Every President makes mistakes but Trump’s mistakes are too often and too significant to ignore. Trump is incompetent. The following taken from Peter Wehner’s Atlantic article entitled “America’s Mad King”
- The formula Trump used to calculate his tariffs was not just ill-advised but nonsensical as well.
- Trump’s messaging around tariffs as been confusing. Realy, an absolute disaster!
- Trump’s press secretary said that the tariffs were not a negotiation—until Trump and his secretary of the Treasury said they were.
- His commerce secretary said there wasn’t any chance that the president would back off from his tariffs—until Trump backed off from his tariffs the following week.
- Last Friday, the administration announced that it would exempt iPhones, computers, and other electronic devices from the tariffs—and on Sunday, Trump announced that this did not count as a tariff exemption.
- Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave orders so vague for DEI purging that the Defense Department flagged photos of the Enola Gay for deletion from all websites and social-media posts. (The B-29 bomber that dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was named after the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay Tibbets.
- Hegseth, during a February press conference at the NATO headquarters, in Brussels, unilaterally conceded a major Ukrainian negotiating position before anyone had even met with the Russians. Roger Wicker, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he was “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments, calling them a “rookie mistake.” The Mississippi Republican added that everyone knows that “you don’t say before your first meeting what you will agree to and what you won’t agree to.” Wicker added, “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.”
- In an appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy and the lead negotiator tasked with ending the war in Ukraine, was not only effusive in his praise of Russia’s totalitarian leader, Vladimir Putin, but even repeated Kremlin propaganda that “the overwhelming majority” of people in four Ukrainian regions that have been occupied and annexed by Russia want to be absorbed by Russia. (During the interview, Witkoff, a wealthy real-estate developer, struggled to remember the names of those Ukrainian regions.)
- The editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a Signal group chat that included senior Trump officials who were coordinating an air strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
- In its mass firing of federal workers, the Trump administration dismissed—and then had to rehire—people with highly sensitive jobs in the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for ensuring the readiness of America’s nuclear arsenal. The people who ordered the firings had failed to grasp the nature of those responsibilities.
- Employees who were working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian-flu outbreak, which is decimating poultry flocks and spreading to humans, were fired. The Department of Agriculture scrambled to reverse the firings.
- The single biggest line item on the DOGE website claimed a savings of $8 billion from one canceled contract. The actual contract was worth $8 million, much of which had already been spent.
- The Department of Health and Human Services, which is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, hired a discredited vaccine skeptic to study whether vaccines cause autism.
- Amid a measles resurgence in the United States, Kennedy is also making unsupported and misleading claims. ProPublica reported that leaders at the CDC ordered staff not to release its assessment linking the spread to areas where many are unvaccinated.
- The National Institutes of Health, the global leader in biomedical research, is getting irreparably damaged by dramatic and reckless cuts being made by people who have no knowledge of the agencies they are gutting. Progress in cancer therapies such as cell-based immunotherapy is being threatened. Active clinical trials are being disrupted. Decades of research are being undermined.
- Also being decimated is PEPFAR, the global AIDS initiative started by President George W. Bush in 2003, which has saved more than 25 million lives; until the Trump era, it enjoyed strong bipartisan support. PEPFAR is estimated to save 1.6 million lives each year.
- Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued some waivers for PEPFAR, but they are a mirage. The waivers have done very little to restore funding or provide distribution of medication. One expert told The Dispatch that aid groups that do qualify for waivers have been unable to draw down funds from the USAID payment system. “A waiver is kind of useless without the ability to have some cash flow,” Chambers Sharpe, who previously worked in the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator at the State Department, told The Dispatch. “You can’t ship a waiver to a clinic as an antiretroviral medicine.” There have been massive disruptions in HIV prevention, testing, and treatment services. Clinics continue to close, and people are beginning to die at an alarming rate.
- In February, an inspector general wrote that about a half billion dollars in food aid that had already been purchased was at risk of spoilage. That inspector general was fired the next day. In addition, the Trump administration has “dismissed the few remaining health officials who oversaw care for some of the world’s most vulnerable people: more than 500,000 children and more than 600,000 pregnant women with H.I.V. in low-income countries,” Apoorva Mandavilli reported earlier this month in The New York Times. “Expert teams that managed programs meant to prevent newborns from acquiring H.I.V. from their mothers and to provide treatment for infected children were eliminated last week in the chaotic reorganization of the Health and Human Services Department.”
- DOGE cut almost $900 million from the Department of Education’s effort to collect national statistics and track the progress of American students, eviscerating one of the genuinely valuable things the federal government has done in the area of education. The cuts threaten to leave us in the dark when it comes to determining school effectiveness, where gaps exist, and what works. Many of the projects being canceled were near completion, making the decision even more mind-bogglingly stupid.
- The Trump administration has acknowledged mistakenly deporting a Maryland man with protected legal status to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. (Later claims by the White House aide Stephen Miller that the deported man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was lawfully sent to El Salvador were undercut by the facts of the case and court rulings.) The judge presiding over the Abrego Garcia case, Paula Xinis, said on Tuesday that she was weighing contempt proceedings against the Trump administration. Xinis previously ordered the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from the custody of El Salvador, and the Supreme Court upheld that portion of her order last week. “To date, what the record shows is that nothing has been done. Nothing,” Xinis said on Tuesday.
- According to their lawyers, some Venezuelan migrants are being falsely accused of gang membership and deported to that same prison in El Salvador based on their tattoos and high-end urban street wear. “In one instance, a man who was deported was accused of having a crown tattoo that officials said proved his membership, but his lawyers claimed that the tattoo was in honor of the man’s favorite soccer team, Real Madrid,” The New York Times reported. “Another migrant got a similar crown tattoo, the lawyers said, to commemorate the death of his grandmother.”
- Yesterday, federal judge James E. Boasberg said that he had found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for violating an order he issued last month directing officials to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador.