The drowning leader

We've heard it before: our domestic Dear Leader is hopelessly incompetent. His penchant for demonstrating that on a daily, sometimes hourly basis tends to numb us to that unsettling truth.

So every once in a while I need to be reminded of how staggeringly bad he is at management, a task that the first modern so-called businessman-president had bragged he could do far better than any of his predecessors.

Thank you, Matt Yglesias at Vox, for today's reminder: a sorrowful look at how Trump completely botched the federal government's reaction to Hurricane Maria, dooming Puerto Rico's residents to a year (and counting) of misery.

... something anyone in the media could tell you is that cable producers’ news judgment is not an infallible guide to the substantive importance of various stories....

This is why presidents have traditionally relied upon staff and the massive information-gathering capabilities of the American government for information rather than letting television set the agenda. Trump has a different philosophy, however, and spent the post-storm Saturday glued to his television and letting the hosts of Fox & Friends drag him into an ill-advised Twitter spat with NBA star Steph Curry and various NFL players.

...

Because Trump wasn’t paying attention, the [Maria] situation evolved into a catastrophe. And because the situation evolved into a catastrophe, it eventually ended up on television.

The Washington Post reports that by Monday, Trump “was becoming frustrated by the coverage he was seeing on TV.”

Yglesias notes that Puerto Rico already was more vulnerable to the disruption of a major natural disaster than it should have been. That wasn't Trump's fault. However, his administration's failure to focus on and to respond to the knowable facts on the ground was nothing less than an abdication of its responsibilities. Putting it more succinctly, the administration flatly failed to provide the aid Puerto Rico needed in a timely fashion.

The administration claimed that its response was "fantastic". Well, you can claim anything when you don't give a shit about the truth.

The administration didn't care that the official death toll of 64, issued by the Puerto Rican governor's office in the hurricane's immediate aftermath, was farcically low. Anybody with two functioning brain cells knew that that number could not be squared with the devastation on the ground and the dire calls for more aid that could not be entirely ignored by the media.

Of course, that official death toll was, a year later, finally revised — upward. It now far exceeds the death toll from Katrina, Bush 43's most damaging domestic crisis, and rivals the total count from the 11 September 2001 attacks.

That's staggering. It's also extremely embarrassing, to view it in terms of cold politics for a moment.

And yet our domestic Dear Leader denies any mistakes.

The tragedy of 2,975 American citizens (yes, Puerto Ricans are American citizens and have been for a century) dying as a result of a natural disaster cannot be minimized.

Yet it's merely a particularly grotesque and appalling example of the larger truth about this administration: it is incompetent. And the incompetence starts at the very top.

Trump likes to pretend that his executive orders are effective governance, but the truth is that the government only functions because a handful of his senior appointees know what they're doing and can keep the lights on. Trump himself does not comprehend his own responsibilities, much less what all his Cabinet members are supposed to be doing.

Until recently he didn't care, either, because as long as he was able to enrich himself and his family and friends, all was right in the world. Now, however, it's dawning on him that his casual corruption — which I suspect he doesn't even comprehend is corruption — will have legal consequences that could harm him and his family and friends.

He still doesn't know how far short he falls of his job's requirements. He will never understand that. (Indeed, it would be difficult to find another American as wrong for the job because very few people combine pathological self-absorption, obliviousness to their own shortcomings, and enough wealth to buy their way out of trouble.) But it's becoming clearer to him that he doesn't have a team he can trust to help him weather the storms on the horizon.

He's drowning: he just doesn't know it yet.

As always, he will be the last to know.