Apr.28

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

The Mistakes Just Keep Piling Up

Part of the reason that the voters see Trump v2.0 as chaotic is the increasingly long list of news stories that show how incompetent Donald Trump and the people around him are. In small matters and large matters, many negative incidents have occurred and it gives people the feeling that the administration doesn't know what it is doing. The Biden and Obama administrations never had a long list of mishaps like these:

• Signal: At least two times, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has put secret war plans out on an unapproved channel where participants without a security clearance could see them. He even had an unsecure PC and an unsecure Internet connection installed for his use, in violation of all DoD security rules. Any Democratic Secretary of Defense who did this would have been impeached and convicted already. People don't like the lives of service members being put at risk due to politicians ignoring the security rules. Remember that Republicans rode Hillary Clinton's e-mail server to victory for years, even though there is no evidence that anyone other than Clinton and her staff had access to it.
  
  
• Harvard: Someone sent Harvard an outrageous list of demands, basically saying that unless it let the administration run the university, billions of dollars in funds would be (illegally) withheld. After the resulting storm died down a bit, the administration said it was a mistake. We don't know if it was really a mistake. If it was, they are incompetent. If it was not a mistake, they are going full-blown authoritarian. Neither is a good look.
  
  
• IRS commissioner: Trump appointed Gary Shapley as acting commissioner of the IRS. Two days later he fired Shapley. Supposedly, Elon Musk was the genius who suggested Shapley, but when Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent got wind of this, he blew a gasket and demanded that Trump fire Shapley. The whole thing reeks of gross incompetence.
  
  
• Tariffs: The initial round of tariffs on "Liberation Day" was a disaster. Apparently someone asked an AI chatbot to provide a tariff for each country, and it used some nonsensical formula to pull numbers out of thin air, including a tariff on an island occupied only by penguins. A few days later, Trump yanked all the tariffs and announced new ones. Couldn't he get this right the first time around? Apparently, no. He now claims he has made 200 trade deals, even though that’s more countries than the world has, according to most lists. Of course, most lists do not include the penguin kingdom of Heard and MacDonald Islands. In any case, this claim is obviously a lie. Trade deals take months to negotiate. He probably hasn't completed a single deal yet. At best he might have a concept of a plan that he could propose if the other side decides to show up for negotiations.
  
  
• DOGE: Elon and the Muskrats are just slashing the budget without any idea of what they are doing. Musk eliminated the government workers who look after nuclear safety and power grid security. They (and many others) had to be brought back. Musk promised $2 trillion in savings. So far, he has saved $160 billion at best, but has also run up a bill of $135 billion for correcting his mistakes. Our staff mathematician claims $160B - $135B ≠ $2T. We don't know. Our calculator app doesn't do trillions.
  
  
• Markets: Trump's poorly thought out policies have caused the stock market to tank (causing trillions in losses), the bond market to panic, and the U.S. dollar to lose about 9% of its value since Jan 20. His billionaire cronies don't like this kind of volatility.
  
  
• Kristi Noem: The Secretary of DHS had her purse snatched while at a D.C. restaurant, despite a full security detail present. Her $4,000 Gucci purse contained her driver's license, apartment keys, blank checks, passport, official badge, and $3,000 in cash. This is getting a lot of attention, and maybe should get more. Think about the things she was carrying. Why would you need that much cash, plus blank checks, plus a passport? One possibility is that you want to be prepared to flee the country. Certainly it is unusual.
  
  And Noem is not only careless, but also tone deaf. Forget her bragging about shooting her puppy in the head. That was before she joined the Cabinet. But wearing a $50,000 Rolex watch and tactical gear while using the El Salvador gulag as a backdrop for a speech praising Trump suggests she is in over her head. For a professional politician, she ought to know better. She is not among South Dakota's best and brightest.
  

In addition there are many things Trump has done that are not mistakes but also are not popular. He has made a serious effort to stop scientific research on reducing climate change (and the accompanying hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and tornadoes), curing diseases, and creating new industries. He has targeted Head Start and heating oil programs for poor people. He has deported people without due process and defied the courts on this. He soured all of America's allies on America. And many more things. Voters don't keep track of all this stuff, but at some point the overall message is: "Can't they do anything right?" (V)