Photograph Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain

The Trump administration is claiming powers in both domestic and foreign affairs that vastly exceed those of prior presidents. He bases his claim on his unprecedented “mandate” in which he did not get even a majority of the votes. His popular vote victory margin was less than Hillary Clinton’s margin in her Electoral College loss to Trump in 2016. But facts mean little to Trump and his followers.

This is a big problem. We probably would not want to see unchecked powers going to any presidential administration, no matter how competent, but it is especially dangerous in the hands of incompetents who often do not have a clue.

The displays of incompetence in Trump’s first 80 days are endless. The most visible was the war-planning session, involving all the top military and intelligence officials (except Trump), conducted over Signal. And they apparently did not even know their guest list since they included a senior editor/reporter from The Atlantic magazine. This would have led to an immediate impeachment resolution and likely actual impeachment under Biden.

But this is just the beginning. We have Elon Musk running around with his chainsaw, wrecking one government agency after another.

Musk apparently could not be bothered to take even a few minutes to learn about the agencies he was sawing through. For example, he immediately offered buyout plans to encourage retirements even at agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration, which already had a serious shortage in many key positions, like air-traffic controllers.

He decided the entirety of USAID was waste, fraud, and abuse, seemingly without knowing that it supported an AIDS program in Africa (

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