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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

These people who work for this administration are all so grossly and maliciously incompetent.

They are quite competent at causing enough chaos for those with inside knowledge and wealth to exploit.

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 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.

> 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.

"Y'all trash people" - The world, to summarize

They should not canditate. Let a comedian do it instead, like UK did with Count Binface.

It's easier to understand if you consider they might literally be agents of a foreign government.

Never see malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.

They are making hundreds of millions of dollars on the grift. They seem quite comptent.

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...

Heck, all of that is like the tip of an iceberg, before anyone even googles like "kushner + saudis"

But, what about Hunter Biden's laptop!? /s

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.)

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.

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.

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".

These people aren’t very bright, are they?

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.

I mean, Americans have consistently elected these people, haven’t they? This is easy to mask as "evil", but…

I don't know what you're trying to say. Evil people can run for elections and receive votes.

But not-very-bright evil people can’t?

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.

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.

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.

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...

Is it though? Desiring such an end state sounds pretty stupid to me.

Of course, how could I forget that people's motivations are solely filtered through their reasoning. Obviously no smart person has ever desired anything that brings negative consequences for the people around them, while increasing their own power. That would be too stupid.

They seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.

Indeed.

> Never see malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.

¿Por qué no los dos?

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.

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

It was flagged for moderation.

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

Oh no they made me into a backpack rapper lmao

more likely alien race

Should be criminal.

A lot of it is! We live in lawlessness (for those at the top) in the US.

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.

'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

I love that analogy. Controlled opposition. A lack of action is the point.

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."

The MAGA agenda is just a tiny sliver of what the government actually does (albeit, a particularly culturally obnoxious sliver). On most economic and foreign policy the two parties are in emphatic agreement. The Democratic Party mostly exists to keep itself in power regardless of the state of the country—in this sense, it is emphatically controlled opposition.

If they were effective opposition, half the party would be in prison right now.

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.

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.

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.

Won’t matter as long as people have Netflix and Chipotle

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_state_(model)

This is fantastically interesting, thanks!

Today, I learned.

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.

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.

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.

(And/)Or maybe uncaring ("psychotic", technically speaking) exploiters of the system of incentives... "Conformists".

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