The presidency of George W. Bush was defined by the image of a Texas oilman flanked by east coast bankers. Commodity prices boomed, flames rose over Baghdad, and the Hummer was the hottest car on the market. Donald Trump’s first term was cast in the mold of a super star real estate mogul. A wall was going to be built, Jared Kushner made deals all over the Middle East, and coverage of the president turned into a four year prestige TV series/sitcom depending on the day.
Both of these presidencies ended engulfed in crises they actively made worse. In both cases, it was the fault of ignoring common sense that would benefit the wider public in order to loosen regulations that provided some kind of relief as the problems were made worse. Bush didn’t step on the growing subprime bubble, Trump opted to not encourage lockdowns and opted to instead pump the economy with zero interest PPP loans that would float the economy until Election Day.

Both of these administrations were supposedly staffed by experts, cold blooded killers that had a lifelong mission which they sought to carry out. To these people, seeming failures were part of the plan, reshaping the Middle East despite Saddam’s lack of WMDs being probably the most glaring example. Hyper-competence is expected, enough experts staffing a presidential administration would make it operate with almost perfect information, and if there is a crisis, it is because the administration decided it would be this way. Of course, everything didn't go according to plan. With the example of Iraq, a power vacuum left by Saddam’s fall was partially filled by Iran; the arch-enemy of Neo-Conservatives that they supported Saddam’s war against.
I am here to make the case that there are morons, especially in the forthcoming administration. There isn’t 3D chess, there isn’t a cleverly hidden plan to advance the interests of capital, there is only a group of very incompetent people that are going to steer the boat. These morons (sometimes the exact same people) existed, but now we will have to really start dealing with this fact if we want to make sense of the upcoming administration. The churn of the Trump administration has kept few long term allies, any potential future James Bakers or Donald Rumsfelds were probably too frustrated by the end of 2020 and got replaced by Laura Boomer, one of J.D. Vance’s 17 year old mutuals, or an AI generated picture of Harambe smoking a joint that Elon Musk thinks is the funniest thing of all time.
This phenomenon obviously isn’t exclusive to Republicans. I would say that the outgoing Biden administration was a masterclass in many of the ways an administration can be objectively stupid. The difference with Biden was that the stupid decisions were wrapped up in egotistical idealism and cognitive decline. There’s an entire book to be written about how much of Biden’s presidency was a trauma response by someone who was trying to be every Democratic president from the past 50 years and failing miserably, all while being supported by an unquestioning inner circle. But as we enter the second Trump administration, a different set of morons is coming into the White House.
Part I: Deportations
The first area of incompetence is Trump administration’s deportation plan. Deporting all 11 million undocumented people in the country is logistically impossible, financially ruinous, and very unpopular. Furthermore, Trump has proven to not even be the best at deportations, the Biden administration deported more people than Trump had. The incoming administration could still increase deportations, ruin countless people’s lives, focus on the weak and marginalized, and keep more of the country in a state of perpetual fear. But that isn’t all of what is being promised, it’s some of it, but the promise is to reshape the demographic nature of the country, not to enhance the policies of Obama and Biden.
One could say that this is all rhetorical window dressing, that it’s a promise made to be broken as part of a wider plan. While this could certainly be considered, the history of mass deportations tells us that showboating creates more of a headache than it is a mobilizer of popular support. While the mass deportations might bring to mind Germany during the worst years of the Holocaust in Poland and other occupied territories, the more accurate allegory would be the years before the Holocaust, when Germany tried to cleanse it’s Jewish population while maintaining a growth in its peacetime economy.
I was recently reading a book about the rise of Reinhard Heydrich (Gerwarth, 2011), one of Hitler’s ministers who was famous for his cold, calculating methods with which he carried out some of the worst crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich. Something that I took note of was how Heydrich reacted to Kristallnacht, the violent pogrom against Jewish businesses in 1938. Like most of the Nazi leadership, Heydrich felt that Kristallnacht was actually a massive headache and general step back when it came to the wider plans of purifying Germany of Jews. Until this point, the plan was to force legal emigration in such a manner that kept Jewish assets intact and able to be seized by the government. Heydrich himself was surprised by the outbreak of pogroms, and quickly sent out a telegram instructing police to make sure that only Jewish buildings (i.e. synagogues, Jewish owned businesses) were to be allowed to burn, and only if they were not endangering other buildings.
This was a surprise to Heydrich and the rest of the police apparatus in charge of ethnically cleansing Germany because it conflicted with the established plan of ‘encouraging’ Jews to emigrate while leaving their assets behind to be seized by the Reich. It was the only way to make deportations more than just a pet project for a regime strapped for cash. Getting rid of a large number of German citizens was impractical, especially in a modern country where value can't be easily grabbed and melted down. Adam Tooze Wages of Destruction elaborates on this phenomenon:
“The Jews would pay the bill for clearing up the mess, but replacing the high-quality Belgian plate glass would cost the Reichsbank 3 million Reichsmarks in precious foreign exchange. As Goering put it: 'I wish you had killed 200 Jews, and not destroyed such values’” (Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 278).
Following the assassination of a German diplomat, the violence against Jewish businesses that would be Kristallnacht was encouraged by those in Hitler’s inner circle most interested in keeping up appearances: Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and Der Stürmer editor Julius Streicher. Stirring a population to rise up for a night of looting that terrifies their supposed mortal enemies is a great way to move papers and add gravitas to speeches. However, as could be seen previously, it didn't actually further the broader Nazi goal of conquering Europe, and only further isolated the country on the international stage.
