| ▲ | hn_throwaway_99 a day ago |
| These people who work for this administration are all so grossly and maliciously incompetent. |
|
| ▲ | throwaway27448 a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| They are quite competent at causing enough chaos for those with inside knowledge and wealth to exploit. |
| |
| ▲ | slater a day ago | parent [-] | | And for the next administration to be left holding the bag, teeing it up for another round of "see? SEEEE???? they're terrible at the economy!!" if a Democratic president wins the election | | |
| ▲ | gmueckl a day ago | parent | next [-] | | The next presidential campaign should narrowly focus on the long term effects of existing policies if not corrected and direct blame with name dropping. There is no more moral high ground in this fight. The ugly needs to be pinned on the current administration in way that it can never be removed again. But of course the Democrats will try to keep their heads high and try to float over all of this mess instead of throwing the dirt back that gets flung around. It's not working anymore. | |
| ▲ | M95D a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They should not canditate. Let a comedian do it instead, like UK did with Count Binface. | |
| ▲ | locknitpicker a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > And for the next administration to be left holding the bag, teeing it up for another round of "see? SEEEE???? they're terrible at the economy!!" if a Democratic president wins the election The damage the Trump administration is doing/has done is nothing that any future administration can undo. The relationship with NATO members alone is unsalvageable. | | |
|
|
|
| ▲ | walrus01 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's easier to understand if you consider they might literally be agents of a foreign government. |
| |
| ▲ | Drupon a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Thought terminating cope from people unwilling to accept that they live in a nation full of cruel oinking swine, enough to control the government at the moment. No, they must be foreign assets. Thinking that way makes it easier to ignore the fact that the American individualist (read: selfish and cruel) ideology is baked into every aspect of the country's propaganda. Much easier to ignore it, write hagiographies that have the greed that drove the smugglers and wealthy elite to found this country's morals replaced by rapping stage actors. Craft narratives that the crumbling of the fine character of a nation practicing racial segregation until only half a century ago is actually the crafty infiltration of the savage slavic mind. | | |
| ▲ | NalNezumi a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Apologies in advance for off-topic but I couldn't help but reading your sentence with the tone of a rapper. Like Deltron 3030 or Aesop rock. I think it would sound great. If there's a text to speech for rapping I'd really love to insert your sentence. | | |
| ▲ | k12sosse 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm sure this will get me an angry message from HN's HOA but here you go (couldn't find direct contact methods in your profile) suno.com/song/56c551ae-4162-407c-855a-28dc21b9d9e5 'inspired by' edition suno.com/song/da442a4a-0060-473b-b0b0-121076bdb5b8 | |
| ▲ | k12sosse 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It was flagged for moderation. |
| |
| ▲ | walrus01 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I have no idea what your personal background is but it's very interesting that without me saying it or even alluding to it, you jumped directly to what is your presumption of what nation-state ("slavic", presumably you're thinking Russia) that might be controlling foreign agents. You know it's possible for some groups of people to be a mixed bag of cruel, venal, greedy, feckless, foolish and compromised, right? Of course it's not likely that everyone in the administration is literally a recruited foreign asset. | | |
| ▲ | anon7725 a day ago | parent [-] | | I believe their point is that the talk about foreign interference is a red herring. The current administration reflects a deeper rot in the culture. "As democracy is perfected, the office [of president] represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." | | |
| ▲ | burnoutdv a day ago | parent [-] | | I would say that the current maga goverment of the USA is the result of the culture, not the other way around. There might be _some_ funny business around the elections but overall the people that fall to/want exactly this government are not few | | |
| ▲ | krapp 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | MAGA was just the normalization of politics which have existed within the American right and Evangelical Christianity since at least WW2, and which reached an inflection point with 9/11 and Obama's election. None of it is new and none of it is a foreign plot. Trump isn't a Russian asset, he's an avatar of America's hatred of itself. |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | hamper653 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Never see malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation. | | |
| ▲ | walrus01 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Could be a core cadre of 5% of clearly compromised or foreign agents recruiting a vast amount of fools and putting them in the positions where they can do the most damage. | | |
