We are a nation ruled by idiots. Oppressed by absolute morons. I don't mean to say they're incompetent to a man, though many, of course, are. I don't mean to say that there are no intelligent conservatives in the right wing of American politics, that these people are all fools amusing themselves with the levers of power out of idle boredom or curiosity. As Project 2025 shows, they had a plan, and they have executed that plan. They can build and implement complex systems.
But I do mean to say they are dumb. They are idiotic.
Look at this Amero-Iran War. Everything that has happened since the initial strikes was absolutely predictable. It's why multiple presidents who had the opportunity to never made any progress towards attacking Iran outright. That a decapitation strike on a regime that has government structure is riddled with redundancies and decision-making bodies, along with a second iteration of the military that is explicitly trained as a political force, would not bring it tumbling down was utterly decipherable from the facts at hand. That they would shut down the Strait of Hormuz and plunge the US and global economy into catastrophe has surprised no one.
Except the Trump administration, who seems to have never considered that such a thing would follow from open hostilities with one of the world's largest oil producers and whose geography affords them access to and control over the waterway that several more oil-producing nations use for exports. They seem to have never considered that Iran might fight back, that if you poked the bear with a stick, you might serve only to enrage the beast. So they have gone to war without enough anti-air missiles, without a plan for the US Navy to do its primary mission: secure the world's shipping lanes for the benefit of the United States and its trade partners, without any idea of an off-ramp. They have spent years now lauding oil, refusing to engage with renewable energy and green design that would have, at least, kept demand for oil in the United States low enough that we would be self-sufficient, so that if we were ever foolish enough to bomb the capitals of two hostile OPEC nations, our citizens' daily lives would be safe from the blowback. Instead, they imperil themselves because they have no conception of what happens tomorrow.
And this is the real thing that I find so outrageously repulsive and insulting about the character of the Trump administration and the rogues' gallery of goons it contains:
They are incurably incurious. They have no belief that anyone else exists. In the television show 30 Rock, the eccentric celebrity character Tracy Jordan declares "I'm Tracy Jordan: when I go to sleep, nothing happens in the world!" This might as well be the operating logic of the Trump administration's plethora of pinheads. Small wonder they deploy videos of US strikes on Iranian targets dressed up as clips from video games—they believe everyone else is an NPC. They are the main characters of their own universe.
They have no interest in learning the complexities of the systems they're meddling in. This is why DOGE destroying USAID makes the world's richest man an accessory to the deaths of thousands. This is why Trump seizes oil tankers from Venezuela containing a product that barely any nation can use and which the United States' refineries for have been mothballed. Everything that meets the definition of "oil" is exactly the same thing in his mind, there's no variation or degrees of it. Nuance is for the weak. Consequences are something that happen to other people.
I sometimes have to pause and remind myself that the Nazis were this crude and dumb, that the main difference between their approach and Trump's is that they ordered Hugo Boss by the military truckload, whereas MAGA is awash in loud baseball caps. Aesthetic differences. We were not owed a better class of fascist; none exists. They are as they have always been: petty, shallow, vain, arrogant people with a completely unearned confidence in their own basis of knowledge.
Socrates once observed that he was wiser than a man who claimed to know a lot, because he did not claim to possess knowledge he did not actually have, in fact, he was very aware how little he knew. All he knew was that he knew nothing. This sort of recognition is beyond this administration. Karoline Leavitt has been pushing the line that the Strait of Hormuz closure is all part of a master plan, which is par for the course: they cannot admit fault because to admit fault would be to suggest that there was something you didn't know and they know everything.
You actually do have to learn to conceive of other people as having independent thoughts and feelings, to understand that other organisms perceive the world differently from you and have access to knowledge you do not and thus make decisions and act on a body of knowledge you do not possess. That the universe does not begin and end with you. It's believed to be a marker of intelligence, a step on the pathway to sentient thought. Most species are suspected to not have this skill at all. Human beings generally begin to work out around the age of four.
It is not good that our leadership is filled with people who seem to have avoided that stage of development altogether. It is not a desirable trait in a leader that they do not consider all the facts as they are and not as the leader perceives them to be. We used to tell ourselves a story of the President as the weigher of options, but I see little evidence that is happening here.
This is a dangerous place to be, to be a nation governed by the incurious, by people who ask no follow up questions when presented with information. Today, the Secretary of Defense announced the Iranians would be given "no quarter," which is to say that surrendering soldiers will be shot rather than taken prisoner, among other treatments of the enemy considered to be inhumane. Just announcing this policy is a violation of the Geneva Conventions and subsequently US law. But Hegseth is the type of person who thinks of the phrase "take no prisoners" as a literal policy and not as a metaphorical approach. We made these conventions for a reason: because there will be days when American citizens and soldiers will need to surrender. And knowing that they will not be shot, will not be captured and tortured, will not be starved or mistreated, that any wounds they have will be tended to, is critical to allow, say, a wounded person to surrender in order to receive medical care.
Hegseth (and through him, Trump) doesn't care about this. His words are not coming from a considered place. It is a declaration made of ignorance, and you can tell because anyone who had sat down and seriously thought through the long-term ramifications of saying this into cameras would have avoided doing it. Anyone who values life beyond their own, that is.
And unfortunately, we are going to be stuck with this careless, selfish and stupid administration for a while yet. And I encourage people to remember: ignorance may be bliss, but it is not a virtue.