If there was any doubt that the inmates are running the asylum in our administration right now, the group chat on the Signal messaging app about the attack on Yemen should have erased it for all but the most diehard MAGA supporters.
The conversation intended for our Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Director of National Intelligence and other administration principals also, accidentally, included the Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, and revealed a precise attack timeline, target surveillance, and shared plans for a bombing campaign 30 minutes before the first planes took off on March 15.
Secretary of Defense Hegseth subsequently insisted that no classified information was communicated. “Nobody was texting war plans. No units, no locations, no routes, no flight plans, no sources, no methods, no classified information.”
Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Iraqi war veteran, took exception: “Pete Hegseth is a f***ing liar. This so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could have gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.”
As always, President Trump referred to the entire episode as a “witch hunt,” and “a hoax.”
While this example of one of the most ignorant breaches of protocol affecting our national security should concern us, the general lack of focus on relevant, evidence-based substance underpinning policy discussions at the pinnacle of the administrative level of our governing body ought to be disturbing. Much of it might be relegated to willful ignorance, which unfortunately sometimes degenerated to stupidity.
Modern-day researchers have identified several recognizable sets of actions embodying stupidity: “Confident ignorance,” involving people taking risks without having the necessary skills to deal with them.
President Trump may know what he does not know, but delegated tasks to staff members like Elon Musk or trade tariff architect Pete Navarro, neither of whom appear to possess such awareness.
“Absent minded failure,” meaning people knew the right thing to do but were not paying sufficient attention to avoid doing something stupid, like in “Signal gate.”
And, finally, “Lack of control,” in which decision makers compromise their organizations by failing to accept objections from those charged with implementing the leader’s preconceived plans. Such decision makers may select biased information to support their proposals, instead of considering factual data.
We have seen numerous situations in which consequential decisions were reached “supported” by fallacious interpretations of available facts.
Preeminent examples include: Candidate Trump’s insistence that illegal immigrants from Haiti residing in Springfield, Ohio have been eating domestic pets. He claimed this assertion to be factual since he saw it on television. President Trump’s declaration that our government sent $50 million worth of condoms to the Gaza strip, a “fact” Elon Musk apparently identified as uncovered by his DOGE group of researchers. In fact, the Gaza in question is a province in Mozambique, in which we supported a fund for prevention of HIV.
Mr. Musk also spread the assertion that 9 million 130-year-old recipients—many even more than 150 years old—were receiving social security. This bit of “information” exhibited his total ignorance of how the Social Security Administration maintains its records.
And then there remains the issue of the administration’s preoccupation with colonizing Canada, Greenland and Gaza, changing the Gulf of Mexico, which received its name during the mid 16th century, to the Gulf of America, and proclaiming English, which is spoken fluently by 80% of the population, to be our official national language. And these represent only the tip of the iceberg. The list goes on.
We can’t gloss over the hot topic of the moment—tariffs—a concept the president refers to as “the most beautiful word.” It remains difficult to understand how Peter Navarro, the president’s point person on the subject, has become so dominant, and yet appears so ignorant about the consequences of blindly pursuing the developing policy. The global economic system that the U.S. has shaped and steered for more than 3/4 of a century was animated by a powerful guiding vision: that trade and finance would be based on cooperation and consent rather than coercion. By provoking a world-wide trade war, Trump risks abandoning that vision of shared interests and replacing it with one that assumes that sharp economic conflicts are unavoidable.
So yes! It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that the inmates appear to be running the asylum.
Based on the administration’s record thus far, we should brace ourselves for significant uncertainty going forward.
