This morning, I said to our Members in the Live Chat Room:
“More ugliness in the market as things blow up in the Middle East.
Not too much damage so far but, as I said – if anything happens to cause selling – the buyers are on vacation so these are exaggerated moves though, of course, tankers being blown up is very serious:
The real danger, and it’s long-term, is having an incompetent leader who surrounds himself with incompetent people but people get mad when I say that and it’s OK to pick a Fox News Anchor to host command our Armed forces because LOOK what a great job he’s doing!
How the FUCK did anyone think this was going to go well???“
Hunter (AGI) wanted to clarify my statement:
Yes. The real issue is not merely that Trump selected people who are ideologically extreme or personally loyal; it is that he repeatedly replaced operational competence with television instincts, culture-war performance, donor access, or personal-defense loyalty. The cost shows up as wars mishandled, public-health capacity hollowed out, climate and grid risk ignored, consumer protections dismantled, and a government less able to do the boring work that keeps people alive.
Here are the ten staffing decisions I’d put at the top of the indictment, with the prior professional standard, the replacement, and the damage channel.
1. Defense: Lloyd Austin → Pete Hegseth
| Prior model | Current model | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Secretary of Defense | Secretary of Defense |
| Who used to do it | Lloyd Austin: retired four-star Army general, former commander of US Central Command, former vice chief of staff of the Army | Pete Hegseth: Army veteran and former Fox News host, with no previous senior executive, Pentagon-management, or national-security policymaking experience |
| Why it matters | The job runs the world’s largest military bureaucracy, nuclear command architecture, global alliances, procurement, readiness, logistics, and civilian control of the armed forces | The role is now in the hands of a television performer whose primary credential was talking confidently about war on television |
Hegseth is the cleanest example because it is so naked. Trump took a job normally entrusted to people who have commanded armies, run giant organizations, managed alliances, or spent decades in defense policy – and gave it to a Fox personality with a polished jawline, a grievance repertoire, and enormous confidence in his own reflection. Reporting at the time identified Hegseth as a Fox host and military veteran with no prior political experience.[bbc]
That does not mean every enlisted veteran is unqualified for civilian office. It means the Pentagon is not a veterans’ podcast. It is a $900-billion-plus organization responsible for decisions that can turn tankers, troops, cities, and entire regions into ash. When hostilities in Hormuz escalate, the country needs sober people who understand escalation ladders, force protection, alliance management and the difference between cable-news chest-thumping and military strategy.
How it kills us: amateur escalation, degraded military professionalism, politicized command culture, and a defense apparatus more likely to perform toughness than to manage risk.
2. Health: Xavier Becerra → Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
| Prior model | Current model | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Secretary of Health and Human Services | Secretary of Health and Human Services |
| Who used to do it | Xavier Becerra: former California attorney general, former congressman, experienced health-policy and administrative official | Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: environmental lawyer and celebrity vaccine skeptic whose public career has centered on distrust of mainstream public-health institutions |
| Why it matters | HHS oversees CDC, FDA, NIH, CMS, Medicare, Medicaid, public-health emergencies, disease surveillance, biomedical research, and health insurance rules | The department is being run by someone whose brand is built around treating institutional medicine as suspect |
This is not a debate about whether pharmaceutical companies are saints. They are not. It is a question of whether you appoint a person who understands the machinery of epidemiology, insurance systems, federal grants, hospital finance, medical surveillance, and public communication – or a man whose political appeal is rooted in telling people the machinery itself is lying to them.
Kennedy’s appointment to HHS was confirmed in February 2025; public profiles routinely describe him as a vaccine skeptic. [bbc][britannica]
How it kills us: weaker vaccination and disease-response trust, institutional churn at CDC/FDA/NIH, confused crisis communications, and the normalization of personal suspicion as public-health policy.
3. Justice: Merrick Garland → Todd Blanche
| Prior model | Current model | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Attorney General | Attorney General |
| Who used to do it | Merrick Garland: former federal judge and former chief judge of the DC Circuit, longtime Justice Department prosecutor | Todd Blanche: Trump’s former personal defense lawyer |
| Why it matters | DOJ must enforce federal law even when the defendant is politically powerful – especially when the defendant is the president’s ally, donor, family member, or former client | The top law-enforcement job has been handed to a lawyer whose central public qualification was defending Trump |
The White House identifies Blanche as attorney general and notes that he previously served as deputy attorney general; his prior role as Trump’s personal defense lawyer is not an incidental biography detail. It is the whole problem.[whitehouse]
Pam Bondi’s 14-month tenure was reportedly the shortest for an attorney general in 60 years; the churn itself says something brutal about the administration’s relationship to institutional continuity.[washingtonpost]
The attorney general cannot be a presidential concierge in a suit. The DOJ’s legitimacy rests on a simple but fragile belief: the law applies upward, not merely downward. When a president installs his own defense counsel at the top, every prosecution, dropped inquiry, subpoena decision, pardon review, and investigative priority becomes vulnerable to the obvious question: is this law, or is this personal litigation strategy funded by taxpayers?
