Corruption; Incompetence -- rinse, repeat
Take with deep, cleansing breaths
“What fresh hell is this?” or some such variation of that sentiment is how I usually greet the rising sun each morning. Immediately thereafter followed with a robust: ‘Corruption; Incompetence’ -- rinse, repeat. It keeps me centered, politically; it keeps me grounded, in the gladiatorial fundament. In fine, Corruption; Incompetence’ -- rinse, repeat is probably the shortest distance between now and the midterms, Tuesday, November 3, 2026. It carries me through the ick.
I try to stay on-message on social media regarding the #Corruption and #Incompetence. But it is not easy to remain focused in the cleansing breath, with all the massive distractions — drone swarms, I call them — being thrown at us. The zone is indeed flooded with excrement, to borrow a phrase from that silver-tongued wordsmith, Steve Bannon, poet laureate of MAGA.
This flooded zone has served to fracture a coherent Democrat opposition. What, pray tell, on which to focus? Elon’s Nazi salute? Radical DOGE cuts? The spurious use of “combatting anti-Semitism” to attempt to take control of elite Universities? Disappearing grad students? Turning the Judiciary into a Federalist Society lab experiment? The Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s power struggle (like, who does that?). The FBI, deprioritizing white-collar crime in order to focus obsessively on immigration enforcement? The Afrikaner asylum issue is an issue clearly calculated to rasp. And that is why it rankles me, of sub-Saharan descent, particularly. The Marie Antoinette Cabinet? This is an administration of billionaires, looking out for themselves. South African-born Elon Musk donated nearly $300 million to put Trump in office, including an unprecedented “sweepstakes” in key swing state and electoral barometer, Pennsylvania …
But always, at the height of cognitive vertigo, the act of conscious inhalation, retention and exhalation offers — Namaste — some relief. Also, always, ‘Corruption; Incompetence’ -- rinse, repeat …
Because, borborygmous are the corruptions still ahead of us.
Take Trump’s three-nation tour of the Middle East to shore up his investors this week. The three legs of the tour involve Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, a triumvirate of nativism. We use the term “investors” here rather loosely, because: Trump Family Crime syndicate. Saudi Arabia, as was the case in Trump, 1.0, becomes the first foreign destination of this morally-challenged administration. “It’s clear why the Gulf Arab states – with their vast riches from oil and gas exports, and sovereign wealth funds eager to make investments – would be more attractive to Trump than US neighbors such as Canada and Mexico, or traditional allies such as the UK,” notes Simon Tisdall of The Guardian. He continues, not un-damningly:
In Saudi Arabia, the Trump Organization has signed branding deals for two real estate projects, including a Trump Tower in Riyadh, the capital, and another $530m residential tower in the coastal city of Jeddah. The deals, announced a month after Trump was elected to a second term, won’t require the Trump family business to contribute funds toward building the towers, but they will earn millions of dollars in licensing fees. The projects are spearheaded by Dar Global, a subsidiary of Dar Al Arkan, one of the largest real estate developers in Saudi Arabia. The company is privately owned, but it is dependent on contracts from the Saudi government and Prince Mohammed’s favor, especially as he pursues an ambitious development plan called Vision 2030, intended to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil.
Another one of those “investors” who merited the geopolitical prize of an early Presidential visit is the United Arab Emirates. The UAE, we cannot fail to note, has been supplying Chinese GB50A guided bombs and 155mm AH-4 howitzers to the Rapid Support Forces for use in their wet work in the killing fields of Darfur, despite a UN embargo. (Averted Gaze) Notwithstanding that, when not supplying advanced Chinese ordinance to Sudan in breach of a righteous arms embargo, the UAE spends its down-time cutting lucrative, amoral, pay-for-play side pieces with the President’s adult children. “We are proud to expand our presence in the region,” Eric Trump said last month in an announcement that Trump Tower Dubai — mirabile dictu! — is set to start construction this fall. Enquiring minds want to know: Will Bangladeshi construction workers be subject to human rights abuses in this Trump-UAE joint production? In other Qatari corruptions, an Abu Dhabi state-backed investment firm is making a major $2 billion investment in the Trump/Wykoff family crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. Charmed, I’m sure.
