Clown Car Administration Moves Some Clowns Around in the Car

Only 1358 more days to go!

Photo by Sammy Xu on Unsplash

One of the stranger aspects of Donald Trump’s first term was its unintentional hilarity. Trump’s stewardship of the executive branch was, how to put it, real bad. But there were enough adults in the room and competent bureaucrats in the departments to minimize the collateral damage of Trump’s immature leadership style (until the pandemic). This meant that most elements of the federal government functioned at a base level of competence. So when Trump and his loyalists kept beclowning the executive branch, it could be funny because it didn’t feel calamitous.

In Trump’s second term, two things are becoming readily apparent. First, the beclowning tempo is still high. Second, this humor comes with a frightening edge — because there are no competent people left to mind the store.

Let’s start with the beclowning, because it is legit funny. On his 101st day, Trump finally got rid of a foreign policy principal:

President Trump announced on Thursday that he was removing his national security adviser, Michael Waltz, nominating him as ambassador to the United Nations and installing as his interim replacement Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who will remain the nation’s top diplomat.

It is the first significant personnel overhaul of top White House aides, and the kind of shake-up that Mr. Trump had sought to avoid in his second term….

Mr. Waltz had been on thin ice as national security adviser for months, but his position became more precarious after it became public that he organized a group chat on the commercial messaging app Signal to discuss a sensitive military operation in Yemen and accidentally included a journalist in the conversation….

One person with knowledge of the discussions said Mr. Rubio had indicated some time ago that he would be willing to serve for roughly six months if Mr. Waltz was being replaced and Mr. Rubio was asked.

Now there is a lot of this that is pretty f**king funny. For one thing, Waltz appears to have learned nothing from his role in Signalgate:

Also amusing: the video of State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce learning about this news in real time:

Even more amusing is the fact that Marco Rubio has become Trump’s second-term Mick Mulvaney. Early in Trump’s first term, Mulvaney was simultaneously the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for a period of thirteen months. Later on Mulvaney was simultaneously OMB Director and acting White House chief of staff for approximately fourteen months.

Rubio’s current remit surpasses Mulvaney’s multitasking. He is, as of now, the Secretary of State, Acting USAID Administrator, Acting Archivist of the United States, and acting national security advisor. The only comparable example of foreign policy multitasking is Henry Kissinger being dual-hatted as Secretary of State and national security advisor during the Ford administration. As the New York Times write-up excerpted above put it ever so delicately, “The Kissinger experiment has not been considered a success by most historians.” And for better or worse, Marco Rubio is no Henry Kissinger.

Then there is the fact that Rubio has managed to accumulate all of these titles because he has demonstrated his willingness to discard his previous views and demonstrate absolute fealty to Donald Trump, even if it means telling bald-faced lies. Rubio might nominally be in charge, but his genuflection to date has already revealed that there is only one real decision-maker in this administration.

As per usual, Politico’s Nahal Toosi delivers the goods on this point:

One intriguing aspect of President Donald Trump’s second administration is how no one, aside from Trump himself, has much juice on matters of foreign policy and national security. Instead, there’s been a proliferation of power centers — some of them institutions, some individuals, and none of them particularly strong….

When I’ve asked current and former U.S. and foreign officials to rank the most influential foreign policy adviser to Trump, most have mentioned special envoy Steve Witkoff. He’s the real estate investor and longtime Trump friend who has taken the lead on major portfolios such as the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas conflict and the Iran nuclear talks.

That said, current and former officials aren’t sure how much power Witkoff has or how long he will last. Witkoff already has drawn criticism from within the administration for coming across as too soft on Russia or too eager to please Iran. At a gala for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on Wednesday, former U.S. diplomats who’ve served under Republicans and Democrats expressed worries that Witkoff didn’t have enough staff, lacks technical expertise and has taken on too many major tasks.

Someone who barely came up during that dinner was Rubio….

“A fundamental problem with American foreign policy right now is there’s no mechanism or institutional capability to execute,” said Adam Ereli, a former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “There’s no interagency process, there’s no leadership structure that is functioning in any of the foreign policy Cabinet departments. There is no trust in staff.”

In its own mordant way, the second-term beclowning of all of the policy principals will produce moments of levity. Watching Rubio try to melt into an Oval Office couch while JD Vance looks on with jealousy bemusement is pretty funny.

And yet, like Marshall Zhukov, I may be smiling right now but I’m very fucking furious. Because in contrast to Trump’s first term, this time around the culling of the permanent bureaucracy has been rather severe. Indeed, Politico’s Dasha Burns, Sophia Cai, and Robbie Gramer suggest that more culling is to come:

A planned wave of White House firings may come as early as late next week, two administration officials familiar with the matter granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations said.

Inside the West Wing, aides have started referring to the potential shakeup as “The Purge,” one administration official said. The plan, according to the official, is to carry out the firings in a single, decisive wave rather than to do it piecemeal….

“A lot” of firings are about to happen, the second official said.

The thing is, Trump is already scraping the bottom of the policymaking barrel with his residual staff. Sure, his loyal subordinates will try to turn his whims into policy, but the competency is lacking. Finance guy Spencer Hakimian suggested as much on social media this past week:

I have a lot of friends both in New York and Washington DC at investment banks, commercial banks, hedge funds, pension funds, etc. that get face time with the administration.

They are almost all unanimously telling me something similar and very disturbing.

Regardless of the policies the administration is attempting to implement, the actual level of competence (especially amongst lower/career staffers) is simply not there.

They say that this is a stark contrast from 2017, when Trump first came in and largely just left Obama’s infrastructure in place at the Treasury, IRS, Commerce, Trade, etc.

This time around, Trump came in and purged the lifelong employees at these places and replaced them with people he owed favors to on his farewell tour.

People that are just simply unqualified to be doing these gloryless jobs.

Why believe Hakimian? Probably because the Financial Times reported something similar:

Donald Trump’s top economic adviser Stephen Miran struggled to reassure leading bond investors in a meeting last week that followed a bout of intense tumult on Wall Street triggered by the president’s tariffs.

Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, met representatives from top hedge funds and other major investors at the White House’s Eisenhower Executive Office building on Friday, said people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Some participants found Friday’s meeting counter-productive, with two people describing Miran’s comments around tariffs and markets as “incoherent” or incomplete, and one of them saying Miran was “out of his depth”.

“[Miran] got questions and that’s when it fell apart,” said one person familiar with the meeting. “When you’re with an audience that knows a lot, the talking points are taken apart pretty quickly.”

During Trump’s first term, there was a clown car at the top but a reasonably competent bureaucracy that kept the trains close to running on time. After a hundred days, Trump has made it clear that in his second term it’s clown cars all the way down.