by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
I have been searching for the origin of the concept that Trumplandia is “malevolence tempered by incompetence” and I think it came from Lawfare Blog. Regardless, it’s perfect. It sums up the world we live in today. If Donald Trump was, say, in any way qualified to be president, the damage he could inflict on all of us would be truly dystpian.
Yet, he’s so bad at his job that he can’t do any of the things he’s threatened to do. So, while he can still inflict some serious harm to democratic norms and the Republic in general, he is a really, really bad leader and may, in fact, be daft.
That incompetence is all that stands between us and all-out fascism is something to worry about a great deal. It’s something very troubling and it will be a minor miracle. I mean, imagine the history of Nazi German if Hitler simply was so incompetent that he couldn’t muster the government to actually inflict harm on anyone, much less Jews.
But that is the world we live in. It really is.
That was the part that we totally missed during the election when rhetoric was running high and people like me were really scared that the worst would happen. We simply had no idea how bad at governing Trump would be. He’s really bad, really, really bad. You have to look no farther than his incessant tweeting to see how bad he is. He tweets about things in ways that not only give us painful insight into his thinking in real-time, it also does a huge amount of damage to his drive to turn the American Republic in a “managed democracy” run via executive orders.
Regardless, only time will tell if any of this will change. Only time will tell if Trump will get his act together and begin to use the levers of power to enact the darker aspects of the Trumplandian vision.