To their credit, Democrats are viewing this crypto-plot as crossing some nebulous red line with regards to blatant political corruption and calling Trump out on it. Whatever gets Dem leadership onto the battlefield, I suppose. But, as always with the Trump family’s problematic side hustles, there’s always more graft, usually worse, hidden in broad daylight. Two billion dollars is a cartoonish, yet deadly serious, recurring “investment” figure in Trump Family Numerology. You’ll remember, months after leaving the first Trump White House hot mess, the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner scored a reported $2 billion investment from the sovereign wealth fund controlled by Prince Mohammed, the Saudi crown prince who was implicated in the 2018 killing of US permanent resident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Coincidence!
The Trump family corruptions do not end there. “Ahead of Mr. Trump’s current trip to the Middle East, his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump, have in recent weeks traveled the world and announced new overseas business deals involving billions of dollars, including … a high-end residential tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and a new golf course and villa complex in Qatar,” notes Charlie Savage in today’s A1 above-the-fold story in the Times on the continuing corruptions of the First Family. It is not so much an “unforced error” on the part of the Trump Family so much as the nature of the beast. Why did the scorpion sting the frog? It just couldn’t help itself. Finally, regionally, we cannot fail to note how curious it is that Trump’s relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have chilled considerably. No stopover trip to Netanyahu this time around. Why does Trump always sting his friends and allies? Because, like the scorpion, he cannot help himself. Or, as the ancient Greeks knew it at the dawn of Time: Ηθος Ανθρωπος Δαιμων.
Trump has been corrupt all his life. This is his natural default mode, his thimble-deep understanding of strength and cunning. Money, to Trump, is power is everything. So, of course, borborygmous were Trump’s corruptions during his first term. In Trump 1.0, Mar a Lago and the Trump International Hotel went from being inconsequential watering holes for the surgically-enhanced, to an influence-peddling transactional zone of world-historical consequence.
But, why should Democrats focus on #Corruption (and, to an equal degree, #Incompetence)? “That’s not just common sense—the party trusted to take on corruption has won every election since 2016, according to anti-corruption nonprofit End Citizens United,” notes Alex Aronson in The Contrarian. Further, End Citizens United has two recommendations in their January 2025 memo titled, appropriately: Harsh Accountability for Corruption is our North Star. “Republicans are baiting Democrats into the losing fight of defending the status quo by challenging the rules–including laws and practices that should curb corruption,” write Tiffany Muller, Joe Radosevich and Ethan Smith. “Instead of siding with a system voters are disgusted with, Democrats must be the impatient voices demanding better.” Note: Not a bloodless, centrist, establishmentarian return to the status quo ante. Rather, “demanding better.” So much the better.
Second, Democrats are recommended in the article to tell a specific story about the consequences of Republican corruption. Our common aversion to unfairness is very human. “We have to show how Republican corruption is harming honest Americans–cuts to specific and vital programs like Medicaid, weakened regulations including for safe drinking water, and favors for special interests like drug companies at our expense,” write the authors. The new House GOP reconciliation bill offers a perfect example of a bald corruption in search of a compelling narrative framework. Trump has altogether waffled on his “raising taxes on the rich” rhetoric (surprise), reverting true to form. And hedge fund managers, private equity executives and their lobbyists, Punchbowl News notes, will be the overall winners.
Trump has taken advantage, through his message of resentment, of the working class. Historically, voters punish corruption, particularly during midterm elections. Corruption lies in Trump’s stablecoin, an arena where Democrats like Chris Van Hollen and Elizabeth Warren are calling for divestment. Corruption lies in the $400 million jet the Qataris (soon to be outfitted with Air Force One capabilities) have gifted Trump. There should be no doubt in any ones mind that the Boeing 747-8 after his Presidency — if indeed his Presidency ends — will not wind up in Trump’s “Presidential Library.” Because, for God’s sake, if Trump were to ever set foot in a library, he would almost certainly burst into flame!
