Sobriety Test

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, April 21, 2025

 

A few days into the president’s first term, his new executive orders banning certain foreigners from entering the United States were described by Lawfare founder Benjamin Wittes as a case of “malevolence tempered by incompetence.” Thank goodness that the orders were so poorly drafted, Wittes argued, as their sloppiness harmed their chances of standing up in court.

 

“Malevolence tempered by incompetence” as a description of Donald Trump’s M.O. stuck, but Wittes reversed the formulation three years later. With COVID beginning to spread in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fumbled its early attempt to develop a test for the virus; meanwhile, the president focused on protecting his strongman image by downplaying the threat and overhyping his administration’s response. That was an example of “incompetence exacerbated by malevolence,” per Wittes and co-author Quinta Jurecic.

 

It’s often not easy to tell whether malevolence or incompetence is the cause or the effect in Trump policies. For instance, which is which in the matter of Kilmar Abrego Garcia?

 

Abrego Garcia was detained by immigration agents, hurriedly loaded onto a plane, and flown to an El Salvadoran prison without due process, before a court could act. But because he enjoyed “protected” status under U.S. law that should have barred his return to El Salvador, he stands a better chance than most immigrants deported under the Alien Enemies Act of returning to the United States. The government admitted that he was wrongfully removed, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in his favor, and he’s become a cause célèbre among Trump critics here at home—even receiving a face-to-face meeting with a visiting U.S. senator last week.

 

The administration’s malevolence toward him has been tempered by its incompetence.

 

Or has it? Abrego Garcia remains in El Salvador, after all. It’s quite possible that he’ll be packed off to Venezuela in a prisoner swap and never receive the hearing he’s due in the United States. The White House press team has vowed on social media that he won’t return, in fact, and no doubt every effort will be made to ensure that outcome. The last thing Trump wants is a man whom he unlawfully deported to sit down with the media and recount what he experienced in the gulag to which the president also hopes to one day send American citizens.

 

Prolonging Abrego Garcia’s ordeal to prevent accountability for its own error sure sounds like a case of administration incompetence exacerbated by malevolence.

 

As far as I’m aware, the only government official who’s been punished for Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation is the Justice Department lawyer who admitted to it in court. Which raises a question: Is it possible to be so incompetent that this president won’t employ you—even if you’re willing to behave as malevolently as he demands?

 

Amateur hour.

 

Consider Pete Hegseth, whose continued gainful employment at the Pentagon has become something of a sobriety test for the White House. On Sunday the New York Times revealed that the world’s most notorious group chat wasn’t the only one in which the new secretary of defense recently shared sensitive combat information in a format he shouldn’t have.

 

According to the Times, last month Hegseth posted information on coming U.S. airstrikes in Yemen to a private channel on the encrypted platform Signal that included his wife, brother, and personal attorney. He created the channel himself; he posted to it using his private phone, not his more secure government device; and he was reportedly warned by aides shortly before the strikes not to share operational details on platforms like Signal.

 

A few days before that story appeared, three of Hegseth’s top advisers were fired and escorted out of the Pentagon for reasons that remain unclear. Allegedly they were suspected of leaking to the press, although all three deny it. Unnamed defense officials told the Times that “Mr. Hegseth’s office has been plagued by infighting, dysfunction, and occasional screaming matches since he took over in late January.”

 

“There is a complete meltdown in the building, and this is really reflecting on the secretary’s leadership,” another defense source told Politico. Last night John Ullyot, a former Hegseth ally who briefly headed the Pentagon’s public affairs department before resigning last week, went on the record in an op-ed to affirm that a “meltdown” was in progress and to warn that there are “even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.”

 

It would feel a bit unfair to dismiss a toady like Pete Hegseth for incompetence when it wasn’t competence that got him nominated in the first place. Trump had thousands (millions?) of more qualified Republicans whom he could have chosen for the job, but he liked Hegseth because Pete had certain intangibles that the president recognized and valued. He was blindly loyal, he was politically ruthless, and he was good at performing contempt for the right’s cultural enemies on television, a skill that came in handy again this morning when reporters confronted him about the new Times scoop.

