The Dunning-Kruger administration goes to war

We now take it as a given that no matter what the Donald Trump administration tries, they will assuredly screw it up. Any American with a lick of common sense, after all, would refuse to work for an incompetent vulgar always-scamming twice-impeached convicted felon, seditionist, thief, sex predator, adjudicated rapist, accused child rapist and probable foreign agent, and that narrowed the list of potential hires to C-listers like Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Pam Bondi, Elon Musk, and anyone even vaguely associated with the Heritage Foundation.

Once those loudmouthed C-listers were installed, they quickly began to purge any careerists from government who might Know Things, because there's nothing more infuriating to an aspirational idiot than having someone around who Knows Things. And that's why we find ourselves here, as every last anti-Trump voter predicted from the beginning.

You'd be forgiven for thinking "screw it up" was referring to tariffs here, or the already rotting corpse of DOGE, or to whatever the fuck Robert Kennedy Jr. and "Doctor Oz" think they're doing. Nope! This time around we're learning that the Trump-demanded indictment of former FBI director oh-by-the-way may not have actually happened.

In a stunning admission, prosecutors in the James Comey case conceded that the two-count indictment against the former FBI director was never presented to or voted on by a grand jury.

Now, this is kind of a big deal. The premise of calling a grand jury is that you, a prosecutor, present evidence to the grand jury and the members of the grand jury, comprised of normal folk who lacked the cunning or motivation to get out of grand jury service, get to tell you whether you've actually collected plausible enough evidence to even waste a court's time with. In this case, Dunning-Kruger graduate now U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan appears to have invented a new rule that says if you present your case to the grand jury and they reject either all or part of it, you can write up a new indictment that you think they meant to agree with, coax the grand jury foreman into signing it, and the rest of the grand jury doesn't actually need to discuss it or vote on it or even know you've done it.

Or something. But the indictment against Comey is now very likely to be thrown out as illegitimate—which might be appealing to the federal judge who already has to determine whether Halligan was properly appointed herself and whether the Justice Department had ordered the prosecution for malicious reasons, as evinced by Halligan's inability to get anyone in the department who actually Knows Things to sign the paperwork for it.

There is another, separate scandal coming to a head in another courtroom. Having been granted a rather tortuous go-ahead by an appeals court, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg will be proceeding on Monday with possible contempt charges against Trump administration officials who appeared to ignore his court order temporarily blocking the government from deporting people to a notorious El Salvadoran prison. Boasberg suspects that the administration intentionally continued those flights despite knowing of his order, and he is not hiding how extremely pissed he is over that.

The Trumpers have been creative in maneuvering around the courts whenever courts rule against them, but in this particular case it appears that some idiot or collection of idiots thought they could cheat the system more directly, despite warnings against it from the Justice officials who Know Things.

A good measure of whether our legal profession has any remaining pretense of integrity will be the number of Trump-backing lawyers who end up being disbarred after Trump himself shuffles off to Mar-a-Lago, or Russia, or the pits of hell. We're ten months into his term and already have another dozen contenders for the honor.

Setting aside all of the legal shenanigans going on, and setting aside the new Pam Bondi-launched, Donald Trump-demanded "investigation" into any Democrats who might have texted with his sex trafficking best friend Jeffrey Epstein while conveniently blocking the release of any Republican names, and even setting aside the [gestures broadly at anything related to the economy], there's actually an even more pressing potential screw-up in the works.

The Dunning-Kruger administration is preparing to go to war.

The specifics of the war are currently unclear. It might be against Venezuela. It might be a more vibe-based thing, in which the White House declares not-war against, eh, whatever targets of opportunity arise.

President Donald Trump has yet to make a decision on whether to attack Venezuela on land, a White House official and a senior US official said, as he hints a window may be opening for diplomacy.

Trump said Monday he would be open to speaking directly with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro at a “certain time,” suggesting he sees a pathway in the country that doesn’t involve dropping bombs or sending commandos to take Maduro out.

At the same time, Trump made clear his willingness to go after drug operations on land using military force — including, he said, in Mexico and Colombia.

What we have here, according to an administration made from the human equivalent of the skin that forms on the top of cooling soup, is a national emergency so dire that it requires war but one so hazy in premise that it really doesn't matter which nation we go to war with. Just pick one, friend or foe, somewhere in the general neighborhood of the Gulf of Epstein, send in some elite troops and bask in the glory of having shot something up a bit.

There is no actual plan to speak of. There is only a desire, among the most ambitious and least intellectually curious dipshits to ever congeal in one place, to have a war against something because war is seen as something that powerful and intellectual people get up to.

Paul Krugman once observed that former Republican House Speaker turned pundit Newt Gingrich was a "stupid man's idea of what a smart man should sound like." That, however, is now the aura intentionally sought after by the entire Republican movement; the entire MAGA schtick is performative claims of being smarter than anyone to ever come before while, simultaneously, engaging in public dipshittery more embarrassing than any previous generation could bear.

