Incompetence Exacerbated by Malevolence

[babylonsister]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/incompetence-exacerbated-by-malevolence/607696/


Incompetence Exacerbated by Malevolence
The coronavirus has dangerously inverted a long-standing White House theme.
6:30 AM ET
Quinta Jurecic
Contributing writer at The Atlantic and managing editor of Lawfare
Benjamin Wittes
Contributing writer at The Atlantic and editor in chief of Lawfare


Throughout the many disasters that have befallen the Trump administration, one theme has remained a constant: malevolence tempered by incompetence. That description emerged from a text-message conversation between the two of us in January 2017, the day after the release of the president’s first travel ban. Chaos was erupting at ports of entry around the country. U.S. permanent residents were being denied entry. Courts were getting involved. Protesters and lawyers were assembling at airports. And yet, the worst consequences were averted, because the travel ban was so ineptly conceived and executed that it was quickly put on hold and later substantially rolled back.

The phrase took on a life of its own, because so many other events of the past three years followed a similar pattern. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman used it to describe the botched Republican effort to undo the Affordable Care Act. Senator Ed Markey pointed to it in condemning the administration’s failure to care for immigrant children separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. Describing the president’s slapdash trade policy, the podcaster Mike Pesca suggested that a better formulation might be “malevolence tempered by incompetence shot through with mendacity”—emphasizing the pervasiveness of Donald Trump’s lies in the conduct of his administration.

Now, however, the disease known as COVID-19 has upended this theme altogether. As the former Justice Department official Carrie Cordero declared on Twitter: “To invert a @benjaminwittes formulation, the Trump administration #COVID19 response might be characterized as incompetence exacerbated by malevolence.”

snip//

In a true disaster, the malevolence never successfully covers up the incompetence. It can do so for a while. But the disaster is ultimately uncontainable.

This past spring, HBO aired a timely miniseries dramatizing the 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. There is a great deal of difference, of course, between Chernobyl and an pandemic. But one early scene from the series is particularly resonant: The chief engineer of the power plant is informed that a nuclear reactor has likely exploded. Instead of listening to his worried employee, he screams that the man is mistaken and that the evidence of the explosion isn’t real. Minutes later, the chief engineer vomits and loses consciousness—poisoned by a massive dose of radiation.

Trump is making a similar error now to the one the Chinese government made a couple of months ago and to the one HBO portrays the chief engineer at Chernobyl as having made. The president can’t pretend the virus does not exist. He can’t suppress news of it, unlike the Chinese Communist Party or the Soviet government in 1986. But he can berate those who report on it honestly. He can deny its severity. He can lie about it—all until the moment at which he can’t anymore, the moment at which the malevolence no longer covers up the incompetence but amplifies it, at great human cost.

[UpInArms]

1. tRump is evil

and he is destroying our country’s abilities at warp speed

[3catwoman3]

2. Add in the disastrous combination of ignorance and...

...arrogance, and we have a foursome of traits that could keep an army of psychiatrists busy 24/7.