 

One might assume that there must be some limit to how much embarrassment the president is willing to suffer from the incompetence of his plainly unqualified defense secretary. There was a limit for Mike Flynn, you may recall. Trump fired his then-national security adviser less than a month into his first term due to an “evolving and eroding level of trust” after Flynn misled Trump officials about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.

 

But since then, it’s rare for Trump to dismiss an otherwise loyal deputy. To get bounced from his administration, typically one must have behaved “disloyally,” not incompetently. Hegseth hasn’t done that.

 

In fact, Trump being Trump, I doubt that he distinguishes between competence and loyalty any more sharply than he does between objective truth and “information that benefits me personally.” Actually, we know he doesn’t: Loyalty tests were part of the hiring process for staffers in his new administration, right?

 

The president seems particularly willing to overlook incompetence when it’s driven by zealousness for his agenda, especially the more malevolent parts of it. That’s why no one that we know of has been disciplined for hauling in Kilmar Abrego Garcia erroneously and causing a giant headache for the White House’s immigration policy. Or for sending an “unauthorized” list of draconian hiring and admissions demands to Harvard that thrust the administration into a legal battle it’ll have trouble winning. Or for devising an inane trade formula that made “Liberation Day” tariff rates four times steeper than they should have been and launched a global trade war that might wreck Trump’s popularity.

 

Those are major mistakes with enormous potential consequences for American politics, all of which occurred in just the past few weeks, but each was apparently forgivable because it demonstrated ruthlessness in carrying out Trump’s wishes—the touchstone of “loyalty” in his movement.

 

Trump himself is so wedded to ruthlessness in dealing with adversaries that he usually defaults to doing so even when it’s obviously strategically stupid. Bullying Greenland and Canada makes those countries less likely to want to join the United States; slapping tariffs on the whole world before zeroing in on China makes it harder to isolate Beijing; attacking Harvard for hiring progressives makes the university’s claims of viewpoint discrimination stronger; demagoging Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell makes already jittery markets more jittery.

 

The most one can say for an administration that’s both incompetent and malevolent is that it packs a certain deterrent punch. “The federal government does not have the capacity to carry out ‘mass deportation’ of 10 million+ people and never has,” Matt Yglesias noted recently, “so the strategy is to inflict random acts of severe cruelty and hope that inspires people to preemptively self-deportation.” The problem is that illegals aren’t the only ones whose behavior will be influenced by those random acts. A country that’s cruel and unpredictably so is a risky place to invest one’s capital, human or otherwise.

 

Ruthless people.

 

For that reason, one might think all of the mistakes lately would be a sore spot for populist Republicans.

 

They wanted protectionism, a cultural offensive against “woke” universities, and a zero-tolerance policy toward immigrants, and instead they’re watching administration officials commit one unforced error after another that undermines popular support for those causes. A true-believing border hawk should be incensed at seeing the White House’s project to deport gang members under the Alien Enemies Act sidetracked by whoever put Abrego Garcia on that plane to El Salvador. Or at Trump for being so fickle, ignorant, and ambivalent about his own policies that a few minutes apart from Peter Navarro can produce an instant sudden sea change in global trade policy.

 

The incompetence of its own personnel is making MAGA less successful than it might have been. If your guy got elected by promising to make the trains run on time, his—and your—political viability depends on making them run on time.

 

I haven’t seen much grassroots anger about it towards the administration, though. (I’ve seen lots towards the courts.) And that’s not just because populist Republicans are all cultists, although many are, or because we all have low expectations of competence from the sort of goon who’s willing to work for the president at this late stage of authoritarian decline. I think it’s because Trump admirers fundamentally don’t believe that one can behave too ruthlessly toward enemies.

 

To them, deporting Abrego Garcia despite his protected status is no more a “mistake” than a cop firing too eagerly on a criminal suspect is. Whether an official has behaved incompetently or not depends almost entirely on who the target was. Did the target deserve to be treated malevolently by dint of who he is, or who we assume him to be? If so, treating him that way can’t be incompetent, by definition.

