The Negative Scaramucci All-Stars
The Trump churn begins earlier this time around.
Let me be blunt: a lot of bad shit is going to happen over the next two to four years in the United States. Donald Trump’s second go-around of the presidency is less than 72 hours old and he has already announced a large dollop of awfulness.1
As with the first term, however, Trump 2.0 will be a battle between MAGA malevolence and MAGA incompetence. My concern for the past few months has been that the malevolent policymakers will rack up more wins this time around. In the main, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World will focus on the substance of the Trump administration’s foreign policy choices. That will mean focusing on all of the ways that this administration goes soft on terror or believes that sanctions and tariffs will cure everything when they don’t, or the possibility of a great power conflagration — or even the occasional moment when the administration does something right.2
But… that does not mean that the incompetence cannot be highlighted from time to time. This is for multiple reasons. First, the incompetence was easily the most amusing aspect of Trump 1.0. There will likely be less of it this time around, but that does not mean it can’t be enjoyed when it rears its very stupid head.
Second, the vibe shift in recent weeks has been to portray Trump and his allies as an an unstoppable political and cultural behemoth. And, no doubt, certain sectors of American society sure seem eager to welcome their new MAGA overlords. In such moments it is all too easy to attribute their success to Machiavellian wizardry and intelligence rather than, oh, I don’t know, the fortuna of a global anti-incumbent wave.
The incompetence on display is a healthy reminder that Trump 2.0 is going to beclown itself on a regular basis. The more that beclowning is visible for all to see, the easier it will be for critics to highlight the malevolent actions as well.
And let’s be clear, the incompetence has been pretty thick this week. For example, Time’s Stephen Elliott reported that despite possessing the Project 2025 blueprint as a template, Trump’s first raft of executive orders were still littered with mistakes:
Take the barrage of executive orders Trump issued over the first 12 hours. When first published, they were filled with strange formatting errors. Bold here. Bigger there. Passages duplicated. Lists were sometimes ordered with the same numbers used over and over again. (Not everything can be a 1, especially within a political movement that has made participation trophies a subject of ire.)
Legal eagles on social media were eager to point out the hiccups in the formatting and more than a few typos that were cleaned-up on the White House’s website before they got pilloried too badly. One laundry list of Interior Department tweaks had six subsections numbered as Part One. Another first-day memo announcing the structure of the National Security Council members identified more than one member as number one, and others in the same list with bullet points. Others noticed typos that probably don’t change the weight of these actions but still are embarrassing for a new administration that promised to restore greatness to the Oval Office.
But then there are the errors that could meaningfully change what some executive orders do. For instance, in an effort to give the culture warriors a win and transgender individuals a loss, Trump ordered that people would be pinned down to use the biological “sex”—and not gender—assigned at the moment of conception. What the order missed, though, is that all fetuses spend their first six weeks as females, and then some become males. In feeding an anti-trans ideology—one that swayed some voters during his campaign against Kamala Harris, to be sure—he also fed uncertainty in pursuit of imposing pronouns assigned at birth.
There was also Trump’s rather casual dismissal of appointees who served during Trump’s first term. For example, Trump summarily dismissed Brian Hook, who served as director of policy planning at the State Department and special envoy to Iran during Trump’s first term, from his position on the Wilson Center Board of Trustees. That is a little weird given that Trump appointed him to that position during his first term. I suppose this is further evidence that Trump does not want Mike Pompeo or Nikki Haley acolytes in his administration this time around. It is also evidence that in Trumpworld, many people who behave badly to stay in the good graces of Trump wind up being the victims of similar treatment.
Then there is Vivek Ramaswamy, who managed to be ousted from co-running the “Department of Government Efficiency” with Elon Musk on the day of Trump’s inauguration. There are conflicting reports as to why Ramaswamy left: see the Washington Post’s Faiz Siddiqui, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Jeff Stein for an account that is somewhat more sympathetic to Ramaswamy and Politico’s Adam Wren and Holly Otterbein for an account that is less sympathetic. Both accounts agree that Ramaswamy’s December Twitter rant about “American mediocrity” did not help him with MAGA folks. They also agree that Musk steamrolled Ramaswamy. But the Politico story does contain some fun details:
Ramaswamy “just burned through the bridges and he finally burned Elon,” said a Republican strategist close to Trump advisers. “Everyone wants him out of Mar-a-Lago, out of D.C.”
One main reason for some Republicans’ frustration with Ramaswamy was a post he made on X during a discussion of H-1B visas. In late December, Ramaswamy criticized American culture, saying that tech companies hire foreign workers in part because of a mindset in the country that has “venerated mediocrity over excellence.”
“They wanted him out before the tweet — but kicked him to the curb when that came out,” said one of the three people familiar with his departure.
Ramaswamy maintained to confidants as late as Saturday evening that he was actively involved in DOGE, saying he was at work writing executive orders, according to six people who had spoken with him. But a person familiar with the arrangement said he had done almost no DOGE-related work since early December.
As recently as last week, Ramaswamy was hoping to achieve some early wins at DOGE before leaving to pursue a gubernatorial bid.
Now Ramaswamy and his allies are laboring to put a positive spin on his departure, coming just as Trump takes office.
Ramaswamy — a man who, during his 2024 presidential run was so obnoxiously ignorant that he rousted Mike Pence from his torpor — lasted zero Scaramuccis in Trump 2.0, which has to be a record for a political appointment. Maybe he will become the next governor of Ohio — or maybe he falls victim to his own incompetence as a politician.
Meanwhile, Musk spent a lot of Wednesday publicly blasting Trump’s $500 billion AI investment plan called “Stargate.” Trump announced the plan on Tuesday at the White House with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison. CNN’s Hadas Gold reported on the contretemps:
Shortly after President Donald Trump announced a new massive AI infrastructure investment from the White House, “First Buddy” Elon Musk tried to tear it down.
“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”….
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday rebuffed Musk’s comments, saying in a Fox News interview, “the American people should take President Trump and those CEOs’ words for it.”
Altman replied directly to Musk’s claim on X, writing “wrong, as you surely know. want to come visit the first site already under way? this is great for the country. i realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role i hope you’ll mostly put (America) first.”
The contretemps encouraged Steve Bannon to blast Musk yet again.
I suspect that Elon Musk will last at least one Scaramucci in the Trump administration — if nothing else, running DOGE will provide him with all sorts of inside information about the government, information that will no doubt enrich his companies in the future.
Still, watching these first few days of Trump 2.0, it’s important to savor the incompetence. It’s a reminder that at some point, more Americans will realize that these are not very bright guys.
It could happen!
The flub with the definition of gender feels like it could make for some fantastic 'did you know' weird technically-true-from-a-certain-point-of-view facts in some future pop history book.
Did you know: America had its first female president in 2025, when the newly inaugurated male president signed an executive order that, by mistake, declared all men to be women.
Did you know: For a few weeks during the early 119th congress, over 80% of congress members were married lesbians?
Did you know: The united states actually once tried to protect women through an executive order that abolished all men?
An embryo does not change from female to male during embryogenesis, that is impossible. Sex is determined at conception and never changes.
Were this article to be meaningful, for instance in sloppy typesetting, it would have to compare against similar documents from the last 7-10 administrations, at the same points of change.
I find it hard to believe that all administrations for the last 30-40 years have flawless typesetting in documents the first 5 days of execution. I agree with the premise but speaking of it this is easy to dismiss as sour grapes.