re: #308 lawhawk

Trump brought in cronies with zero policy experience. He values loyalty to him over all else, including competency to do the job he’s intended for them to do.

So, between picking extremists who are intent on destroying the very departments they’re running and incompetents who are allowing agencies to falter and fail because they just don’t know what they’re doing, he’s got the government in a tailspin.

And his admin is a shitshow of rivalries who are intent on showing how loyal they are to Trump by throwing everyone else under the bus by claiming they aren’t sufficiently loyal to him.

It’s a cancerous and toxic environment, and Trump thinks that all this is normal, because this is how he runs his businesses (into the ground and has seem them become so highly leveraged that he’s compromised by all the money he owes to foreign countries and banks).

Eugene Robinson had a good article in the WaPo this morning.

washingtonpost.com

Trump and his family have refused to divest themselves of their businesses or even draw more than a flimsy veil between their official actions and the impact those actions have on their personal finances. Does the administration’s policy toward Panama really have nothing to do with a bitter dispute over the Trump-branded hotel in Panama City? Does the administration’s tough new attitude toward Qatar really have nothing to do with that nation’s refusal to invest in Jared Kushner’s debt-laden real estate company?

It’s not the potential answers to those questions that are so corrosive; it’s the questions themselves. As in many countries whose governance we scoff at, Americans must now wonder whether policy is being tailored for our leaders’ personal gain.

When the rule of law and financial probity can no longer be assumed, the vacuum is filled with conspiracy theories. The president himself is a conspiratorialist par excellence; he was, after all, the chief purveyor of the birther nonsense. Since neither his words nor those of his press office can be believed, it is natural — but incredibly damaging — to assume that the real story is being hidden from us, for reasons that must be nefarious.