| ▲ | hamper653 a day ago | parent [-] | | Or it could be a core cadre of 51% of clearly foolish Americans electing a vast amount of fools and putting them in the positions where they will do the most damage. |
| |
| ▲ | throw0101a a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Never see malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation. ¿Por qué no los dos? | |
| ▲ | conception a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They are making hundreds of millions of dollars on the grift. They seem quite comptent. | | |
| ▲ | no-name-here a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Hundreds of millions dramatically undersells what happened in Trump's ~first year back in office: Trump personally made $3 billion during his 2nd term's 1st year. [1] 19-year-old high school graduate Barron Trump earned $150 million dollars. [2] Also, Trump's children stand to profit from a $1.6 billion mining deal that Trump cut as president this term - 'Kaz Resources'. [3] Also, "The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr." - 'Vulcan Elements'. [4] Also, "Trump’s Sons Land Massive Pentagon Deal as They Flaunt Corruption" via "Powerus" a company founded last year and which merged with a golf club in March. [5] The Trump family cryptocurrency company received a $500m investment by the Emirati royal family, before the Trump admin announced that the Emirates would be allowed to import enough Nvidia AI chips to build the largest AI campus outside the US. [6] Edit: As alluded to by walrus01, "The double life of Jared Kushner, mixing business with politics as emissary for his father-in-law Donald Trump … Ivanka Trump's husband has a career as an unofficial diplomat and a master dealmaker, juggling billions and focusing his activities on the Middle East and Near East. His latest coup, carried out with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, was the $55 billion acquisition of video game giant Electronic Arts." [8] While Trump and his family have made billions during Trump's first year back as president, for an example of how Republicans treated Biden family finances: in 2018, while Biden was out of office, Biden received a check from his brother with "loan repayment" written on it for 200K. Despite that Biden was not in office then, and the small amount (compared to not just thousands or even millions, but billions that Trump and his family have made in Trump's first year back in office), 5 years later, in 2023, Republicans were still investigating that $200K loan repayment. [7] [1] https://theweek.com/politics/donald-trump-presidency-wealth [2] https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-news/how-did-barron... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/28/world/europe/trump-lutnic... [4] https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-vulcan-de... [5] https://newrepublic.com/post/209840/donald-jr-eric-trump-mil... [6] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/02/trump-uae-cr... [7] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/31/politics/fact-check-evide... [8] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/10/07/the-dou... | | |
| ▲ | walrus01 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Heck, all of that is like the tip of an iceberg, before anyone even googles like "kushner + saudis" | |
| ▲ | psadauskas 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But, what about Hunter Biden's laptop!? /s | | |
| ▲ | no-name-here 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's actually an excellent example - perhaps the closest thing to something real for Joe Biden to come out of the laptop was that in 2017, while Joe was a private citizen and held no office, an email between his son and his son's business partners had proposed Joe take a 10% share in a foreign deal his son was negotiating. 6 days later in 2017, Hunter replied that Joe had replied "an emphatic NO" when the idea was presented to him. https://www.vox.com/2020/10/22/21529237/hunter-biden-debate-... Republicans spent years focusing on a potential deal that Joe had quickly said no to, which was while Joe was out of office anyway. Meanwhile Trump in both term 1 and term 2 has been actively getting foreign income, but crickets. (I realize you said /s.) |
|
| |
| ▲ | hamper653 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
| |
| ▲ | spit2wind a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Some direct quotes are, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.” That was Russel Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget and key author or Project 2025. Trump also said, "a whole civilization will die tonight". | | |
| ▲ | hamper653 a day ago | parent [-] | | These people aren’t very bright, are they? | | |
| ▲ | Timon3 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They've successfully planned and executed a takeover of the US government that will take decades to undo, if it's even possible at all. Of course they are bright, you don't stumble into causing this much damage. They are simply thoroughly evil. This is easy to mask as "stupid", but stupid people wouldn't be able to be so consistent. | | |
| ▲ | Gud 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They are capable of executing in their own self interest.
