WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT WOULD HAPPEN?

Donald Trump's bizarre selection of unqualified people to positions of supreme power within his administration based on their financial contributions to his run for the presidency and their sycophantic support for him is starting to bite him on the bum.

Sorry, not you lovely people ....

... I meant these clowns.

No doubt you've heard about the fiascoes, catastrophes, criminality, cruelty, stupidity and egregiousness as perpetrated by Trump and his cronies in just the first two months of his second term as president - things like alienating Canada and Mexico. raising inflation by imposing silly tariffs, insulting EU and European nations, threatening to annexe Greenland and Panama Canal, making a balls-up of Ukraine Russia peace negotiations, trashing Gaza and Middle East relationships, cosying up to Russia, destroying Federal agencies concerned with health, education, social security, civil response and the environment .... the list does go on and on and on ...

Maybe just when you thought the bozos both elected and unelected couldn't do any worse - they did. 

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The USA takes pride in its war machine and its ability to bomb the crap out of anyone it doesn't agree with supported by 'cutting edge' technology. Their 'war cabinet' is usually made up of: 

• President: The President, as Commander-in-Chief, leads the group and makes the final decisions.

• Vice President: The Vice President, who is also the President of the Senate, is often involved in national security discussions.

• Secretary of State: The head of the Department of State, responsible for foreign policy and diplomacy.

• Secretary of Defense: The head of the Department of Defense, responsible for the nation's military.

• Secretary of the Treasury:

The head of the Department of the Treasury, responsible for the nation's finances and economic policy.

• Attorney General:

The head of the Department of Justice, responsible for enforcing the law.

• National Security Advisor: The President's advisor on national security matters, who often chairs meetings of the "war cabinet".

• Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The highest-ranking military officer, who advises the President on military matters.

• Other key advisors: Depending on the situation, other officials, such as the Director of National Intelligence, may also be included.

All good so far.

In the current fiasco nicknamed (as stupid and puerile Americans do - 'SignalGate') the 'war cabinet' was made up of 18 Trump officials and Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg:

• National security adviser Mike Waltz 
• Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth 
• Vice President JD Vance 
• CIA Director John Ratcliffe 
• Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard 
• Special envoy Steve Witkoff
• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent,
• White House chief of staff Susie Wiles
• Secretary of State Marco Rubio
• Deputy national security adviser Alex Wong
• Joe Kent National Counterterrorism Center leader
• Brian McCormack for NSC, 
• Walker Barrett?
• Jacob?
• Trump adviser Stephen Miller. 

There are some additions and deletions to the 'list' which I guess is fluid depending on the situation but here are a couple of glaring ones:

The absence of Donald Trump as president is the first. It's almost as if he wanted to keep away from this situation even though, in the past his hubris and narcissism has wanted him to be in the limelight to take credit in 'heroic' situations.

Special envoy Steve Witkoff was there who just happened to be visiting Putin at the time - at the actual time - in Moscow at the Kremlin following the Signal chat on his phone.

Mmmm...

Related to this is this excellent editorial by Frank Bruni in the New York Times on March 27, 2025:

TRUMP'S CRACKERJACK CABINET

This is a great read and, if you don't or cannot access it here are some outtakes:

"Who could have imagined it? That Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, of all peacocks, would commit an egregious error in judgment, display a complete lack of professionalism and be sloppy enough to divulge war plans in a group chat that included a prominent journalist?

Sure, there were reports of Hegseth’s gross mismanagement of the veterans’ groups that he once led. There were accusations of public drunkenness and a violent temper. But how many of the men who previously held his job could rock a bright blue suit the way he did? Or pose shirtless to such fetching effect?

What he lacked in rectitude he made up for in pulchritude. Give that man a big say in military operations and a Signal account. What could possibly go wrong?

And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s immunity inanity — I mean, no one saw that coming. When the Senate held hearings on his fitness to be the secretary of health and human services, he assured lawmakers that his vaccine denialism was overstated. That his views were measured. That his words and deeds would be cautious.

Then came a measles outbreak in western Texas, and he sagaciously decreed: Hey, this isn’t a failure of inoculation. It’s a failure of diet. If those sickly children were just eating better — and maybe taking some cod liver oil — they’d be superheroes resistant to these vestigial viruses. And bird flu? Here’s a thought: Let it run rampant through affected flocks. Yes, it might mutate and spread catastrophically among humans, but perhaps we’d glean important insights along the way. Think of the approach as a new, microbiological season of “Survivor,” only with pathogens in the mix and countless lives on the line.

As President Trump’s crackerjack cabinet settles in and unsettles any sentient American, we are not beholding a series of discrete embarrassments and outrages. We are witnessing iterations of the same horror story. Trump chose people for senior administration positions not because they had demonstrated the skills and disposition that those jobs required, not because they had paid their dues, not because they had proved their mettle. He wanted provocateurs. He wanted sycophants. He wanted to test his supporters’ compliance and send his detractors into a tizzy.

Competence didn’t enter the equation, so competence isn’t among the results. He got exactly what he paid for, and now a nation is paying the price.

During a congressional hearing on Tuesday morning, his preposterous director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, preposterously downplayed the security breach of the Signal chat, insisting that none of the information shared was classified. That transparent fiction followed her initial refusal to confirm to lawmakers that she was even a part of the sensitive conversation; she never did tell them whether she’d participated using a personal phone, which would have exacerbated the breach, or a work-issued one.

On Wednesday, she was back before lawmakers, back on defense and armed with a new script: The divulged plans were being shared simultaneously with allies, so, I guess, they weren’t all that juicy a secret. Who could have anticipated such insouciance from Gabbard, a Russia-loving contrarian whose principal qualification for her lofty government position was being so unqualified for it that she’d owe Trump whatever spin his administration wanted, whatever subservience it demanded?

Even members of Trump’s cabinet more credible and seasoned than Gabbard knew the deal: You take the title, you bow before the king. This brings us to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or “Little Marco,” as Trump once mockingly (and prophetically) called him. Rubio was supposed to be the (reasonably) safe member of the cabinet — every Senate Democrat joined every Senate Republican in voting to confirm him. They assumed the best. That’s a fatal error in matters Trump-related.

Although Rubio had long been an impassioned advocate of American military support for Ukraine, he watched Trump and Vice President JD Vance gang up on President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in that shameful Oval Office meeting, got the message, got out the pompoms and got on Elon Musk’s social media platform to cheer his boss.

“Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before,” Rubio wrote. “Thank you for putting America First.” Junking his principles that merrily and fawningly suggests that he was poised for surrender all along — and that Trump could smell as much.

Hegseth may actually be exceeding Trump’s expectations. His mimicry of Trump is uncanny. After Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist privy to the Signal chat, wrote about the breach, Hegseth simply denied reality, saying, “Nobody was texting war plans.” Goldberg clearly demonstrated otherwise. Hegseth also went on the attack, Trump-style, by smearing Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, as someone who had “made a profession of peddling hoaxes.”"

I'm bewildered at how 'the world's greatest nation' (a self congratulatory statement like "Richard's Bass Bag - the original bass bag") can so quickly and completely disintegrate. It's like they all got together and said "we're tired of all this democracy and world-leading shit, let's just do what we've always wanted to do - be autocratic dictators and take the money and run".