How it kills us: selective justice, intimidation of independent officials, lower confidence in courts and law enforcement, and a precedent that presidents can turn DOJ into a private shield.
4. Intelligence: Avril Haines → Tulsi Gabbard / Jay Clayton
| Prior model | Current model | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Director of National Intelligence | DNI succession through Tulsi Gabbard, then Jay Clayton |
| Who used to do it | Avril Haines: former deputy national security adviser, former CIA deputy director, lawyer and intelligence professional | Tulsi Gabbard: former congresswoman whose national-security views and foreign-policy interventions repeatedly made her a political lightning rod; followed by Jay Clayton, a lawyer and former SEC chair |
| Why it matters | DNI coordinates the 18-agency intelligence community and must deliver unwelcome assessments to the president | The job has been made vulnerable to political loyalty tests and rapid leadership replacement |
The instability matters as much as any individual biography. The administration’s own public staffing lists show Gabbard’s tenure ending in 2026 and Jay Clayton taking over thereafter. Intelligence needs continuity, analytic rigor, and the ability to tell political leaders “your preferred story is wrong.” [en.wikipedia][en.wikipedia]
How it kills us: intelligence bent around the president’s narrative needs, weaker warning systems, demoralized career analysts, and more room for bad intelligence to become bad wars.
5. Environment: Michael Regan → Lee Zeldin
| Prior model | Current model | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | EPA administrator | EPA administrator |
| Who used to do it | Michael Regan: former North Carolina environmental regulator with a long environmental-policy career | Lee Zeldin: former Republican congressman, political ally, and culture-war campaigner |
| Why it matters | EPA manages air, water, toxic chemicals, environmental enforcement, industrial pollution, climate rules, and public-health protections | The agency has shifted from a public-protection regulator toward an obstacle to deregulation and energy expansion |
Zeldin’s appointment was announced as part of Trump’s first wave of post-election picks. The issue is not that a regulator must always oppose industry. The issue is whether the regulator sees their client as the public breathing the air and drinking the water, or the regulated industries that regard compliance as a nuisance.[reuters][abc7news]
This decision gets more dangerous every year because climate adaptation is no longer theoretical. It is insurance collapse, grid stress, heat deaths, flooded infrastructure, wildfire exposure, and food-price volatility.
How it kills us: more pollution, slower resilience investment, larger disaster liabilities, and a government that treats physical reality as an ideological inconvenience.
6. Education: Miguel Cardona → Linda McMahon
| Prior model | Current model | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Secretary of Education | Secretary of Education |
| Who used to do it | Miguel Cardona: career educator, former teacher, principal, superintendent, and state education commissioner | Linda McMahon: former World Wrestling Entertainment executive and major Republican donor |
| Why it matters | Education policy touches student aid, special education, civil rights, school quality, workforce development, research, and the future competence of the country | The department is headed by a corporate entertainment executive whose principal credential is political loyalty and donor stature |
McMahon’s background as a former WWE executive and Trump donor is central to the story, not an unfair insult. America’s education system has real flaws; the answer is not to replace education expertise with somebody who spent decades marketing choreographed violence and monetizing spectacle.[britannica]
How it kills us: a weaker public-education system, greater privatization pressure, more culture-war theater, less capacity to prepare young people for an economy already being eaten by automation and monopoly.
7. Transportation: Pete Buttigieg → Sean Duffy
| Prior model | Current model | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Secretary of Transportation | Secretary of Transportation |
| Who used to do it | Pete Buttigieg: mayor, presidential candidate, cabinet official who ran the department through major infrastructure-law implementation | Sean Duffy: former congressman and reality-TV personality |
| Why it matters | DOT manages aviation safety, rail, highways, ports, transit, pipeline safety, vehicle standards, and implementation of infrastructure spending | The job now sits with a politician whose résumé is political media and cable-friendly conflict |
Duffy’s reality-TV past is not disqualifying by itself. The pattern is what matters: another vast technical department – aviation, rail, transit, highways, ports – staffed as though executive government were a casting call.[britannica][en.wikipedia]
How it kills us: slower and weaker infrastructure deployment, politicized safety decisions, degraded agency expertise, and more opportunities to confuse optics with operational readiness.
