Only the Worst People
Where are those professional politicians when you need them?
Donald Trump has just demanded the “unconditional surrender” of Iran. This is farcical on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin. But we must try.
Trump launched this war saying it was not about regime change. Or was that performative Pete? But then didn’t Trump exhort the besieged Iranians to rise up and something or other? Or is the war about re-obliterating the threat we obliterated last year? Or is it that Iran was about to rain nuclear warheads on Mar-a-Largo? Or is it (the Rubio narrative) to pre-empt counterattacks we knew would follow Israel’s attack?
And surrender to whom? Netanyahu? The UN? The Allied Expeditionary Force?
Remember when people use to vilify “professional politicians” and “experts”? It’s way past time to reconsider. Let off its congressional leash, the Trump junta has demonstrated one important thing: the perils of transferring power from professionals to amateurs. A rough analogy would be booting the pilot from the cockpit and installing the loudest know-it-all passenger. You might end up in a hot mess of twisted fuselage and runway foam, but at least you’d have told the experts where to put it.
It’s worth recalling that long before the MAGA Times there was a land far away where folks understood why government was staffed by full-grown adult people with high-fallutin’ degrees from places like Georgetown and the London School of Economics. No one took offense that the Oval Office and its adjacencies were staffed by civic-minded grownups who read daily briefings, enjoyed books and employed serial thinking.
People like George Marshall and McGeorge Bundy. They sometimes got things wrong, but for the right reason: because the world is full of unpredictable moving parts and unknowable contingencies that even smart people can’t fully anticipate, and because you’re always deciding whether to green-light the Bay of Pigs or terminate Osama bin Laden on tight deadlines with incomplete information. But it’s precisely because failure risk comes with the territory that you field the best players, not the backups and the theatrical careerists.
“The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them,” wrote humorist Samuel McChord Crothers. To which MAGA answers with Mark Twain: “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”
Once you’ve mastered that invaluable technique, you can turn Alex Pretti into a terrorist and J6 hooligans into freedom fighters. Any MAGA flunky can do it. Indeed, they must do it to keep a spot on the team. As Kristi Noem has just demonstrated in spades, what advances a MAGA career is not competence and maturity but servility. It’s OK to pilfer taxpayer funds for million-dollar ego vids, rendition people with no due process and defend murder in the streets, but offend the spray-tanned sultan-child and you’re instant road-kill.
To make up for the colossal hiring error Noem represented, Trump is duty-bound to choose a successor with impeccable professional qualifications — a seasoned, level-headed public administrator who understands the meaning of civic responsibility.
So naturally he’s chosen — a former MMA fighter and take-it-outside brawler with no national-security experience, which seems to be the critical qualification for Trump’s NATIONAL SECURITY chiefs. Maybe Markwayne Mullin is MAGA’s idea of a DEI hire. Whatever he is, it takes the wit of Charles Pierce do him justice, so:
Until the people of Alabama sent Tommy Tuberville to the U.S. Senate, Markwayne Mullin was a strong contender for the title of Dumbass di tutti Dumbasses. Here he is, asking a witness to step outside. And on Tuesday, Mullin went on the electric teevee and...
“War is ugly. It smells bad. If anybody has ever been there and been able to smell the war that’s happening around you and taste it and fill it in your nostrils and hear it, it’s something that you’ll never forget.”
Mullin, at least, never will forget it, largely because he’s never experienced it. The closest he’s come to combat was in his career as an MMA fighter. So if he wants to tell me what canvas smells like close-up, I’ll listen. But he’s no more qualified to talk about the smell of war than a crow. And he’s no more qualified to be Secretary of Homeland Security than Noem was. The rest of us remain in the gravel pit because the phrase “only the best people” will never not be hilarious.
The arc of competence from Harry Truman and George Marshall to Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth is long, and it bends toward stupid. Trump, let’s recall, could not identify the nuclear triad when asked in 2015, and once mused aloud on why we have nuclear weapons if we’re not going to use them. Pete is a TV performer and frat-boy provocateur reading whatever script is put in front of him, and with the practiced aggression of a Fox news character. Kristi Noem, aka Ballistic Barbie, was a pretend public administrator overseeing pretend ICE officers while preening to the cameras in SWAT gear and skinny jeans.
This is an administration of amateurs, but who else would you expect Trump to appoint? If John Gotti were president, you think he’d surround himself with Harvard intellectuals? No, he’d surround himself with criminals and corrupt, know-nothing opportunists, and no one should be surprised.
MAGA is not just indifferent to expertise, but hostile to it, which means that in his own perverse way Trump actually represents the revealed preference of the peevish herds who voted for him. Maybe democracy works after all.
But when MAGA children start coming home in body bags from a war of choice that that an amateur commander-in-chief launched on little but his uninformed gut, let’s see how many Trump supporters are still willing to say “I voted for this.”
A New York Moment
A public-service reminder that the orange gargoyle hasn’t ruined everything.
Or even professional-like. Or professional-looking.