Trump’s “Emoluments issues” were effectively vacated by the Supreme Court in January 2021, leaving no checks on #Corruption or, for that matter, #Incompetence. Because the Supreme Court did not meet the historical opportunity to strengthen the guardrails after January 6, they allowed room for the present corruptions of Trump, 2.0 to flourish. From Jill Lawrence of The Bullwark:
THUS DID THE SUPREME COURT set the stage for this year’s ongoing, unchecked festival of domestic and foreign corruption. Dinner with Trump for top buyers of $TRUMP crypto coins, spurring millions in purchases. Multiple nations courting and committing to Trump Organization projects. An invitation-only, $500,000-per member Executive Branch club cofounded by Donald Trump Jr., opening soon in Georgetown. Talks that might lead to the Trumps taking back control of their first-term hotel in the federally owned Old Post Office Building (it’s been a Waldorf Astoria since they sold their leasing rights in 2022.) The palatial Qatar plane fit for a king.
And that’s a tiny fraction of a long list. “The corruption is brazen,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Cal.), posted on social media after ABC News broke the luxury plane story. Yet the brazenness is Trump’s cover, at least in his mind. The plane gift is perfectly aboveboard, the president said, a “very public and transparent transaction.”
Trump’s corruptions recall to mind one of the central the arguments made in the influential Assault on the State, by Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopfield about the forces eroding democratic governments. Conspiracies against elites — like “Deep State” thinking, which the Trump campaign absorbed last election — aim towards the destruction of all modern states built on the rule of law. And after the bureaucrats, the experts, are gone, we have left a government of cronies entirely in thrall to the leader. Stephen Hanson said of this very old form of government called patrimonialism:
Jeff and I think that the German sociologist Max Weber’s evocative term “patrimonialism” better describes the threat that these leaders pose to modern institutions. These men pose as “fathers” of their nations, running the state as a sort of “family business” and doling out state assets and protection to loyalists. As Weber pointed out a century ago, this mode of state-building is one of the oldest political forms in human history. But most analysts never thought patrimonialism would make such a powerful comeback in the contemporary era.
In other words: #Incompetence. Jonathan Rauch on The Bullwark talks about patrimonialism and how its two most menacing outcomes — Incompetence and Corruption — are built-in flaws of the system. Pam “Blondie” Bondi becomes more of a photogenic TV presenter out of central casting rather than the actual chief law-enforcement officer of the land. Princeton’s intellectual bantamweight Pete Hegseth, likewise, is tasked with the USO tours, while DoD lifers actually run what is left of the Department. Basically: Incompetence. Those are also flaws that, when given a proper narrative, will prove to be organically distasteful to most voters, according to Rauch:
Getting to the two inherent flaws. One of them is the incompetence. We are seeing this on full display now and I guess we all saw it during COVID too. It's just for a variety of reasons that didn't land with certain segments of the population. But we're seeing it again, just kind of the vast incompetence. I had a friend, it was like a business guy, finance guy who was sort of Trump light, like, just a typical, I just like the tax cuts, don't pay that much attention kind of person text me last night, just like, this is way more of a shit show than I thought. And I was like, You don't say, doctor. But yeah, exactly. Anyway, unfortunately, we have to all live through it for people to learn from this. But incompetence was one element of it and corruption was the other. And talking about how those shortcomings might help us get out of the morass here. Well, let's talk about them serially because they're both important and they're different. Patrimonialism was the standard form of government until the modern state, basically, more or less, until the United States, and was actually very until the late 19th century when we professionalized the government, and until Otto von Bismarck and the modern state. The interesting question is why did it ever go away? Why was it replaced? The major reason for that is that running a big modern state with a modern economy and a modern military, a vast mighty war machine, this takes a lot of expertise and it takes a whole lot of social organization. And that means it's got to be bureaucratic and rules-based. There is just no way that some guy with his whims and his family and his pals and his personal loyalty can do those things effectively. And what patrimonialists do when they snip the tendons of the administrative state and replace them with loyalties diminish the capacity of the state to do what the state needs to do. And it turned out that patrimonialist systems were just not able to meet the demands of modern statehood. And, you know, you see that in a place like Russia when you look at the, to use your scientific term, shit show, when they tried to topple a weak neighbor and what they wound up with wasn't a victory, it was a traffic jam.