This is the Meme Administration. It exists to create memes. It judges accomplishment solely by the ability to make memes; it considers the sole purpose of every government agency to be the production of insult-laden memes and meme-laden insults.

It turns out when you make all hiring decisions based on who can (1) stomach working for you and (2) make

Pam Bondi. Kristi Noem. Kash Patel. Pete Hegseth. Every single seized government Twitter/X account, all now run by anonymous white nationalists posting their most-favored neo-Nazi phrases, because it's funny.

It was until recently the case that the Secretary of State was expected to be the nation's top diplomat. Savvy. Skilled. Knowledgable. Diplomatic, that being the entire fucking point of the job.

No more. Now it's just another meme account.

This is what the "State Department" is expected to be, in the Meme Administration. The Secretary of State is, to the best of our knowledge, engaged in no diplomacy at all; even Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner appears to have more actual negotiating power. The department needs no staff because its only purpose is Meme. It needs no Marco Rubio either, it just needs someone with access to Marco Rubio's online accounts so that it can do Memes.

And this thinking, this notion that no actual knowledge is necessary in order to carry out the basic duties of government so long as you're good at hurling insults at passersby, is everywhere.

Knowing things is frowned on. Knowing things will get you fired, or even demonized. From top to bottom, the whole point of the administration is to not know things, and not know them very, very loudly. Staff and supplicants are judged on loudness, not correctness.

Or, to take another example: The White House Situation Room is a hardened, soundproofed, electronically secure space designed for monitoring crisis—or it was, under previous administrations. But in this administration, crises are discussed on unsecured cellphones and the Situation Room is instead the location used to coax wayward lawmakers into dropping their probes of sex predator Jeffrey Epstein's associates.

That was not a scene in Idiocracy. It really should have been.

There may be no more fitting example of the MAGA compulsion to prioritize crudeness over expertise than the appointment of former Fox News talking head Pete Hegseth as the actual, real-life supposed Secretary of Defense—or as the administration would prefer it, the "Secretary of War." Hegseth's only significant initiatives have been the ongoing purge of women and minorities in the military's upper ranks and his continual, omnipresent public bluster.

It is Hegseth who is heading, at least on paper, the random murder of alleged "drug smugglers" on small boats off the coast of South America—an outrageously illegal act by any metric. It is also Hegseth who, between bouts of possibly booze-inspired paranoias and demands that everyone in his general vicinity be subjected to supposed lie detector tests, will be Trump's top deputy in determining how to go to war with whatever enemy the administration settles on as the most meme-worthy target.

And I have to ask, seriously, whether there is anyone in America who thinks the administration that regularly screws up even the tiniest of tasks, tasks like keeping planes in the air, not firing essential personnel just because some barely post-teen doesn't understand their job description, and not stapling the economy's tongue to a nearby telephone pole, will somehow be able to pull off a shooting war against anyone.

I don't mean "can the United States military win against the South American target eventually chosen for Operation Dunning-Kruger." The U.S. military could likely pave over the entirety of Venezuela, given enough time and budget.

History is full, however, of examples in which mighty armies get their asses handed to them because the highly-trained, nigh-on-unstoppable force got told to do something stupid by an insufferable asshole in a position of high authority—and they did it, because that is how militaries generally work. It's all fine and good to say we have the most powerful military the world has ever seen, but we also have the most stupid leaders humanity has ever witnessed.

If there is one person who can manage to somehow ground a nuclear submarine on a coffee plantation 60 miles from the nearest shoreline, Pete Hegseth would be that man. Under Hegseth, the military has engaged seemingly random targets based on unverifiable supposed intelligence. On the high seas, that is bad. Moving that capriciousness to ground targets inside Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela or elsewhere is a recipe for a military disaster on the order of the Battle of Mogadishu or Operation Eagle Claw.

At some point, it may become clear to Americans that electing Any Idiot to office is not the path to national greatness, but instead only assures that the government will be populated mostly by idiots. Or that may never become clear; it would require paying attention, in an environment built to dissuade anyone from doing so.

But I really do not think we're fully prepared for the outcome of a Meme Presidency run by Memelords launching a poorly defined shooting war justified by memes and strategized through more memes. For all the talk of a "Wag the Dog" operation intended to deliver an easy military victory that can be boasted of, knocking each new Epstein revelation, girlfriend scandal, and measles outbreak from the news cycle, we have to remember that Pete Freaking Hegseth is the one responsible for choosing potential targets and tactics.

Do we think that the entire collected expertise of the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus can truly keep Hegseth and Trump from screwing it up in heretofore unprecedented, previously thought impossible ways?

Yeah, I'm ... not so sure.