This Trump administration is filled with amateurs, unqualified by knowledge or experience to fill their posts. Worse, those amateurs have huge egos, so large that they refuse to see (or at least admit) all that they don’t know.
There’s nothing to be ashamed of in being an amateur. Everyone is, when first getting involved in an activity. But amateurs should at least be humble enough to admit that they’re novices, not yet experts.
Many of Trump’s cabinet members and others of his appointees apparently assume they know it all. They don’t.
Big egos are not rare in politics. In fact, no one would run for the presidency or the congress who didn’t have a healthy ego. But it’s one thing to recognize your own real strengths and quite another to swagger around pretending you have abilities that you don’t.
Unfortunately, quite a few people now running our government are in the second group.
Much has been written and spoken about how unprepared members of Trump’s new cabinet are. I’ll just mention a couple in each of two important areas where their unfitness could have devastating consequences: our national defense and our health care.
Take Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for example. This former Fox host’s only experience running any military organization was heading two veterans’ advocacy groups, both of which forced him out amid charges of mismanagement. That’s the person now heading the massively huge and complex Department of Defense (DoD), which oversees a budget of about 850 billion dollars (www.defense. gov) and about 2.91 million employees (https://comptroller.defense. gov).
Tulsi Gabbard, a former Congressperson with no experience in intelligence work, now oversees this country’s spy agencies as the new Director of National Intelligence. Her many admiring references to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad make it unclear where her true loyalty lies.
The very real danger of having amateurs in control of this nation’s defense and intelligence departments was highlighted recently in revelations about a “group chat” held between senior administration officials about upcoming military action against Houthi militants in Yemen. Instead of conducting such a discussion in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), using secure communication systems as required when handling classified or sensitive information, this group used the Signal software, which is subject to being hacked and which also erases communications made over it after a certain period of time.
That latter characteristic violates The Federal Records Act of 1950 as amended. Not only did these senior officials risk a possible enemy hearing their communication, but they apparently were trying to hide what was said from those in this country who should know about it. If Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic magazine, hadn’t been mistakenly made a part of the call, the American people would probably never have learned of this frightening breach of security and violation of law.
Robert Kennedy Jr., a famous vaccine skeptic with no medical background, now heads the Department of Health and Human Services (which oversees Medicare, Medicaid, the Food & Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control). Putting a kook like Kennedy in a post that could vitally affect the health and well-being of everyone in this country is truly frightening.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, who now heads the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, does have a medical degree and in fact taught medicine at Columbia University before retiring a professor emeritus in 2018. But he is far better known as a TV pitchman who pushed “cures” of questionable value. A big booster of Medicare Advantage, Oz is expected to try to fully privatize Medicare (Liz Shalka, “Dr. Oz Has a Long History of Promoting Quack Treatments,” Huffpost, December 3, 2021).
The combination of Oz and his boss, RFK Jr., being in charge of our health care should make everyone scared.
What do all these novices have in common? Besides their inflated egos, all have pledged fealty to Donald Trump, which seems to be the main quality the President seeks in a nominee. That, and looking good on television.
The head amateur with the biggest ego of all is Trump himself, of course. In his first term, he showed he had little knowledge of how government works, and worse, that he didn’t care. If anything, he’s worse this time. At least during his first term he had some “adults in the room,” people who didn’t just suck up to him but would sometimes tell him when an action he contemplated wasn’t allowable.
Now those restraining forces are gone. Instead, we have Elon Musk, an unelected man who doesn’t seem to even understand how government should work but who has been allowed, by the head amateur, to take a chain saw to vital functions of government, firing experienced employees right and left.
And we have Vice President J. D. Vance, who also seems to have little understanding of government (and who was also in on that infamous Signal “group chat”).
The press conference between Trump, Vice-President Vance, and President Zelenskyy of Ukraine a few weeks ago was one of the most embarrassing spectacles politically that I have witnessed in a long time.
It was apparently intended to embarrass and humiliate Zelenskyy, as Trump and Vance double-teamed him, trying to make him grovel and beg for a crumb of help from the United States. Zelenskyy stood his ground, however. He was not disrespectful as the two Ugly Americans claimed. They were disrespectful of him. It was painful to watch.
As someone who is usually proud of my country, I felt ashamed that day. No person— certainly no ally, especially not someone who has bravely led his also-brave countrymen through three years of horrible war against a much larger aggressor nation— should be subjected to such treatment.
And what’s with J. D. Vance’s behavior? Vice-presidents typically sit silently in meetings between heads of state, unless invited to speak. Vance kept interrupting Zelenskyy, apparently at Trump’s instigation.
Trump apparently thought putting Zelenskyy down as he did made himself look strong. To me, Trump looked like a playground bully who knows himself to be weak but tries to look strong by attacking a smaller victim. Trump looked like the amateur he is. An amateur with a giant ego.
Maybe Trump’s most ardent admirers think he came out of that exchange looking like the winner. Only one man looked presidential in that exchange, and it wasn’t Bone-Spurs Trump. Or his Ass-kisser Vance.
Amateurs do not belong in important positions of power, at least if they don’t have enough humility to realize, and admit, what they don’t know.
What we have now is a horribly dangerous combination: a bunch of amateurs with way-too-big egos.