These clownish villains may actually bring down Trump

President Donald Trump stumped with promises to rescue the forgotten man, telling his MAGA base he'd bring down the globalist "left" by exposing the Epstein empire and destroying the pillars of domestic democracy, one at a time, all in accord with Project 2025. That process is ongoing — fortunately for the rest of us, Trump's problem is that he couldn't and still can't find the cast to ensure it all gets done before his own implosion creates a historic mile marker in American self-government.

Similarly, Trump promised a strong economy, only to reliably set that aside and focus instead almost solely on remedying personal grievances and shockingly clear fraudulent enrichment.

The pursuit of such a contradictory agenda requires the assistance of true loyalists — and in Trump's case we're lucky that means people so closely tied to him as to ensure abject incompetence (think Pete Hegseth), such that their own ultimate destruction is also baked in.

Over at the Department of Justice, Attorney General Pam Bondi stands ready for her own inevitable implosion. Hot off one of the worst performances in a congressional hearing in memory, Bondi oversees an operation still suppressing half or more of the total Epstein files. Perhaps that's understandable. Congress has already used files disclosed to bomb Bondi and light up a scandal encompassing such obvious cover-ups that it would have long since brought down a normal administration.

Bondi's DOJ has so incompetently suppressed thousands of references to Trump that even absent evidence Trump committed any crime in the world of Jeffrey Epstein, the scandalous and utterly inexplicable decision to not investigate and prosecute any possible Epstein co-conspirators, Democrats or otherwise, remains as one of the leading indicators that Trump and/or his friends are vulnerable to something in those Epstein files.

Bondi doesn't possess the tools to dance through this delicate situation.

A truly qualified attorney general would know he or she would be far better served by overreach without regard to the president, than by no reach at all.

Bondi has never seemed more out of her depth than when failing even to do anything to advocate for Epstein victims present at her own hearing.

Such laughable ineptitude would ensure she someday faces charges in a criminal conspiracy, were it not for the ever reliable “get out of jail free” card that is the presidential pardon.

But one cannot pardon self-destruction.

Meet Kristi Noem. Predictably, this situation appears to need no Democratic nudge to help it into the abyss. The Homeland Security Secretary is so hapless that she doesn't even know to avoid attention by setting aside her own personal luxury jet while traveling the world with her alleged boyfriend, Corey Lewandowski. (Both are married but reports regarding the plane reference a "private cabin" in the back, nearly begging the reader to appreciate the pair's, uh, dedication to their mission.)

Noem's one gift seems to be unleashing her wildest instincts, untamed. But even in the wild, the survival instinct usually "trumps" the reproductive.

Ironically, though the plane and the boyfriend present the most shocking display of overt political malpractice among Trump's sidekicks and henchmen, that failure is also the least important among Noem's own shortcomings. This is a woman who oversees agencies that shoot non-violent protesters in the face and back, while leading a department tasked with federal intervention in less predictable disasters such as weather events, earthquakes, or even terrorist attacks: the kinds of events that always expose incompetence.

She's ready, for sure.

The travails of Noem and Bondi are just two recent cases among so many examples of egregious Trump administration ineptitude. The drumbeat of scandals and failures continues, further testing Trump's hold on the right.

And thank God for that.

Sometime this year, prior to the November elections, the nation will have to navigate one of two paths, both of which lead to destruction.

One path involves a demolition of the Trump administration through a combination of mounting Epstein evidence, relentless inflation, rising unemployment and other economic woes, all mixed with a foreseeable cluster of errors by incapable loyalists like Hegseth, Noem, Bondi, Kennedy, Patel, Gabbard, and others. This path ends with the administration unable to hold on, calls for Trump to resign reaching a deafening pitch.

The other path leads to a point where Trump succeeds in breaking American democracy for good, through a mix of comprehensively despotic moves that render elections indistinguishable from those held in Russia: pre-ordained, Republican wins brought about by a Republican-only vote.

The man who brought about a literal mob attack on democracy after losing in 2020 will not allow the next election to bury him in intensive investigations. But he will only be able to take such drastic destruction if he is led by a team of capable soldiers, able to pull off the mechanical and emotional steps that serve as a predicate to an unarmed takeover.

Lucky for us, we can be sure that his actual aides and advisors will press on, doing everything possible to put their utter incompetence in the face of every American.

Trump promised MAGA he alone could lift them above the elite. In fact he never prioritized his own voters' needs, and appointed a cabinet that collectively provides his opponents with their greatest hope.

The clock is ticking, elections are looming, Trump's self-enrichment is expanding, his grievances are growing, his cast of incompetents stand unready. Bondi, Noem, Hegseth, the whole gang, operating in a cloud of self-interest, moderated only by breathless inability.

• Jason Miciak is a past associate editor of Occupy Democrats, author, attorney, and single parent girldad to a teen, seeking serious beta readers of his soon-to-be published novel. Contact at [email protected], follow on X @JasonMiciak, and please now follow on Bluesky.