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Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

Notice why Hesgeth's aids were fired:

> According to the Times, the private chat also included two senior advisers to Hegseth – Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – who were fired last week after being accused of leaking unauthorized information.

I understand the tactics of much of what Trump and his people do, even though I often disagree. I understand why Trump has DOGE moving quickly and breaking things; I understand why they show contempt for the law, rules, and customs - they want to destroy those things.

I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears; an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission? I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.

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Privileging ideology and loyalty over reality and competence causes massively sub-optimal results.

Imagine you ordered your Waymo to pretend its location, direction and velocity were what you wanted them to be, ignoring its sensors.

It's a myth that the fascists of the 1930s made the trains run on time.

Fascism rewards loyalty above competence.

No this is the distraction. The buffoonery and even the buffoons committing it all dilute the news cycle.

Accounting for the damage done will be nearly impossible and that makes it all the harder to fully reverse. That's one of the focuses here. Making it stick.

At least you are honest in your tacit support for some of these clowns actions.

I think you might want to read their comment again more carefully. Understanding and explaining someone else's terrible motivations for their terrible actions doesn't imply support.

That'll teach me to comment quickly on something on my phone when in the middle of something else.

lol.

Folks that are more competent and considered are less likely to be involved in the first place. I think we can see that from Trump's first time in office. There were people politically aligned that fell by the wayside. Unfortunately incompetence appears to be the winning strategy.

> I don't understand the utter incompetence

Simply put, it’s a reflection of Trump’s own incompetence, or perhaps carelessness and his utter refusal to recognize and make use of expertise in others. I’m about halfway through “Lucky Loser” (Buettner & Craig) which traces his financial history. His disdain for objective data over “intuition” has always been alarming. I suspect his hiring for cabinet positions follows a similar carelessness.

> Lucky Loser

Thanks for that ref! I've always maintained T is extremely dumb, He goes towards far left on the Dumb scale on the levels which you'd have never seen before. But, at the same time, he has all the luck which no one else has. Glad, I'm not the only one to see him that way.

> he has all the luck which no one else has

Well, the tagline of the book is "Inheritance. Fraud. Deceit.", so "Lucky" might not be the right word.

Its a little more than luck. Trump has the best political instincts I have ever seen. He is able to control the narrative in a way dems can only dream of.

I don't think he has very good political instincts at all. He just fell into a time when the conservative party was looking to exercise their spite and he gave them an outlet just by being the crude bigoted asshole he has always been. Doesn't matter what he does as long as he continues to be cruel and hurt the "right people". This is what conservatives have been asking for and are showing up to vote for. You can tell it's not about things like the economy as they often lie about because "the price of eggs" was one of the most important things before the election and they aren't saying shit about the faltering GDP and increasing inflation.

It's interesting to look at opinion polls pre/post election. All through Obama's last term the conservative rallying cry was the economy was bad and migrant caravans were coming. As soon as Trump was elected, there was a 40 point swing on conservative's opinion on the economy. It's not just the economy. It's every position. When Bill Clinton has an affair, then family values are incredibly important. When Trump brags about grabbing women by the pussy without consent, it's just locker room talk.

> I don't think he has very good political instincts at all

I think the political instinct trump brought, and that you're alluding to, was his ability to never admit being wrong about anything. Yes politicians have always done this to some extent but he's taken it to a whole new level.

It's the method of saying what you want people to believe and think over and over with complete confidence until they actually do, even if it has no basis in reality or is stupid and wrong.

It's incompetence as a political platform.

And other politicians have noticed how well it works, so now they do it to (see: hegseth).

> I suppose it's disruptive but if they just showed basic competence they would probably get away with much more.

Yeah but if you were a competent person in a position to work for them, would you do it? I believe there are relatively few smart people willing to go down this hole precisely because they can understand the consequences.

I remember reading a book on the Columbine shooter, and on some level I imagined evil, but a coherent evil, and it really was not, it was quite nonsensical and inconsistent. It was like 4chan logic.

I think when at the surrounding facts - a group of people who talk anti-woke but don’t seem to make a distinction between Jackie Robinson and “all white people are racist”, or willing to ignore every last economist in favor of blanket tariffs, or hiring a Fox News host to run your DOD in the first place! You’re telling me there aren’t enough conservative minds to choose from, in the fucking military! the simplest solution is that there isn’t a coherent ideology.

I think this makes sense, that sort of evil isn’t rational, but we’re so used to movie villains with a coherent ideology I think it poisons the reality. Go watch “The Last King of Scotland”. Idi Amin was the whole bag of nuts.

Because they're idiots. There is no "ahahahahah, we are deliberately doing stupid stuff as part of a sinister plot". They're just doing stupid stuff naturally, because they are stupid.

Like, the hiring process is pretty much "who shows most loyalty to Dear Leader"; one would not _expect_ competence.

Classic supervillain mistake - hiring incompetent minions. Sure, they're loyal. But they don't work.

I mean, it's not a trope for no reason; there are plenty of real-world examples.

> an earlier example was team Trump's court filings challenging the 2020 elections but there is lots more. How does that furthering the neo-fascist / conservative / Trump mission?

With the usual caveats about politics, my understanding is that this is because Trump such a narcissist that he genuinely cannot process the idea of not winning, or being in the wrong.

If he really is like this, this is exceptionally dangerous. Ignore any question about intelligence for a moment, because everyone makes some mistakes: purging anyone who isn't a sycophant means that when he inevitably does make a mistake, nobody will be willing to stop it.

> I don't understand the utter incompetence that often appears

Trump and company want you to think that the national government is completely incompetent so they can sell as much of it off to their Wall Street oligarch ghouls as quickly as possible. They are intentionally incompetent to further that goal.

When the only qualification you have for the people that you hire to advise you is absolute sycophantic loyalty, it isn't surprising when they turn out to be wildly incompetent.

Hesgeth has significant success in life and served as a captain in the Army (or Army National Guard). Those aren't sufficient qualification for Secretary of Defense, but they are for not doing stupid, self-sabotaging stuff.

Simlarly, Rudy Guliani was a lawyer and mayor, but the 2020 election court filings and arguments were idiotic. How is that possible?

I don't buy that they are idiots. I don't have an explanation, however.

Hegseth has years on record as a day drinking handsome face on day time TV who rushes into things without thinking ..

eg: throwing an axe and hitting a drummer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMrVdFnjEjs

That's a very narrow type of "significant success" and absolutely below the bar of qualification for Secretary of Defense, although easily clearing the bar to be considered an idiot.

anyone who goes to college can become a captain in the army. Its honorable sure but not a sign of competence.

You're basically guaranteed a promo to captain, after which promotion gets a lot harder and rarer.

It's the officer version of getting to E-4 before your enlistment ends -- as long as you're not a moron and get busted down you'll get there.

A Captain rank is in no way a qualification for Sec of Defense when there are literally hundreds of 4-star Generals and Admirals with well established track records of running operations during 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Having credentials doesn't make you not an idiot. It's important to understand that you can be very educated or skilled in certain things but it doesn't make you good at everything.

The U.S. Army has approximately 72,729 captains.

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