. And that is a big driver in the rise and continued failing upward of abject mediocrities like Keir Starmer and Kamala Harris. The Trump team does represent a ratchet down, but it’s on an established trajectory.
And as readers will also appreciate, “People will die” is a feature, not a bug, per Lambert’s second rule of neoliberalism.
By Dean Baker, the co-founder and the senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of several books, including “Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better bargain for Working People,” “The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive,” “The United States Since 1980,” “Social Security: The Phony Crisis” (with Mark Weisbrot), and “The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer.” Originally published at Beat the Press; cross posted from Common Dreams
We all know and expect that a president’s top appointees are picked in large part because of their willingness to carry out a president’s agenda. But usually these are people with some experience in the areas that they are overseeing. Insofar as this is not the case, they can generally rely on the high-level career officials in the departments or agencies under their control to make sure that necessary tasks get accomplished.
Unfortunately, this is not the case now. The main and possibly only qualification for Trump’s top appointees is the ability to tell blatant lies with a straight face. He has picked people who not only have no background in the areas they oversee, they don’t even have the most basic understanding of their responsibilities. And in many cases they have fired or marginalized the career people with expertise.
Starting at the top, Trump picked a former Fox talk show host with a drinking problem, Pete Hegseth, to be his Secretary of Defense. Secretary Hegseth apparently didn’t know that he shouldn’t be making war plans on unsecured channels and without knowing who was included in the conversations. He apparently also didn’t know that his wife should not be included in the discussions.
Hundreds of people just died in Texas because of this failure, and we are virtually certain to see far worse in the future.
Trump has a Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, who claims he doesn’t know that tariffs (import taxes) are taxes. Since tariffs are among the oldest form of taxes, long predating the income tax, this is a pretty elementary point that a Treasury Secretary would be expected to know.
Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, didn’t know what habeas corpus is. Since that is basic right guaranteed by the Constitution, it would be rather important for the person controlling the largest federal police force to be familiar with the concept.
While knowledge of their areas may not be a strong point for top Trump officials, lying in front of TV cameras is an area of real expertise. We see this constantly.
We just saw Attorney General Pam Bondi tell us that there is no Jeffrey Epstein client list. This was after telling us back in February that the list was sitting on her desk and promising that it was soon to be released.
After Trump released his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which included a steep tariff on the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insisted this was not a mistake and an indication of a rushed job. Instead, he said the tariffs were necessary to prevent transshipment from other countries to escape the taxes Trump was imposing.
This is obviously an absurd claim since there were many uninhabited islands that escaped taxation. In addition, while the problem of transshipment to avoid tariffs is real, it is not one that can be solved by putting a tariff on imports from islands inhabited by penguins and seals.
China and other countries whose exports are subject to high tariffs can and will ship them through countries that face much lower import taxes. If our customs agents can’t recognize that we are not actually importing cars and television sets from uninhabited islands, they surely will not be able to detect that the goods coming from Thailand or Indonesia were actually manufactured in China.
Trump appointees do have a remarkable ability to lie. RFK Jr. can tell us that discouraging people from getting the measles vaccines has nothing to do with the largest measles outbreak in decades. They all tell us that we can reduce Medicaid spending by $800 billion over the decade (roughly 10 percent), without throwing anyone off the program. And former DOGE boss Elon Musk told us 20 million dead people were getting Social Security benefits.
But it seems that none of them can do their jobs, and since they have fired or sidelined most of the high- level civil servants with expertise, these jobs are not getting done. Hundreds of people just died in Texas because of this failure, and we are virtually certain to see far worse in the future. As much as Trump might insist otherwise, incompetence is not a virtue.
Trump’s top appointees weren’t selected for their ability to tell blatant lies with a straight face. They were selected for their personal loyalty to Trump and not nebulous things like the Constitution or even the country. First time around he had people like Mike Pompeo, William Barr, Betsy DeVos, Gina Haspel and Nikki Haley on his team. My own guess is that he thought that they were all ‘tough guys’ and he had a big thing for tough guys then. But being tough did not carry automatically over into competence and certainly not loyalty as Trump found to his cost. So this time around he is going for personal loyalists – to him. If you spent time defending Trump during his wilderness years from 2021 to 2025, then that gave you a big in for a top appointment. It was all about loyalty and for people to stick by whatever he said as Tulsi Gabbard found to her cost when she committed the high crime of disagreeing. You see this with him and golfing buddy Lindsay Graham who is ‘always there for him’ and so takes his advice. Trump is the great decider who is going with his instincts rather than advice by his Cabinet members who will not disagree with him. This being the case, he could have cardboard cut-outs for his Cabinet – so long as they were loyal to him and enacted whatever agenda he decides on.
Trump proclaiming himself touched by – The Deity – in saving his life and thus choosen[tm] too make America Great Again, during a public video, today on The White House broadcast ….
1:08
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoYnn444ECo
Wellie he did in his first term get real chummy with the evang faith healer wealth set, with upgrades since.
I’m calling Aristocrats with a rim shot …
Here flood risks have often been expressed as “20 year flood” or “100 year flood” – a highly misleading description, as people can, and do experience such floods in successive years, as in the Severn valley in recent times, but this doesn’t help residents or insurance companies assess risk at all.
Much of the data here is historic too – in most of the northern UK, annual rainfall is 10% higher than 1990, but with 5% more rain days, which confirms that periodicity is changing too.
There is now a new measure which tries to show how rainfall intensity is changing. This newish criterion compares rainfall events with monthly averages, so say a 50mm overnight rain storm in an area with 90mm monthly average shows a concentration of rainfall that may well cause localised flash flooding. Here in Scotland we are now seeing 150mm rainfall events in winter months, such is increased intensity.
Changing rainfall seasons, even in areas now with lower annual precipitation due to climate change, can predict longer periods of saturated ground and increased vulnerability to flooding, but the rate of change in rainfall patterns is unpredictable in terms of modelling, so unless regulatory agencies are properly funded, then the risks to the public are massively increased.
Tories between 2010-2024 cut Environment Agency budgets by c.60%, just at the same time as weather patterns were changing.
Boiling frog syndrome especially applies to the political class, they are so short termist, they defer on risk assessments, and cut amelioration and adaptation as its an easy target. This institutional failure is inbuilt within neoliberal mindsets.
Add the nihilistic attitudes of free market, small state dogmatism and you have all the preconditions for regular failure in environmental management, let alone disaster management.
As you sow so shall you reap.
Trump appointees do have a remarkable ability to lie.
They sure do. But surely this post is simply confirmation of the earlier post “What Does the US’ Increasing Emulation of Israel Augur for the Country’s Future?”
Israeli spokespersons and politicians literally lie about everything. No surprise then, that spokespersons and politicians in the west are increasingly doing exactly the same.
Having lived in the U S of A during the years after the passage of the Patriot Act, until 2021 (Biden administration), I’m leery, after what I have seen, of proposing that Trump is especially incompetent.
First, internally, almost all U.S. companies are rigid, hierarchical, inflexible, and slow to change. I have worked in publishing for years — a sector that is supposedly loosey-goosey — and I’ve seen plenty of top-down management in action. And if you don’t like it, you can head to Human Resources, which will be happy to curtail your health insurance (which is a workforce-disciplinary measure, not a benefit).
Second, what is happening, particularly since Obama, is a change in capitalism. If possible, globalized capitalism is more and more predatory. Cruel managers and deliberately uninterested boards of directors are rewarded handsomely.
All of which is to say, Kristi Noem served as a U.S. rep for four terms and supposedly has a degree in political science. She knows what habeas corpus is.
Scott Bessent worked for Soros for years. He knows what a tariff is.
Pam Bondi knows what the law requires.
I am reminded of the attempts in the past to portray Hillary Clinton as the Most Qualified Candidate Ever, and I saw the more recent attempts to pretend that Biden was cogent and the Kamala Harris was up to the job. And one must not forget Pete Buttigieg, future of the Democratic Party, secretary of transportation known for his successes with the railroads, Amtrak, Boeing, and residents of East Palestine.
The issue isn’t competence so much as their training as U.S. business types. They believe that management is always correct. By and large, they believe that White Is Right. And they believe in “controlling labor costs” by mistreating their employees and destroying the unions.
Many of them are also practitioners of something I saw with plenty of lawyers: It isn’t a conflict of interest until you get caught.
This is an “ethic.” Incompetence? I”m not sure. Predatory capitalism reinventing itself? Look at the explosion of subsidies for war profiteering in the US of A and Europe.
Incompetence is easily found, just by marking words spoken in public or in a press interview. For one example of many to cite from the Biden administration…I paraphrase former DHS Secretary Mayorkas circa mid year 2023. Beneath I’ll add my short hit list or best of since Bush 41. American leadership in full display as imperial decline hastens the pace, my two cents.
Quoting Mayorkas, in an ABC interview…”Our southern border is secure.”. The lie may indeed had a kernel of truth but since that time it’s obvious a blatant lie. Back to the article, sorta meh since it is by Dean Baker. People indeed also died in hurricane Helene, and damage in NC was catastrophic; but that under team Blue. Memories are just so very short including my own…
Bush 43,. Mission Accomplished.
Clinton. It depends on what the word means, Or I had no sex with that individual.
Powell. Iraq has the WMD. Trust the US intelligence for certainty.
Yes, but what if the U.S. business ethic is founded upon the Peter Principle? Sycophancy. The banality of empire.
Even before Trump, cabinet posts were a reward for support. If the cabinet should only include people with practical experience, then this rule should be clearly established instead of left to the president’s discretion.
the rise and continued failing upward of abject mediocrities
what a perfect line. thank you, yves.
From Yevs intro,
>A lesson here is that the press is more than ever run like a business and not with a sense of editorial mission, which would result in relishing fights with power where the publisher has a winning case. The press that published the Pentagon Papers is long dead.
Indeed, it’s a worldwide problem, here is corporate ownership of media today:
Wikipedia first:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_conglomerate#:~:text=Examples by country,-Further information: Media&text=In the 2024 Forbes Global,Global completing the top four.
From 2016 so it’s dated, but has it gotten any better?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-billionaires-own-americas-news-media-companies/
From Politico:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/18/is-wall-street-to-blame-for-the-collapse-of-newspapers-00141920
From 6 years ago:
https://vizworld.com/2019/12/who-owns-the-news-united-states-infographic/
A fair amount of the time now reporters are just stenographers.