Middleboro Review 2: TRUMP SCREWUPS

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Tuesday, April 29, 2025

An incomplete list of every Trump administration screwup

April 29, 2025

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

P.S. Bay Area folks and beyond! We're partnering with the great folks at Story Fest to bring our journalism, as well as stories from other newsrooms in the region, to one stage. The festival is on July 19. Grab your exclusive early-bird tickets.

Mistakes Were Made. And Made. And Made Again.

Donald Trump and his goons only needed 100 days to break the government. Good luck putting it back together.

BY TIM MURPHY

EXCERPT:

What will you remember about Donald Trump’s second first 100 days? Probably the cruelty and arrogance of the people in charge, and the fecklessness of so many institutions that were supposed to fight back. Maybe the image of the world’s richest men, and some of their wives, sitting obediently in front of the president’s Cabinet on Inauguration Day. Or the way the New York Times described Elon Musk as having “extended his arm diagonally upward, palm facing down.” Or the enthusiasm with which the secretary of agriculture encouraged Americans to raise chickens. Or the words, “They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak.”

But personally, I’m going to remember all the mistakes.

I have never seen a government get so many things wrong, in so many different ways. It was like an Obamacare website every 18 hours. It was like the soft opening of Jurassic Park. And these were not the sort of run-of-the-mill snafus that are endemic to any large organization. They all had something in common: People who thought they knew better than everyone else took on work they didn’t understand, and sidelined the people who did. They were making mistakes, quite simply, because the people who didn’t make mistakes were gone, and because there was no one left to tell them not to, or to correct them when they did.

In 100 days the administration has, in no particular order:

“Accidentally cancelled,” in Musk’s words, funding for “Ebola prevention.”
Sent Harvard an “unauthorized” list of demands, which led the nation’s wealthiest university to stop negotiating with the administration and fight back in the courts.
Rescinded job offers for the Veterans Crisis Line, “due to an administrative error.”
Fired Health and Human Services employees that, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “should not have been cut.”
Accidentally fired, and tried to rehire, employees at the National Animal Health Laboratory Network who were working on the administration’s response to bird flu.
Fired, and scrambled to rehire, people responsible for maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
Fired, and then un-fired, workers at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Fired, and then rehired, people responsible for ensuring the safety of medical devices.
Fired workers at the Small Business Administration, then un-fired them, and then fired them again.
Accidentally fired people who had already taken a buyout offer.
Tried to fire 22 US attorneys, but sent the termination emails to the wrong addresses.
“Mistakenly” gave the “normalize Indian hate” guy the power to rewrite Treasury payment systems.
Accidentally published classified information about the National Reconnaissance Office.
Shared an unclassified list of new CIA employees via email.
Tried to sell a government complex that includes a secret CIA facility.
Inadvertently put both the Justice Department and the FBI headquarters up for sale.
Accidentally made Brian Driscoll (aka “Drizz”) acting director of the FBI and then just went with it rather than acknowledge the mixup.
Accidentally revealed living peoples’ Social Security numbers as part of their big dump of JFK assassination files, after Trump ordered the documents released with 24 hours notice.
Accidentally cut off the ability of people in Maine to get Social Security numbers for their newborns because, according to the acting Social Security administrator, “it looked like a strange contract.”
Accidentally made it possible for anyone to update the Doge.gov homepage, which resulted in the words “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN” staying up on the site for 12 hours.
Claimed $8 billion in savings on an $8 million contract.
Completely invented a non-existent $50 million program to supply condoms to Gaza.
Hired a new IRS chief—on Tax Day—without telling the Treasury Secretary, leading to the new IRS chief being replaced with yet another new IRS chief three days later.
Paid $2 billion because the acting solicitor general appealed the wrong court ruling.
Submitted an internal legal brief saying that their congestion pricing case against New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is bad, as an unsealed filing in their congestion pricing case.
Added Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to an emoji-riddled group chat about war plans in Yemen.
“Accidentally” terminated and then reinstated environmental grants in Michigan.
Cut off funding to food programs “that were not meant to be cut.”
Announced an investigation into a non-existent medical school.
“Mistakenly” removed Jackie Robinson and Japanese-American soldiers from the Department of Defense website.
Imposed tariffs on an island of penguins.
Made tariffs 4 times too high because of an incorrect math equation.
Broke, for 10 hours, the mechanism for actually collecting tariffs.
Accidentally told an immigration attorney from Massachusetts, who is a US citizen, she had to leave the country.
Accidentally told Ukrainian refugees they had to leave the country.
Accidentally detained US citizens in immigration sweeps.
Deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador due to an “administrative error.”
Accidentally pronounced 82-year-old Ned Johnson of Seattle dead.