Last week, ABC News' Avery Miller did a brief report on Republican commentator Charlie Sykes' assertions about how the Trump circus is turning America into a kakistocracy. Sykes was long Wisconsin's top right-wing talk show host-- who never tired of pushing the odious agendas of Scott Walker, Reince Preibus and Paul Ryan. And then Señor Trumpanzee waddled onto the national stage with his ever-growing and ever more grotesque menagerie of freaks and thieves. And Sykes was suddenly a #NeverTrump lamppost in the encroaching darkness. He has a new book out, How the Right Lost Its Mind, which seeks to explain "how conservative have strayed from their core values. He points a finger at the Trump campaign's chief strategist Steve Bannon and what he describes as 'revenge of crazy town.'"
"I have known him for many years and really did see him as the intellectual leader of the conservative movement and very much the alternative path the conservatives and Republicans could have taken. He had no illusions about who and what Donald Trump was, but he's made a Faustian bargain." Sykes says Ryan is "all in" on Trump.
In his book, Sykes describes what he believes is the damage Trump has done to the conservative wing of the Republican Party.
A couple of weeks ago, Norm Ornstein, writing for The Atlantic had gone considerably further pointing out that there's a case to be made that the United States is governed by the least scrupulous of its citizens. That's the definition of Kakistocracy, "literally, government by the worst and most unscrupulous people among us."
His point is that America is experiencing kakistocracy and it as come into sharp focus this month as a parade of unscrupulous Trump Cabinet members and White House staffers have been "caught spending staggering sums of taxpayer dollars to charter jets, at times to go small distances where cheap commercial transportation was readily available, at times to conveniently visit home areas or have lunch with family members. While Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was forced to resign after his serial abuse, others-- including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, remain in place."
Awful as the grifterish mentality and behavior may be, worse is the other part of kakistocracy-- inept, corrupt, and disruptive governance. Impulsive, stream-of-consciousness communications from the president by tweet are one thing. Examples like a budget that aims to knock out our weather satellites and cut our ability to respond to a pandemic, along with the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) removing from its website information about the disastrous conditions in Puerto Rico while pumping up the good news, are another.
...The kakistocracy applies as well to Congress. I have already outlined some of the failures of the confirmation process for Cabinet officers and the abysmal lack of oversight of kleptocratic behavior. Add to those the eleventh hour backdoor effort in the House in January to eviscerate its independent Office of Congressional Ethics and the outrageous attempts by House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes, unchecked by Speaker Paul Ryan, to collude with the Trump White House to mislead about allegations of its own ties to Russian officials during and after the 2016 campaign. Nunes was forced to recuse himself from the Russia investigation-- but has continued to try to use his office to influence the process.
Then there is the ineptitude of the policy process in Congress. Despite Speaker Ryan's boast that this could be the most productive presidency and Congress in our lifetime, the record of Congress in its first nine months is abysmal. Not one of the big goals set by the president or majority congressional leaders-- health repeal and replace, infrastructure, a wall on the border with Mexico, major tax reform-- has been achieved. While the number of bills enacted is about average for new presidents, the number of significant bills is extremely low, especially compared to George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Except for a series of narrow measures to roll back Obama regulations and a bill to increase sanctions on Russia, most of the enactments are minor.
So will the voters clean house-- especially The House-- in just over 12 months? Every indicator I look at says yes-- actually, says YES! Trump and his kakistocratic cabinet may be around for a bit longer but if you were to wager that major Republican power players like Paul Ryan (WI), Darrell Issa (CA), Ed Royce (CA), Pete Sessions (TX), Fred Upton (MI), Rodney Frelinghuysen (NJ), Lamar Smith (TX) and possibly even Devin Nunes (CA), will be missing from the festivities when Congress reconvenes in January 2019, you'll probably be whole. And the country will be a little less kakistocratic... at least in the legislative branch.
kakistocracy is nothing new. We started playing that tune in 1980 and haven't changed since. We elected Obama in 2008 in an attempt to reverse the trend, but he was a plant. And we re-elected him anyway.
We have noxious potted plants like gomert and the kings in congress; like sessions and devos in the cabinet; and now like the orange-utan and his family in the wh.
But the real power behind all of them are CEOs and billionaires who are indifferent to openly hostile to the 99.9%. And THAT has been true since 1980.