All of this is not to say that the Nazis had some humanitarian standards on the treatment of Jews, by all accounts the core leadership still regarded them with the same genocidal hatred as during the height of the Holocaust. What is relevant is how even if a country’s government has complete contempt for a population, uprooting said population is not easy and flys directly in the face of most other government functions. It’s also to say that the whole ‘Trump = Nazi’ metaphor doesn't work for our traditional understanding of the war time Nazis, but does somewhat work when predicting the effects of civilian mass deportation.
Many of Trump’s policies seem to have come from the media side of his operation as opposed to the administrative side. Mass deportations sound exciting, but don’t originate from a practical policy that can be pursued. It has already spread fear in immigrant communities, even if deportations have not yet increased noticeably (emphasis on yet). Many of his policies beyond immigration are also made to sound good, such as ‘no tax on tips’ and ‘stopping the fentanyl coming from Mexico’, but open problematic loopholes in the tax code or try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
Part II: Foreign Policy
This is ironically where there the Nazi allegory kind of falls apart. Trump’s insistence on making new territory a central point is not really for anyone beyond the Hearts of Iron IV players that Vance has probably brought along with him. While the Nazis sought territory with the expressed purpose of exploitation, Trump is only interested in Greenland and the Panama Canal as a rhetorical tool without a well defined use.
Some have suggested that the plans for Greenland are a response to climate change, and a savvy move to secure American interests in the area. The fact that the US military already has bases on Greenland mostly negates this as an argument and serves mostly as wishful thinking. It seems like Greenland annexation may have originated from economist Tyler Cowen who has been suggesting it as a half serious policy since at least 2006. It is a proposal more at home with ideological exercises like Matt Yglesias’ One Billion Americans than with any strategic planning discussion.
The Panama Canal at least has some history of being owned by America, but Trump’s demands are similarly nonsensical. It feels repetitive to say why it’s stupid because it’s stupid for the same reasons that the Greenland annexation would be stupid. The idea of needing the Panama Canal as a strategic counter to China is a remnant of the days of battleships and does not hold up in the era of ICBMs. In fact, trade has been seen superseding war in recent years, with Ukraine only recently cutting off Russian gas that had been flowing through its pipelines since before the start of the Special Military Operation.
The obvious exception would be the Gaza ceasefire, which the Trump administration seems to have negotiated ahead of his inauguration. But the lack of a ceasefire deal after over a year is only exceptional because of the Biden administration. An article by ProPublica highlighted how the Biden’s National Security Council essentially froze up and refused to take any actions to limit Israel’s genocide. This allowed Trump to appoint one of his New York real estate friends to put the slightest bit of pressure on Israeli negotiators to get a deal.
The takeaway from this isn’t that Trump has an idiot savant foreign policy team, rather that Biden was uniquely unwilling to do anything about Israel. Given that the deal is nearly identical to the one laid out at the end of May, it doesn't seem like Israel’s negotiators had much extracted by Trump’s team that they didn’t expect to give up already. Also of not is that market researchers in Israel already predicted in December that 2025 would be a ‘post-war recovery’ year. The only reason that Trump was able to get a foreign policy win was because Biden had given Netanyahu as much time as he needed to wait out for a party that was more reliably Zionist.
When you take away the Gaza ceasefire and focus solely on what the Trump administration wants to introduce, what remains is crude nationalism buoyed by Wall Street confidence that hopes nothing will fundamentally change. It’s based on weird ideas that originate in equal parts from the 19th century and the grand strategy games of Paradox Interactive. There is no 4D chess, there is no saying the quiet part loud, there is only a new group of very stupid people advising a new senile president.
Part III: The Economy, Stupid
We don’t know how Trump plans to change the economy, it’s one of the biggest questions in the opening days of his presidency. Will he enact deregulation and tax cuts? Probably. Will he channel the spirit of Huey Long and share the wealth by helping white people build subsidized crypto currency farms? Probably not.
So far, tariffs are the most concrete policy we have to go on. Instead of a 60% tariff on China, Trump has started by kicking the can slightly down the road on tariffs with Canada and Mexico, promising to start at a rate of 25% on February 1st. If they don’t go through, it will be a potential minor scandal/sign of weakness. If they do go through, such a sudden price change is likely to cause massive shockwaves through the economies of North America.
It could be said Trump is doing a Nixonian ‘madman strategy’ to put pressure on neighbors and extract concessions. But Canada and Mexico aren’t primed as primed to negotiate as they might have been in previous years. Ontario’s Conservative Premier Doug Ford has promised Americans that, if tariffs go through, “they will feel the pain”. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum similarly stated that “"Mexico was preparing a list of retaliatory tariffs”.


Canada is currently waiting on an election to be called some time before October, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party is not expected to win, leaving the country is a pseudo lame duck period. In October, President of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum began her single 6 year term and is experiencing approval ratings as high as 80%. Both Canada and Mexico have unique reasons to dig their heels in on this issue.
I would include proposed tax cuts/exemptions in here as a stupid idea, but those were at least politically useful on the campaign trail. Still, we’ll have to see if allowing volunteer firefighters to not pay any taxes will end up happening. If it does, I’ll have a lot more to write about and there will be a lot more firefighters.
Works cited:
GERWARTH, ROBERT. Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich. Yale University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vm09x.
Tooze, Adam, 1967-. 2007. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. New York, Viking.