A bad-faith government is also an incompetent government

Lately Donald Trump has been raging against several of his own appointees. He has publicly raged against the attorney for DC Jeannine Pirro, for admitting that the failure of the Reflecting Pool was due to shoddy work by Trump’s chosen contractors, and for dropping charges against David Hearn and supposed saboteurs. He has raged at RFK Jr. for not making a stronger case for the false link between vaccines and autism. And according to the Washington Post, Trump has privately raged at Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, for misleading him about the state of U.S. munitions, which have been critically depleted by his failed war on Iran.

These may sound like unrelated stories, linked only by the fact they all involve presidential tantrums. In a larger sense, however, they are part of the same story — what happens when a government operates entirely in bad faith, never telling the truth about what it is doing or why. Inevitably, officials in such a government don’t merely lie to the public: they lie to each other too. As a result, they can’t govern effectively, even in the pursuit of evil.

Legal scholars have a term of art, the “presumption of regularity,” which means that one assumes that the government is generally honest when undertaking legal proceedings.

Thus, if the Department of Justice brings charges against an individual, the historical presumption has been that there must be a good basis for those charges. In other words, that they aren’t simply a vindictive prosecution of one of Trump’s perceived enemies. When DOJ succeeds in securing an indictment from a grand jury, the historical presumption has been that government lawyers secured that indictment honestly, presenting the grand jury with complete and accurate information.

Under Trump II, this presumption is no longer reasonable — and the courts have begun to acknowledge this reality. In a number of recent cases judges have demanded information about what the government told a grand jury or dismissed charges because the government was clearly engaged in vindictive prosecution. At this point the Trump administration’s word is worth nothing, or less than nothing.

The same is true on broader policy issues. After most of its initial tariffs were ruled illegal, the administration reimposed them by claiming that more than 60 nations are engaged in “unfair trade practices” because they aren’t doing enough to block “the importation of goods produced with forced labor.” It’s safe to say that literally nobody believes this rationale, or for that matter believes that the Trump administration has any objection to slave labor. It’s all being done in sneeringly bad faith.

Domestically, the administration is denying food stamps to millions of poor Americans, many of them children. The alleged rationale is that this is a crackdown on fraud. Yet the real rationale is that this administration doesn’t want to help anyone afford to put food on the table, whether or not they’re legally entitled to aid. Similarly, the administration has denied FEMA aid to blue states, not because the claims are fraudulent, but to punish blue states for being blue.

So this is an administration of lying liars. But we knew that. The new information is how much this administration lies to itself, and the disasters this creates.

Trump’s war on Iran has been an epic disaster on many fronts. One of the most damning is the fact that the U.S. military has squandered a huge share of its precision munitions, drastically undermining national security in a matter of months. One obvious question is why Trump didn’t move much sooner to conserve interceptor missiles etc., either by calling off the whole war or at least by calling off actions that used up already depleted stockpiles of weapons like ATACMs.

Most attempts to answer that question focus on deranged Trump syndrome — his pathological inability to admit failure, which has led him to double down even as he runs out of ammunition. But it now appears that a contributing factor may be that he didn’t know how bad things were, because Hegseth lied to him, telling him that the munitions problem had been “fixed.” Hegseth, you won’t be surprised to learn, blames his own deputy, Stephen Feinberg. And to be fair, it’s quite possible that Hegseth’s staff were misleading him even as he misled Trump. Last week, in a post about the Putinization of the U.S. military, I cited a Telegraph article about a “culture of silence” at the Pentagon, in which nobody wants to tell Hegseth things he doesn’t want to hear.

It’s liars all the way down. The fact is that it isn’t possible for an administration to be completely dishonest with the courts and the general public while being honest with itself. Do you believe that when Trump boasts about $18 trillion in foreign investment, Kevin Hassett, the administration’s top economist, quietly tells him, “Just between you and me, Mr. President, that number comes out of nowhere, and even the investment promises we have received are vaporware”?

Of course not. This is an administration in which to serve is to abase yourself constantly, rendering fealty to Dear Leader, lying to your colleagues and lying to the American people. And if this administration doesn’t like the official government reports that are detailing the many disasters it has caused, it just quashes them .

So the Iran War is just the most visible of many ongoing, self-inflicted disasters perpetrated by this administration. Furthermore, Americans should be prepared for more chaos and mendacity, because we are governed by people who, just like Trump, are unwilling to acknowledge the truth. Unfortunately, things can get worse – and they probably will.