I doubt they have full understanding about the 2nd and 3rd order effects of their actions. I wouldn't call them stupid, but they are hardly bright. | | |
| ▲ | Timon3 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Maybe you've seen something I haven't, but why do you think that regarding e.g. Russell Vought? His primary goal has long been to swing the US towards Christian nationalism, and he has made enormous strides towards that. People like him are well aware of the negatives consequences these decisions have, but to them it's worth the pain. I can't truly say since I've never talked to him (and I hope it stays that way), but IMO I simply cannot imagine someone doing everything Russell Vought has done to America, without being fairly smart. Maybe he's just acting as a proxy for smart people, but someone behind Project 2025 etc. objectively must be very intelligent. | | |
| ▲ | walrus01 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's a reflexive tendency to assume that anyone implementing cruel and bigoted policies must also be stupid, regretfully, this is sometimes not the case. As you have so accurately described, it's a very careful and calculated plan to move towards a desired end state. Whether that desired end state goal looks something like Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, and whether you're supposed to like that, or abhor it, totally other question... | | |
|
| |
| ▲ | hamper653 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, Americans have consistently elected these people, haven’t they? This is easy to mask as "evil", but… | | |
| ▲ | Timon3 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't know what you're trying to say. Evil people can run for elections and receive votes. | | |
| ▲ | hamper653 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | But not-very-bright evil people can’t? | | |
| ▲ | Timon3 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Of course they can, but as I already said, you don't stumble into causing this much damage. Damage caused by genuine stupidity would be distributed more randomly. | | |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | lazide 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They seem to be doing pretty well for themselves. | | |
|
| |
| ▲ | lazide 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That is exactly how you end up in this situation. There are actually malicious people in the world, and many of them like to pretend to be incompetent as a smokescreen. |
| |
| ▲ | dandanua a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | more likely alien race |
|
|
| ▲ | Varelion a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Should be criminal. |
| |
| ▲ | reverius42 a day ago | parent [-] | | A lot of it is! We live in lawlessness (for those at the top) in the US. | | |
| ▲ | piloto_ciego a day ago | parent [-] | | Man, this is the kind of thing I have been trying to tell people. It's unsettling to think about, but I'm like, "look, there are no rules now, it's all a negotiation, the only real laws are the laws of physics and the rules someone selectively enforces under the threat of violence." It would do us good if we remember this, because this sort of the basic state of nature that most people have lived under most of human history. I'm not saying this is how it should be, but a lot of people are still living in the pearl-clutched "but, that's against the rules!" despite there being basically no real rules for a decade. When people realize that it's all nonsense, it's going to get weird. | | |
| ▲ | hibikir a day ago | parent | next [-] | | There's entire books on developmental economics which explain how states create institutions that might appear to be rules based, but are ultimately just negotiation and favor. They get more money from developed countries and investors that don't look to deep, but ultimately the rate of growth is quite bad, because investing money in that kind of environment just has a poor rate of return. All well described, with experimental numbers and everything, for countries in Africa and Latin America. Little did people realize that no, you can also apply this to developed countries when they suffer sufficient degradation. | | |
| ▲ | walrus01 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I know a number of immigrants from economically struggling developing nations with endemic institutional corruption who very clearly see what's going on when they look at the behaviour of people who are running US federal cabinet level departments. It's all quite familiar, just on a higher budget. | |
| ▲ | pjc50 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | The US has long been a bit of a dual system, with the world-leading and technology and wealth coexisting with a lot of poverty, violence, and discrimination; but this seems to be the point at which it becomes fully Latin American. Could be considered "imperial rebound", from all the School of the Americas decades in which the US made Latin America more violent, right-wing, and less democratic for its own purposes, culminating in the invasion of Venezuela. I'm sure they'd have started on Cuba by now if Iran had gone as planned. |
| |
| ▲ | lokar a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_state_(model) | | | |
| ▲ | BLKNSLVR a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We are _in_ the weird stage. The President is someone who has realised the nonsense, because people around him for his whole life have enabled and facilitated the nonsense in order to earn some of his dad's money. And now, instead of his dad's money backing him, he has the US' money, he's got a whole new cabal of enablers and facilitators, and a line as long as roughly 30% of the US population awaiting to fill any role they could get to feed off that fat pipe. But, yes, when this filters down, and it has started, there's going to need to be a significant amount of legislative strength shown in order to stop the wall from collapsing entirely. | | |
| ▲ | Varelion 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I fear I do not believe the US has that legislative strength, nor the will to build it. I want to believe that justice is still possible, but big E's island, and the lack of any justice has crushed any optimism out of my soul. I do not see how a prosperous future is possible for my family, so long as that future is in the US. | |
