Like his two most recent Republican predecessors, President Donald Trump has crashed the nation’s economy while starting an unnecessary war in the Middle East. It’s dismaying that voters refuse to learn this historical lesson. Might this be the time?
To my big surprise, though, that wasn’t the focus of last week’s site discussion. The war may be happening, but our political fight is much broader than that, and we really, really enjoy stories where Trumpism slams into a wall. As such, the best-performing stories were about how the MAGA movement runs on loyalty and spectacle, yet reality keeps intruding. And not in a good way for them (or really, for us, as we suffer the consequences).
The bulk of last week’s top stories were about the incompetence of Republican governance.
The Trump administration has always prioritized loyalty over competence, and Trump made sure whatever guardrails existed during his first presidency were stripped away. The result is a toxic brew of incompetence and malice that—thankfully—is often too stupid to do as much damage as a smarter team might manage.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem could hardly have been less competent for the job, inevitably leading to scandal and mismanagement. Yet she’s hardly the only one running their department or agency into the ground. Others will get fired, and it’s fun speculating who. Trump toady Kari Lake, however, won’t be on that list, though. A judge took care of ruling her ineligible to be acting chief executive officer of the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
Trump isn’t immune from incompetence, as we’ve exhaustively learned. There’s the ongoing saga of his ridiculous White House ballroom, where public backlash is preventing even his rubber-stamp committee from proceeding with what amounts to architectural and historical desecration.
But the story about the Weyco Group suing Trump for illegally collected tariffs was particularly interesting. Sure, we all know about the job-killing and inflationary effects of tariffs, which are essentially a tax on American businesses and consumers. But this story resonated on several levels.
Weyco owns the shoe brand Florsheim, which happens to be Trump’s favorite. He loves them so much that he buys them for everyone around him. The problem is that he seemingly doesn’t care enough to know their sizes, leaving asshat Secretary of State Marco Rubio walking around in shoes several sizes too big. And everyone is too afraid of Trump to not wear them.
So yes, it’s a story about tariffs. But it’s really a story about the culture Trump has created in the White House, where people are so afraid of offending the manchild-in-chief that they’d rather look like fools in public. Do we really have three more years of this nonsense?
Meanwhile, the story about Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana making a fool of himself in a Senate hearing reminds us that right-wing performative histrionics has its limits. Such spectacle may energize their base, but it doesn’t always survive contact with facts. In this case, it was so cringe I doubt even the base was impressed.
Finally, the Donald Trump Files Featuring Jeffrey Epstein continue to break through Trump’s desperate attempts to divert attention. The Iran war may have pushed Epstein out of mainstream headlines, but it hasn’t escaped social media chatter. And people are coming up with creative ways to keep the story alive.
Taken together, these stories collectively explored the limits of MAGA, hamstrung as it is by its rank incompetence and moral bankruptcy.
Trumpism runs on loyalty, spectacle, and intimidation. But its inherent incompetence means that reality keeps intruding, through the courts, businesses, public backlash, and stubborn lack of tangible results that Republicans can electorally run on this November.
The MAGA base might still be enjoying this spectacle, but the nation is not, and November can’t get here soon enough.
kos March 14, 2026 at 03:00PM From Daily Kos
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