Kakistocracy is back, and we are experiencing it firsthand in America. The unscrupulous element has come into sharp focus in recent weeks as a string of Trump Cabinet members and White House staffers have been caught spending staggering sums of taxpayer dollars to charter jets, at times to go small distances where cheap commercial transportation was readily available, at times to conveniently visit home areas or have lunch with family members. …
The Constitution prohibits anything of value other than a salary going to a president from the federal government or the states. (Trump had also been pushing the District of Columbia for more favorable property taxes.) The failure of GSA top officials to act on Trump’s apparent violation is under investigation by the agency’s inspector general. Foreign-government entities falling over themselves to stay in the hotel and schedule meetings and events there at premium prices may have violated the foreign Emoluments Clause…
News that the president’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner had used a private server and private email accounts for official business—multiplying to several accounts, then hurriedly transferred to the Trump business server after the revelations —showed a remarkable indifference to the rules…
Awful as the grifterish mentality and behavior may be, worse is the other part of kakistocracy—inept, corrupt, and disruptive governance. Impulsive, stream-of-consciousness communications from the president by tweet are one thing. Examples like a budget that aims to knock out our weather satellites and cut our ability to respond to a pandemic, along with the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) removing from its website information about the disastrous conditions in Puerto Rico while pumping up the good news, are another.
The misguided and reckless travel bans instituted at the beginning of the administration were a harbinger of indifference to norms and practices of government previously embraced by both parties…
More troublesome still is the danger to world stability reflected in the embarrassing contretemps-triangle involving Secretary of State Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Mattis and Trump… While we have seen many instances in the past of presidents and Cabinet members at odds—remember Gerald Ford and James Schlesinger; Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig—we have had nothing like these public disputes and contradictory signals involving the most sensitive trouble spots on earth.
Donald Trump campaigned by promising to run government like a business. Unfortunately, that business is Trump University. There are 602 key policy positions in the executive requiring Senate confirmation. Almost nine months into the Trump presidency, only 142—less than a quarter—have been filled, and nearly half, 289, have not even had a nominee chosen. The record here is starkly worse than under the previous four presidents, from George W. Bush through Obama. …
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The New York Times reported that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has filled his schedule almost exclusively with meetings and fancy dinners with coal-mining, chemical company and others EPA regulates—often followed by moves to deregulate them—while scheduling almost no meetings with environmental groups. Pruitt has also spent $25,000 in taxpayer money to put a soundproof phone booth in his office, raising red flags about why this was necessary.
The kakistocracy applies as well to Congress. …
Then there is the ineptitude of the policy process in Congress. Despite Speaker Ryan’s boast that this could be the most productive presidency and Congress in our lifetime, the record of Congress in its first nine months is abysmal. …
Moreover, Republican leaders, especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have blown up most of the remaining norms about how laws are developed, debated, and enacted…
The failure to pass any health measure, or to send Trump any significant bills he can use to have lavish Rose Garden victory ceremonies to show how much he is winning, has led to another round of presidential insults aimed at his own party leaders McConnell and Ryan, and at apostates like John McCain and Jeff Flake. The latest is a round of ridiculous and counterproductive attacks by Trump on Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker, who responded with his own broadsides at an unstable president lacking adult supervision. Many observers are now writing and talking about a Republican civil war, with the latest battle being the Senate primary in Alabama that led to the nomination of radical Roy Moore.
“Can’t anybody here play this game?” was Casey Stengel’s famous lament about his inept 1962 New York Mets. The same lament could apply to the Trump administration and its majority team in Congress—but the problem is deeper and worse when ineptitude joins with venality and recklessness, and when the stakes are far more than baseball pennants.