 

What’s incompetent is to treat him with “suicidal empathy,” to borrow the hot new fascist buzzword among the activist right.

 

Traditional conservatives can sympathize with populists’ anxiety about empathy—to a point. Demagoging right-wing policies as callous and sinister, no matter how well intentioned, was standard left-wing palaver back when Donald Trump was still a fledgling slumlord on the streets of New York. Liberals equated entitlement reform with wanting to toss grandma off a cliff, blamed wanting to protect the unborn on a misogynist impulse to control women’s bodies, and insisted that border security was motivated by fear and loathing of “brown people.”

 

Politically, “empathy” was a cudgel used by progressives to limit even sensible restrictions on behavior that, for cultural reasons, they wished to proceed unimpeded. And it worked: A chronic pre-Trump conservative frustration was seeing Republican majorities elected on promises to cut spending and secure the border, only to watch them back off after being flamed how cutting funds to PBS would make Big Bird cry or whatever.

 

On the right, every policy failure ultimately became a failure of will.

 

So there was anxiety about empathy among Republicans even before Trump. But that anxiety, and the impulse toward ruthlessness that it generated, was tempered by respect for classical liberalism and commitment to Christian values. It was, famously, a Republican administration that pioneered the PEPFAR HIV treatment program that saved millions of African lives.

 

Trump convinced the right that liberal principles and Christian altruism were refuges of weak suckers and “boy scouts” who craved excuses for failing to impose their will on others. Unlike him, traditional Republicans would never muster the nerve to cut the federal bureaucracy or control immigration. To achieve that, the GOP would need a leader immune to the left’s appeals to “empathy”—and morality. And so the devil’s bargain was struck: The right would adopt his ethic of ruthlessness and Trump would reward them by using power to torment their enemies.

 

(Which may explain why, incidentally, the MAGA right has never embraced a robust welfare state for the working class despite its populist pretensions. A movement founded on contempt for empathy will struggle to muster any for its own people as well.)

 

And Trump has kept that bargain, even when he screws up. When he sends a suspected gang member like Abrego Garcia to the gulag, when he embroils Havard in litigation over billions of dollars in funding, when he threatens every foreign country on Earth with a calamitous trade war, he’s delivering the ruthlessness he promised. “Incompetence” functionally doesn’t exist in the MAGA lexicon: Because every policy failure is supposedly a failure of will, not a failure of skill or intelligence, any problem can and should be solved by ratcheting up the ruthlessness a bit higher.

 

So whether the administration has failed in the Abrego Garcia case becomes a question not of whether it erred in deporting him, but of whether it lacks the nerve to tell the courts to go to hell when they order him returned.

 

For Pete’s sake.

 

Where all of this leaves Pete Hegseth is unclear. NPR reported this afternoon that the search for a new defense secretary has quietly begun, but the White House insists that’s fake news (naturally) and other outlets are reporting that Trump is standing by him after a phone call.

 

Hegseth’s problem is that he hasn’t had much time yet to demonstrate his ruthlessness to his boss and the boss’ fans. Yes, he purged a few “woke” military officials. But when the time came for him to restore the names of military bases that had formerly honored Confederates, he refused and renamed them after less politically incorrect namesakes instead.

 

Had he come under fire for, say, defending an American soldier accused of war crimes, that would have evinced the requisite disdain for “suicidal empathy” needed to assure him the support of the president and the base. But getting caught being sloppy with group chats? Meh. What’s ruthless about that? The conflict he keeps messaging his buddies about isn’t even going well for the United States, for cripes’ sake.

 

If there’s a saving grace for Hegseth, it may be that we’re so early in Trump’s term that the White House and the many populist activists who went to bat for him during his confirmation battle won’t want to lose face by seeing him cashiered so quickly. For Trump to fire him after not even three months in office would amount to admitting that Hegseth’s critics were right about him, and a movement as spiteful as MAGA doesn’t make such admissions lightly. Ruthlessness means never having to say you’re sorry. I think they’d rather go on failing the sobriety test by keeping him on than do such a thing.