Advertisement

Supported by

Bret Stephens

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

Harold Macmillan, the midcentury British prime minister, supposedly said that what statesmen feared most were “events, dear boy, events.” Misfortunes happen: a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a foreign crisis. Political leaders are judged by how adroitly or incompetently they handle the unexpected.

Luckily, the Trump administration hasn’t yet had such misfortunes. Its only misfortune — and therefore everyone else’s — is itself.

So much has been obvious again this week, thanks to two stories that are, at their core, the same. First, there was the revelation that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had shared sensitive details of the military strike on Yemen with his wife, brother and personal lawyer on yet another Signal group chat. That was followed by an essay in Politico from a former close aide to Hegseth, John Ullyot, describing a “full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon” — a meltdown that included the firing of three of the department’s top officials. Donald Trump Jr. responded by saying Ullyot is “officially exiled from our movement.”

Then there was a market rout and a dollar plunge, thanks to President Trump’s unseemly and unhinged attacks on Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman. Powell’s sin was to have the audacity to describe the probable effects of the president’s tariffs: namely, that they’ll cause prices to go up and growth to slow down. This sent Trump into a rage, complete with White House threats to examine whether Powell can be fired — a potential assault on central bank independence worthy of the worst economic days of Argentina.

Both cases are about adult supervision: the absence of it in the first instance, the presence of it in the other and the president’s strong preference for the former. Why? Probably for the same reason that tin-pot dictators elevate incompetent toadies to top security posts: They are more dependent and less of a threat. The last thing Trump wants at........

© The New York Times