Hi, I'm Tim Murphy, a national correspondent here at Mother Jones.
I noticed something during the first 100 days of the second Trump administration that, I suspect, some of you may have too. Are you ready? Are you sitting down? Okay: These people don’t know what they are doing.
Much of the administration has spent the last three-plus months pressing random buttons on the control panel and seeing what they do, and the results have not been pretty. That guy with the initials “JG” you added to a group chat about missile strikes? Turns out it’s not a Cabinet-level official, it’s the editor of the Atlantic. Those people you gleefully fired to achieve negative-dollars in cost savings? Oops, they safeguard the nuclear weapons stockpile. The guy you made acting director of the FBI? Well, someone wrote the wrong name on the announcement, but don’t worry, we’ll just promote that person instead. The 82-year-old guy from Seattle the Social Security Administration decided was dead? He’s actually alive. So that’s some good news, anyway.
When I set out to catalogue all the administration’s errors, I honestly did not expect to find quite so many. They have made career-ending scandals look routine. They are breaking things they don’t understand, for reasons they can barely articulate—let alone explain to a judge. But as I wrote in a piece for Mother Jones today, when you make that many mistakes they’re no longer really mistakes:
It was an explicit choice to govern exactly like this, to apply the Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things” to starving children and cancer research. The driving force behind all of these errors is a carelessness about the world today that stems from a disregard for how it will look tomorrow, and a deep-seated loathing of the people who keep the lights on. On a case-by-case basis many of these were accidents. In the aggregate they constitute an ethos: a determination to break things in a way that the next person won’t be able to put back together—to shatter a way of life so thoroughly that in the future, no one will even try.
Give it a read.
—Tim Murphy
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