On third or fourth thought, if there was an actual crisis management team running the situation rather than some political hacks trying to pretend it isn’t really a problem, this sort of stuff would have been sorted out.

(edit missing words) So, yes, complete top-level incompetence means that ground-level problems cannot get sorted out and the bad data doesn’t get filtered. I still think “Trump knew” is overselling it, but the alternative cases are mostly worse.

…though that gets us back into the malice vs. incompetence argument, and I think I’m going to be sick.