It’s a Good Thing Trump is So Incompetent

Negative adjectives to describe Donald Trump could fill a dictionary. He is gross, disgusting, loathsome, shady, deceitful, amoral, crooked, cruel, mean, obnoxious, rude, disrespectful, selfish, heartless, uncaring, paranoid, arrogant, abhorrent, dishonest, sleazy, dangerous, repulsive, delusional, reckless, narcissistic, crude, corrupt, arrogant, authoritarian, racist, dangerous, petty, divisive, egotistical, unfit, unqualified, childish, boorish, hypocritical, bombastic, greedy, manipulative, stupid, loud-mouthed, extremist, shameless, vile, vulgar, vain, and venal.

And they’re just the first 50 words that pop into my head. They’re all accurate, but there’s one adjective, more than any other, that best describes Trump. And, unfortunately, it’s one that gets very little attention in the media. The one word that fits Donald Trump best (and the one he fears the most) is: INCOMPETENT!

Despite bragging about all he’s accomplished, Trump is the least effective of all modern presidents. Almost everything he’s tried to pull off, and trumpeted with great fanfare, has fallen flat on its face. You wouldn’t hire him to organize a two-car funeral.

It started in his first term, with Trump’s bungled response to the Covid pandemic. Remember? His administration was slow to recognize the existence of the crisis, despite early warnings from health officials, and slow to set up national testing centers. It then put out conflicting information on whether to wear masks or avoid human contact. Trump even suggested ingesting bleach as the answer. As a result, the economy tanked and God only knows how many more lives were unnecessarily lost.

That set the pattern for the next three years. After Hurricane Maria, FEMA couldn’t even find Puerto Rico on the map to get them the relief they desperately needed. Trump’s hastily-called Muslim travel ban created chaos at airports and was quickly stopped by the courts. Under his shoot-from-the-lip “zero tolerance” policy, thousands of immigrant children were separated from their parents for months without any system in place to track them. And with so many Cabinet members bounced and replaced, the Trump White House set a record for the highest senior staff turnover of any modern administration.

But any show of incompetence in Trump’s first term has been dwarfed by embarrassing mistakes so far in his second. He vowed to prosecute former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and former FBI Director James Comey, but failed at all three (even though he’s now taking a second shot at Comey). In what became known as “Signalgate,” his national security team invited a reporter to join a discussion of top-secret military strategy.

In his first 100 days, Trump signed only five bills into law, none of them major – the worst legislative performance of any modern president. And how ‘bout that war in Ukraine, which Trump promised to end “on day one”? It’s still on, but now Ukraine appears to be winning, with no help from Trump.

On “Liberation Day,” Trump announced massive tariffs which triggered such a severe financial and bond market reaction he was forced to reverse course. His next batch of tariffs were shot down by the Supreme Court. He unleashed Elon Musk to “cut waste,” but quickly disbanded “DOGE” after it was criticized for generating at least $21.7 billion in wasteful spending, instead, and forced to hire back thousands of fired federal employees.

Perhaps more than anything else, two items in the news this week underscore Trump’s utter incompetence. The first is his one-man, unnecessary, illegal war in Iran – undertaken without any consultation with Congress, our allies, or, apparently, any military experts (Pete Hegseth doesn’t count). Today, after more than 75 days and all the firepower Trump’s unleashed, it’s hard to see what’s been accomplished. The Iranian regime is still in power, now controls the Strait of Hormuz, and, according to the New York Times, still retains roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile.

The second is his embarrassing attempt to repaint the bottom of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Trump announced this as his own pet project, vowing to complete it by May 22 at a cost of $1.8 million. But work is way behind schedule, the cost has soared to more than $13 million and the pool is still leaking 16 million gallons of water a year.

Facts don’t lie. Trump has botched far, far more than the little he’s accomplished. But, don’t complain. In a way, it’s a good thing he’s so incompetent. Had he achieved half of what he set out to do, we’d be in a lot worse shape than we are today.

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(Bill Press is host of The BillPressPod, and author of 10 books, including: “From the Left: My Life in the Crossfire.” His email address is: bill@billpress.com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter @billpresspod and on BlueSky @BillPress.bsky.social.)