| ▲ | BrenBarn a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | We're going to need more than just "legislative strength" within the framework of our existing government, because this has shown that that framework is inadequate. I don't see a path to true recovery without a Nuremberg-style process in which essentially everyone who held any position of authority in this administration is called to account, in a manner that does not assume that that process must be done in accordance with pre-existing laws. As a simple example, it will require ignoring the Supreme Court ruling that the president is immune to facing consequences for "official acts" he has taken. Most likely it will require ignoring or scrapping the Supreme Court entirely. |
| |
| ▲ | throwaway27448 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 'The last decade has been the Democrats clinging onto the rulebook going "but a dog can't play basketball!" while a dog fucking dunks on us over and over' -@Arr | | |
| ▲ | Varelion 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | I love that analogy. Controlled opposition. A lack of action is the point. | | |
| ▲ | reverius42 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | The Democrats are not controlled opposition; they do not secretly want the MAGA agenda and only pretend to oppose it. They simply don't have any power to stop it and are really bad at getting power to stop it. "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence." |
|
| |
| ▲ | wahnfrieden a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Won’t matter as long as people have Netflix and Chipotle |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | mdp2021 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| (And/)Or maybe uncaring ("psychotic", technically speaking) exploiters of the system of incentives... "Conformists". |
|
| ▲ | sublinear a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [flagged] |
| |
| ▲ | macintux a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Do not “both sides” this level of corruption and incompetence. | |
| ▲ | mrtesthah a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Following the law is not a matter of partisan politics. | | |
| ▲ | zmgsabst a day ago | parent [-] | | Sure it is — see the Democrats refusing to stop discriminating based on protected class, despite that being illegal. Quotas, affirmative action, and now DIE have all been ruled illegal bigotry by the US Supreme Court, but Democrats can’t and won’t stop being bigots. I can’t take a party who has flouted civil rights laws my entire lifetime whining about “muh rule of law!” seriously. | | |
| ▲ | UncleMeat 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Where are these quotas? | | |
| ▲ | zmgsabst 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | Quotas were rules illegal in 1978. I listed them as one of a sequence of continued (and later ruled illegal) bigoted practices, over time. > 1978 — Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978) — The UC Davis School of Medicine admissions program violated the Equal Protection Clause with the institution of quotas for underrepresented minorities. However, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.'s concurring opinion deemed diversity in higher education a "compelling interest" and held that race could be one of the factors in university admissions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_Unit... |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | ajross a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | What's the counterexample of significant funding withdrawn by democratic administrations because of "possibly conservative" language in the output? "Tone deaf" seems not to be capturing the essence of the malfeasance here. | | |
| ▲ | rightbyte a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I think it is some sort of whataboutism without any regard to proportions. Some people have a really hard time emotionally dealing with systems that occusionally fail. | |
| ▲ | zmgsabst a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | They refused to give money unless your application included a section explaining how you supported Democrat social ideology, during the Biden administration. So called DIE-statements. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | qsera a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [flagged] |
| |
| ▲ | sunshinesnacks a day ago | parent [-] | | Over-correcting from too much competence? Can’t tell if that’s what you meant (presumably sarcastically) or if you mean over-correcting from too much previous attention to DEI… | | |
| ▲ | qsera a day ago | parent [-] | | Competence does not require correction. It is when there is too much stupidity going on that * Even large number of fairly average people can see it happening... * large number of fairly average people tries to correct it and overshoots the target, because you know, they are a large number of average people.. The cycle continues... I won't go into specifics, because read the above. | | |
| ▲ | Yokohiii a day ago | parent | next [-] | | You are governed by fairly average people. As a fairly above average person you can certainly adapt. | |
| ▲ | jasonlotito a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Competence does not require correction. Correct, which is why an even larger number of fairly average and intelligent people are wondering why we are correcting. > It is when there is too much stupidity going on Exactly. There is too much stupidity going on in government right now. Exactly. > I won't go into specifics, because read the above. Because you don't want to get corrected? | | |
| ▲ | qsera a day ago | parent [-] | | He he he he he he..... | | |
| ▲ | wtfwhateven 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Grow a spine. | | |
| ▲ | qsera 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Careful there! Spine without a brain is dangerous. It will just reflexively react to every stimulus without actually analyzing it. Not unlike some people are doing here. May be they only have a spine, and not much of a brain... |
|
|
|
|
|
|