Which explains why Trump has such a natural affinity for hyper-masculine freakshows, like Putin’s Russia and MBS’s Saudi Arabia. He sympathizes with Orban and Modi’s darkest impulses. It would also explain why the Trump project is involved so extremely in the dissolution of the “Deep State,” whose DOGE firings will prove to be an unforced error in the upcoming Virginia gubernatorial race (VA has a high concentration of federal employees). Further, the 2018 anti-corruption Congress was a reaction to the 2016 election, and is ever on the mind of the Resentful One. “In fact, 122 House candidates in the 2018 midterm elections went so far as to reject corporate PAC money entirely, sending a strong message about their opposition to the special-interest-fueled status quo that distorts policymaking in favor of wealthy Americans and corporations,” Alex Tausanovitch, Will Ragland and Aadam Barclay wrote in the American Progress. “Far from hurting their campaigns, making clear that they will not be beholden to special interests has helped inspire small-donor support; through October 17th, candidates in competitive districts who made this pledge had already raised on average 110 percent more than what the winning candidate in their district raised in the 2014 midterms.”
Which dovetails right back to the two central arguments of Democrats — and, more specifically, Progressives — leading up into the November 2026 midterms: #Corruption and #Incompetence — rinse, repeat. One cannot repeat that secular mantra enough. With deep lovingkindness, peace and love. Let us get through this nationalist moment, show it up for its foundation in #Incompetence and #Corruption, while, at the same time, low-key advancing the opportunities for real Progressive change after the system has, as it almost certainly will, have taken a beating. The failure of the status quo which comforts the affluent and afflicts the poor is what brought us to this nationalist moment. We are not going backwards, into the jagged embrace of the broken wheel. And as much as our centrist Never Trump allies disagree about the political maturity of Progressivism, it will not be a coalition fault line. MAGA is the greater deal breaker. So, repeat after me, with a deep, cleansing inhale followed by a hearty exhalation of the toxins — #Inccompetence, #Corruption, &c, &c ..
”For generations, American foreign policy in the Middle East has been crafted with willful ignorance by people who see the region through the lens of Israel and oil. From the CIA coup in Iran in the 1950s to Cheney and Rumsfeld’s Iraq war folly – arguably the event that destabilized the entire planet by creating tens of millions of refugees, leading to rising fascism in Europe and the U.S – our history in the region is one of murder, mayhem, fecklessness and greed. Major and deadly decisions are routinely made without any appreciation of the history or understanding of the many, heterogeneous communities that live there. Ay-rabs, Eye-rack. In the 1990s, a purge of the ‘Arabists’ in the State Department was even underway. It took 9/11 for the DOD and State to bring back a few Arabic speakers. However, in the last few weeks, it’s started to become clear that the U.S. is taking a strange new tack. During Trump One, the grift was mostly on in Ukraine and Russia. Manafort, Stone, and Giuliani reeking of duty-free cologne in first-class seats out of Eastern European airports, hauling suitcases of oligarchy pelf. Now, Trump Two has located far greater pots of gold. The Mother of all Piles, the trillions of dollars controlled by a tiny clan of Gulf oil potentates – wealth, which, it must be said, our gas addiction created.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“Nearly 18 months ago, I explored the key intellectual challenges that had become apparent as the result of technological insertions into the Ukraine War. This includes the impact of drones and the democratisation of battlespace knowledge through digital command and control systems. In that two-part series, I proposed that the Russo-Ukraine War had evolved into a more static ground because both sides were fighting a 21st century war with 20th century ideas. Most attention was being focussed on generating more munitions, more units, more territorial gains and more people. But I also proposed that even if Ukraine and Russia were to mobilise more people and industry, the trajectory of the war would not change significantly unless there was a mobilization of intellectual capacity to develop new warfighting ideas. The period since those articles were published has proved this out. The ground war, with the exception of short periods of tactical energy such as the Ukrainian Kursk offensive, remains largely static in nature. Where advances have been made, they are achieved at very large costs in humans and equipment. The air, drone and missile war has more dynamism and is having an impact on the economy and warfighting capacity of both nations.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrina)