So one thing that I find perversely satisfying about the current occupant of the White House is when he demonstrates how allergic he is to both accurate information and basic competence.
Some examples:
- He fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because the massively increased tariffs (taxes) were hurting the US economy - as widely predicted by economists, but contrary to Trump's own assumptions.
- He fired the head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, apparently for accurately assessing that the strike on Iran did _not_ "fully obliterate" the target and end Iran's nuclear program.
- Via Musk, he has broadly cut federal agencies, including those that provide important services to his constituents, and which could help him achieve his nominal policy goals.
- He has then struggled to rehire many of them at the IRS, the FDA, at USAID, and the National Nuclear Safety Administration, the National Weather Service, FEMA, Housing and Urban Development, and researching diseases like bird flu.
- At the end of his first Administration, he apparently endorsed protestors' calls to "hang Mike Pence" because he refused to violate the Constitution.
- Trump said he could end the war in Ukraine on day 1, but obviously didn't. He earlier tried to decrease aid to Ukraine but then said that Biden wasn't helping Ukraine enough.
So why the "perverse satisfaction" with this? It's clearly horrible for everyone involved, and bad for the country.
Because it undermines Trump's claims to expertise, it makes extremely public that he doesn't care about competence or facts or reality, or even about his own prior statements. He doesn't care about his Congressional allies. He doesn't care if his hand-picked Vice President lives or dies. He doesn't care about his constituents. He doesn't care about the US economy or military. He doesn't care about the policies he's pushing. He doesn't care about you... and ever-larger portions of the US are going to have that shoved in their faces.
Because you might be able to convince someone that you're solving a problem "over there", but you're going to have a hard time convincing them you're solving their problems when their problems are getting worse & worse, and when you're openly destroying the people and agencies who have helped them in the past.
Elected officials like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lindsey Graham and Greg Abbott and JD Vance and the Supreme Court are going to be caught between their statements, Trump's past statements, and Trump's current statements. Competent professionals will want nothing to do with this Administration, even if they supported some of its policies previously. And by the time Trump leaves office, there'll be a succession crisis in the Republican party. Anyone who tied themselves to DJT too closely is going to be marred by his declining reputation and increasingly erratic behavior. Anyone who has ambition for their own professional / political career is a threat to him. And if their profile rises too high, he's going to have to cut them out to maintain his own dominance - as he did with Elon Musk and William Barr and Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions and Mike Pence.
This is how you build support for a "deep state" and for a balance of power between the Executive and the other branches of government.
This is a general problem with autocracy & fascism: If you work with the authoritarian, you gain power. If you gain too much power, you become a threat to the authoritarian. If you're a threat to the authoritarian, one or the other must go.
It's going to get worse before it gets better, but every high-profile, controversial firing by this Administration will remind people of why it's bad practice to put so much power in the hands of one person - especially when that one person has the long, sordid past that President Trump does.
It's a painful, light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel kind of hope, but it's one I cling to, and one I see the President reinforcing every time he does something stupid, high-profile and likely to undermine his own stated goals.