“It’s 100 days into the Trump (first) Presidency and looking more and more like President Trump is no more effective at running the country than his business interests. His book, The Art of the Deal was meant to tout his negotiating skills, but the results were never very successful.”
I wrote this Huffington Post column in April 2017 during President Trump’s first 100 days in office, and the Trump 2.0 administration is showing even more incompetence. We have just learned that they know even less about keeping military plans secret.
Editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that senior members of the Trump administration planned the March 15 U.S. attack on the Houthis in Yemen over Signal, a widely available encrypted app that is not part of the United States national security system.
In any other administration Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and National Security Advisor Mike Walz would have been immediately fired for disregarding national security protocols, just as Trump liked to fire people on The Apprentice, his TV show.
In fact, Hegseth should follow his own advice given in an interview on Fox News during his Senate hearings: “Anyone breaching national security protocols would be fired and prosecuted on the spot. (sic)”
When asked about the security breach, Trump responded: “I don't know anything about it, reports Heather Cox Richardson. “I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it. You're saying that they had what?”
It’s a sign that the Republican Party and the Trump/Musk administration has doubled down on their extreme incompetence (and naivete), so much so that it threatens our national security.
There is nothing that the administration could say to make the situation better, but this made it worse. As national security specialist Tom Nichols noted: “If the President is telling the truth and no one’s briefed him about this yet, that’s another story in itself. In any other administration, [the chief of staff] would have been in the Oval [Office] within nanoseconds of learning about something like this.”
Nothing ever came of Trump’s first term legislative efforts either; with no repeal of Obamacare, or real tax reform, an immigration ban, new trade policy, and sanctuary city victories because of poorly thought out strategies. Instead, he threatened judges, sanctuary cities, Congress, and even other countries when they didn’t support his various executive orders.
I cited a 2017 Fortune Magazine report on candidate Trump’s negotiating tactics: “As he campaigns, Trump often touts his skills as a negotiator,” says Fortune. “The analysis shows that lawsuits are one of his primary negotiating tools. He turns to litigation to distance himself from failing projects that relied on the Trump brand to secure investments. As USA TODAY previously reported, he also uses the legal system to haggle over his property tax bills. His companies have been involved in more than 100 tax disputes, and the New York State Department of Finance has obtained liens on Trump properties for unpaid tax bills at least three dozen times.”
Do we expect a different outcome with the peace negotiations over the Ukraine war? Putin wouldn’t accept Trump’s 30-day cease fire offer. It looks like Putin is once again playing him, which seems easy to do.
Americans are already realizing that we are even less safe today. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence survey is showing an increasing lack of confidence in their future.
“Consumers’ expectations were especially gloomy, with pessimism about future business conditions deepening and confidence about future employment prospects falling to a 12-year low. Meanwhile, consumers’ optimism about future income—which had held up quite strongly in the past few months—largely vanished, suggesting worries about the economy and labor market have started to spread into consumers’ assessments of their personal situations.”
Isn’t that a definition of insanity—when Republicans keep doing the same things over and over again expecting a different result?
Harlan Green © 2025
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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