The Donald Trump Clown Show 2.0…..

Anyone expecting ANYTHING More is Dreaming…

The past few weeks IS Donald Trump….

He didn’t think of ALL of this crazy stuff….

He’s incapabale of doing so….

The Project 2025 minions have be busy since Trump got beat by ole’ Joe Biden…

So?

If you can get the Felon President’s ear?

And pat him on the back?

You can have him get back to doing stupid things…

 

Okay. I’m not going to make the full case here, but I think we’ve seen enough to know that we’re once again seeing chaos and not ruthless efficiency in Trump II.1 So it’s time to talk about why that is. Because there’s an important structural reason to expect competence to be an uphill battle for this administration.

I think everyone who pays attention knows one of the reasons to expect Donald Trump’s presidency to have trouble governing. The president himself is deeply ignorant and resists learning anything. That was most obviously true at the beginning of the pandemic, but it’s constantly causing him trouble, whether it’s on tariffs or NATO or pretty much anything else. He (thinks he) knows what he knows, and he doesn’t want to hear anything to the contrary. That’s pretty obviously a potential source of all sorts of trouble.2

The related problem, also fairly obvious, is that Trump hires for demonstrations of abject loyalty. Not know-how. So not only is Trump himself poorly informed, but he doesn’t hire for expertise and therefore doesn’t get much of it.

But there’s also a less visible and less personal source of trouble.

Trump exited his first term convinced that a “deep state” of the bureaucracy had repeatedly thwarted his desires, and he appears determined to prevent that from happening again. The idea of a “deep state” is nonsense, but the idea that the civil service often resists presidential directives is very much true. Only in some cases, however, is it because bureaucrats oppose the president’s policy goals. It happens (and not always in the direction Trump thinks), but it’s not the main reason.

Far more common is bureaucratic resistance because they just don’t do things that way.

That too can be for foolish reasons. Bureaucracies tend to have a strong status quo bias; civil servants may not like to learn new procedures, or simply believe purely out of habit that the way things have always been done is the only way things can be done.

More often, however, what happens is that the civil servants who actually carry out policies know quite a bit about the practical constraints involved. In other words: They know how things work. Something that presidents and most White House staffers don’t know, because it’s not their business to know….

….

We still don’t know how successful they’ll be at forcing things through, but within the first two weeks it’s already clear that the constant chaos and incompetence of Trump I is going to be the theme of the second term as well. With all the dangers that go along with that….

More from Johnathan Berstein @ Good Politics/Bad Politics