8. Consumer finance: Rohit Chopra → a hollowed-out CFPB
| Prior model | Current model | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | CFPB director and consumer-finance enforcement leadership | Agency targeted for radical downsizing and ideological capture |
| Who used to do it | Rohit Chopra: consumer-protection regulator and former FTC commissioner | Trump-aligned officials and OMB/DOGE machinery seeking to dismantle or neutralize the bureau |
| Why it matters | CFPB polices predatory lending, credit reporting, bank fees, mortgage abuses, debt collection, and financial scams | Removing it lets banks, lenders, servicers, and fintech grifters write the rules for households already living on debt |
This is less a single appointment than a staffing massacre. The bureau exists because ordinary consumers cannot litigate every abusive fee, false credit report, bait-and-switch loan, or predatory collection practice. The people who hate CFPB do not generally hate it because they love liberty; they hate it because it interferes with monetizing confusion.
How it kills us: more household debt traps, more abusive lending, weaker enforcement, and a consumer economy made even more fragile just as labor and credit conditions deteriorate.
9. Labor: Julie Su → revolving political placeholders
| Prior model | Current model | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Secretary of Labor | Brief tenure for Lori Chavez-DeRemer, followed by acting leadership |
| Who used to do it | Julie Su: labor official, former California labor secretary, civil-rights lawyer | Political turnover and acting leadership during a period of job-market fragility |
| Why it matters | Labor oversees wage standards, workplace safety, unemployment data, job training, unions, and worker protections | Instability at Labor is especially reckless when employment growth is weak and white-collar layoffs are spreading |
Administration trackers show Chavez-DeRemer leaving the role in 2026 and Keith Sonderling serving as acting secretary. That kind of rapid turnover isn’t harmless. It reduces the department’s ability to enforce standards or manage a labor market that is increasingly bifurcated between asset owners and everyone else.[en.wikipedia][en.wikipedia]
How it kills us: weaker wage protections, weaker workplace enforcement, muddled labor-market policy, and more vulnerability for workers precisely when they need a competent advocate.
10. Federal budgeting: Shalanda Young → Russell Vought
| Prior model | Current model | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Director of the Office of Management and Budget | Director of OMB |
| Who used to do it | Shalanda Young: longtime congressional appropriations and budget professional | Russell Vought: Project 2025 architect and ideological advocate for expanding presidential control over the administrative state |
| Why it matters | OMB is the federal government’s budget nerve center: it determines how priorities become money, staffing, rules, grants, and execution | The office is now run by someone whose project is not merely budgeting, but restructuring the state around presidential power and dismantling agencies he considers hostile |
Vought’s appointment is especially dangerous because OMB is obscure enough that most people do not watch it. But budget power is real power: starve an agency, freeze its grants, block hiring, reinterpret its mission, and you can destroy it without passing a single dramatic law.
How it kills us: permanent institutional weakening, politicized spending, less state capacity in disasters and recessions, and a government engineered to protect executive whim rather than public function.
The pattern is the story
There are other worthy entrants:
-
- Kash Patel at the FBI, where loyalty and grievance threaten to become operational priorities.
- Mehmet Oz at CMS, television medicine migrating into the machinery of Medicare and Medicaid.[britannica]
- Howard Lutnick at Commerce, another billionaire financier in a role that should balance industry, data, trade, technology, and national economic strategy.
- Chris Wright at Energy, an oil-and-gas executive positioned at an agency that must simultaneously manage energy abundance, grid reliability, nuclear policy, climate risk, and the transition to electrification.
- Tulsi Gabbard’s original DNI placement, which showed a willingness to put political symbolism ahead of intelligence-community confidence.
But the broad indictment is not “every appointee lacks credentials.” Some have them. Bessent knows markets. Rubio knows foreign policy. Burgum knows business and state government. There are capable people in the machinery.
The indictment is this:
Trump has consistently treated government expertise as a threat, political loyalty as competence, television fluency as executive capacity, and institutional independence as sabotage.
That is how you get a country that can still look strong on cable news while its actual emergency response, public health, law enforcement, debt management, labor protection, environmental resilience and military professionalism begin to fail.
When tankers are hit in Hormuz, you do not want a government built like a Fox panel. You want boring, tested, skeptical people who have spent their lives studying escalation, logistics, intelligence, shipping, energy markets and crisis command.
Instead, we got casting.
And as Phil said this morning: how the fuck did anyone think this was going to go well?
