Same, I want to believe that this is all a ruse and that the are smart and just really good at playing dumb, but there are just too MANY of them.
It's sycophancy plain and simple. Surround yourself with only yes-men, it ends up becoming less and less competent as the ones who stand up and say no are replaced.
Even if they know better, they can't do better because they know there is no loyalty to nay-sayers.
The main thing is that if you're a big enough entity, in favorable enough conditions, it's possible to make stupid decisions continuously and survive them for a very long time.
It's the "market can remain irrational..." problem.
And as a consequence, never recognize them as being stupid---in fact the reverse, because your bad ideas are met with macro success even while individually they may struggle.
The simpler explanation is that all the competent people saw what happened the first go around and want nothing to do with it. That leaves a detritus of sociopathic wannabes to select from for staff, all vying to mirror the behavioral profile of dear leader.
Not really. It is far easier to explain incompetence in powerful positions than to explain competence on purpose in powerful positions - the latter is definitely a conspiracy, the former is not.
It's not uncommon for incompetent people to be put in positions of power. Because they are incompetent, competent but malicious people take advantage of this and commit actual crimes.
This is where actual conspiracies show up. And that is the incompetent powerful people cover up said crime to avoid looking incompetent.
When Donald Trump saw the footage of the murder of Renee Good, he said "Oh". He didn't know what ICE were doing until then. He trusted his cabinet who were telling him they were getting illegal immigrants and left wing terrorists.
No, he did not trust his cabinet at all, which is why he put a bunch of yes men in place to ensure they fucked up and did the dumbest thing.
DT has had a long history of operating like a mafia boss where the design of the people he chooses around him is to put scapegoats on when the criminal activities he's involved in is caught.
He chose people who give him good emotions, because he has dementia. He didn't know that would mean they would screen the world from him, because he has dementia. If he did know that, he wouldn't understand it because he has dementia.
Unfortunately for Maduro, that operation was run by military professionals rather than directly by Trump's lackeys. But give Hegseth enough time and he'll bring them around to the new standard.
When I saw mention it was in context of a “contracting” type set of info / document I actually chuckled - I spent a decade in procurement and sales for high stakes contracts. Incompetent person has no idea how to manage a procurement and goes online. Basically this is a 2026 version of an inept executive bashing “what is an RFP” into a search engine from 2007.
And when the CCP compromised the law enforcement portal for every American ISP, stealing info on 80% of Americans, including both the Kamala and Trump campaigns, under the previous admin it was rock solid op-sec, presumably.
Or when the previous admin leaked classified Iran attack plans from the Pentagon, so bad that they didn't even know whether they were hacked or not.
You can at least pretend to make a technical argument over a political one.
Source? I cannot find anything suggesting that law enforcement agencies operate the portals. They are mandated by law and used by law enforcement, but operated by the telecom providers.
From [0]: “Last year almost a dozen major U.S. ISPs were the victim”, “the intruders spent much of the last year rooting around the ISP networks”, “telecom administrators failing to change default passwords”, “Biden FCC officials did try to implement some very basic cybersecurity safeguards, requiring that telecoms try to do a better job securing their networks”. Per the original topic, the article goes on to explain how the Trump admin destroyed those little security steps.
I’m okay with some both-sidesing of bad opsec, but I think you’re incorrect on the blame in this story, and to the extent it is the government’s responsibility, the Trump II response was worse than the Biden’s.
You're the one making a political argument by doing a whataboutism that attempts to negate the failings of this administration. Which you're not even doing correctly because by every measure the previous administration was drastically more competent by looking at the qualifications of the people who filled their posts.
Can you explain how leaking the phone metadata of 80% of Americans and compromising the integrity of the 2024 election campaign's private comms is better OpSec than a single leak?
It's the worst U.S. government leak of all time, by far.
Is your position that the 2024 election, despite having a foreign power intercept the phone communications of both campaigns (confirmed and on record), had no integrity compromises?
What do you consider a compromise of integrity if not a hacking of political campaigns?
Also, please clarify whether the 2016 DNC hack is an exemption to your prior answer so I can weigh your bias.
Why don't you enlighten us since you seem to know so much about the topic?
I know that none of the people who are experts at detecting the statistical artifacts that appears during voting roll have questioned the integrity of the US election.
In fact the only people questioning it are conspirancy-minded people who don't know that there are robust methodologies to detect election fraud.
What do you think of https://electiontruthalliance.org/ ? I haven’t deeply read their stuff, and I’m not really qualified to evaluate their statistics, but it seems like there are concerns worth following.
If they are so leaky then why were they able to capture Maduro without a single American casualty? On one hand you claim incompetence and yet no one was tipped off. So maybe the Signal group chat wasn't as important as it was made out to be?
Lol. The Maduro operation did leak, but the press held the story. Rubio said “Frankly, a number of media outlets had gotten leaks that this was coming and held it for that very reason, and we thank them for doing that, or lives could have been lost.” https://www.npr.org/2026/01/05/nx-s1-5667060/media-shows-res...
You have to actively maintain a state of ignorance to say this isn’t different. Go look at all of the public reporting starting in January about the way appointees in the Pentagon, DOGE, etc. blew through the normal policies and procedures controlling access, clearing people, or restricting sharing.
For example, this wasn’t just “oops, I used the wrong number” but Hegseth getting a custom line run into a secure facility so he could use a personal computer of unknown provenance and security:
That’s one of the reasons why one of the first moves they made was to fire CISOs and the inspectors general who would normally be investigating serious policy violations.
This isn’t “big government”, it’s the attitude that the law is a tool used to hurt their opponents and help themselves but never the reverse.
> Reviews of decades of scientific research suggest that polygraph tests are not reliable or accurate enough to be used in most forensic, legal or employment settings.
> Although lying can cause the physiological responses measured by polygraph machines—such as sweating and increased heart rate—those same changes can occur even when people are not lying, for example when they are nervous.
