While working and reading today, the insanity of the Trump Administration just became another part of the pattern that my head is trying to match. DeVos wrecking Education, Pruitt at the EPA. Long time readers, and readers with some curiosity about political life, know the drill. Then came yesterday, when Steve Benen took note of Tillerson’s gutting of the State Department:
The picture painted by the Times is alarmingly bleak. Senior Foreign Service officers are leaving in droves; career diplomats and civil servants are being bought out; and Tillerson and his team have forced many to resign “by refusing them the assignments they wanted or taking away their duties altogether.”
In some cases, some diplomats returning from high-level assignments, have been ordered to “spend months performing mind-numbing clerical functions beside unpaid interns.”
For most observers, all of this is simply baffling. The secretary of state’s principal responsibility is to oversee the nation’s diplomatic efforts, and yet, Donald Trump’s chief diplomat appears determined to undermine his own department’s capacity. In a rather literal sense, it defies explanation.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recently wrote, “The purposeful gutting of American power abroad is mystifying. If you didn’t know better, you’d think some rival government was running our foreign policy.”
Senator Murphy’s remark set things off for me. The moves we’re seeing are the sort calculated to push the United States – and the greater ideology that it pushes – into the second rank of nations. Our universities may be first-rate for a long time to come, but we need everyone to be pushing their educational boundaries, not struggling with the silliness of for-profit schooling. Pruitt doing terrible things to the environment. And the Tillerson behaviors at State are mystifying only so long as we try to attribute those behaviors to personal avarice or idiosyncratic beliefs – hard to really see in isolation.
But Benen reminded me in some earlier post that Tillerson has long been an ally of Russia. The same Russia that is now considered to have interfered in our 2016 elections.
I’m entertaining some thoughts here. The Mercers, the Kochs, Adelson, maybe even Murdoch and the Sacklers. These are all known bogey-men of the liberals. What if they’re not free agents? What if each of these groups, known for their conservative positions and donations to extremist causes, have been bought or are being blackmailed?
What if the big bad Koch brothers are just puppets? What if someone has something on Tillerson, and he’s just bouncing along to their string-jerks?
And what if the puppeteer turns out to be Russian?
Yeah, it sounds like something a conspiracy theory nutcase would say, and I think generally I don’t fit into that box. But try as I might, I find most of the explanations for the patterns we’re all seeing to actually be of low probability, a low enough probability that I’m left thinking there must be a better explanation for this incredible cock-up of an Administration than simply he’s a fucking egotistical incompetent who can only hire people who are worse than he is at his job.
I hope someone can come up with a less fantastical explanation for this that fits the pattern better, because it all really makes me sick.
