The worst and dumbest

LIKE millions of people around the world, I was reassured to learn that Donald Trump is a “Very Stable Genius”. You see, if he weren’t – if he were instead an erratic, vindictive, uninformed, lazy, would-be tyrant – we might be in real trouble.

Let’s be honest: This great nation has often been led by mediocre men, some of whom had unpleasant personalities. But they generally haven’t done too much damage, for two reasons.

First, second-rate presidents have often been surrounded by first-rate public servants. Look, for example, at a list of Treasury secretaries since the nation’s founding; while not everyone who held the office was another Alexander Hamilton, over all it’s a pretty impressive contingent – and it mattered.

Second, our system of checks and balances has restrained presidents who might otherwise have been tempted to ignore the rule of law or abuse their position. While we’ve probably had chief executives who longed to jail their critics or enrich themselves while in office, none of them dared act on those desires.

But that was then. Under the Very Stable Genius in Chief, the old rules no longer apply. When the VSG moved into the White House, he brought with him an extraordinary collection of subordinates – and I mean that in the worst way. Some of them are already gone, like Michael

Flynn, who Trump appointed national security adviser despite questions swirling even back then about his foreign ties, and who last month pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about those ties. Also gone is Tom Price, secretary of health and human services, done in by his addiction to expensive private plane trips.

And many incredibly bad lower-level appointments have flown under the public’s radar.

And while unqualified people are marching in, qualified people are fleeing. There has been a huge exodus of experi- enced personnel at the State Department; perhaps even more alarming, there is reportedly a similar exodus at the National Security Agency. In other words, just one year of Trump has moved us a long way towards a government of the worst and dumbest. It’s a good thing the man at the top is, like, smart.

So far, the implosion of our political norms has had remarkably little effect on daily life (unless you’re living in hurricane-battered Puerto Rico and still waiting for electricity thanks to an inadequate federal response). The president spends his mornings watching TV and ragetweeting, he has wreaked havoc with the government’s competence and his party doesn’t want you to know if he’s a foreign agent. Yet stocks are up, the economy is growing and we haven’t gotten into any new wars.

But it’s early days. We spent more than two centuries building a great nation, and even a very stable genius probably needs a couple of years to complete its ruin.