Competence questions
Gosh, ya think?
Competence questions pose risk to Trump’s political image
Oh that’s what we’re calling it: competence questions. Polite for “complete driveling idiot who can’t find his own ass in the dark.”
2½ months in, agencies such as the Social Security Administration have struggled to provide basic services. Trump’s team issues edicts, then reverses them. A leaked Signal chat suggests top security officials were unfamiliar with the basics of protecting military secrets.
Crucial government workers have been fired, then rehired. A much-ballyhooed immigration detention center at Guantánamo Bay has faced logistical problems. Trump’s team told laid-off workers at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to contact a particular individual if they felt they were being discriminated against; she turned out to be dead.
Yes, all that, but also his stupidity and ignorance are blindingly obvious and have been all along.
The question facing the White House is whether the Trump team’s struggles with some of the basic functions of governing and management are posing a political threat — or whether Americans, at heart, chose Trump for his ability to break things rather than run them and will accept missteps as the price of disruption.
Yes probably.
A deeper issue also lurks beneath the discussion of governing competence.
Central to Trump’s populist appeal, and perhaps the appeal of all populism, is a disdain for expertise and experience and the notion that a good American with common sense can get things done better than a condescending intellectual or pompous bureaucrat. Some stars of Trump’s circle, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have made careers of asserting that so-called experts do more harm than good.
Yebbut what about intellectuals and bureaucrats who are not condescending or pompous? Can they get things done better than a good American with common sense? Also why compare to a good American with common sense when the issue is Trump? Anyway yes, anti-intellectualism is notoriously central to the American Way of Life, but what explains going for an outright sadistic greedy lying monster is another question.
Trump is not alone among presidents in facing the challenge of demonstrating competence, although in his case it may be highlighted by his repeated extravagant claims about his own abilities — such as saying he does things “no one thought possible” and that “I alone can fix it.”
Ya think?
DJT is not facing any challenge of “demonstrating competence.” He doesn’t care about competence in the least.
And of course, the assumption that being an intellectual or a bureaucrat means automatically that you are pompous. Asking a person to fill out papers before something happens isn’t being pompous, it’s being sensible…that good common sense they keep talking about.
I have worked in the area of Social Security Disability – only one of the people I worked with could be described as pompous, and he was actually more pompous to his colleagues than his clients (he was an asshole, lazy, and highly lauded by administration. He was also a white male, if there is any relationship). I have watched a lot of interactions in other areas; the ‘intellectuals and bureaucrats’ dealt patiently with some of the most difficult clients. They rarely lose their temper, they don’t talk down to people until it becomes obvious that is going to be the only way to get information across to them, and they put up with egregious abuse.
I am SO SICK of this ‘pompous, condescending intellectual’ picture it makes me want to spit. And those who are pompous (Sam Harris comes to mind) are pompous to everyone, not just to those who are ‘average Americans’ or the ‘common man’.