Welcome to the Derp State

The dumbest president, surrounded by the dumbest people, making the dumbest mistakes.

In March 2016, Donald Trump was asked whom he spoke to for advice on foreign policy. “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things,” he said. “I talk to a lot of people, and at the appropriate time I’ll tell you who the people are. But my primary consultant is myself and I have, you know, a good instinct for this stuff.”

Throughout that race and ever since, Trump has insisted that those who came before him were “stupid people” who made terrible mistakes and ruined the country because their brains were not nearly as big as his. When it came to foreign adventures, he was particularly determined not to repeat the errors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. So naturally, Trump has embarked on a war with Iran in which he is making a whole new series of mistakes, borne of his own brand of stupidity and reinforced by the morons with whom he has surrounded himself.

You’ve heard of the Deep State. This is the Derp State.

The most basic, high-school-level knowledge of world affairs would tell you that if America launched a war on Iran, among the primary risks we would have to plan for is that Iran might shut down the Strait of Hormuz by attacking ships passing through it, thereby throttling world oil supplies. Trump and his people apparently thought that was nothing to worry about:

Top Trump officials acknowledged to lawmakers during recent classified briefings that they did not plan for the possibility of Iran closing the strait in response to strikes, according to three sources familiar with the closed-door session.

The reason, multiple sources said, was administration officials believed closing the strait would hurt Iran more than the US — a view that was bolstered by Iran’s empty threats to act in the strait after US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer.

When they turned out to be spectacularly wrong about that, they thought maybe the U.S. government could offer to insure the oil tankers now being fired upon, but they learned that was also something they knew nothing about. “U.S. officials called London insurers and brokers, trying to figure out how the market operates,” the Wall Street Journal reported, but that didn’t go anywhere either. Yet as far as Trump is concerned, things are going great.

Lessons not learned

What makes this all even more maddening is that so much of it grows from the war in Iraq, and Trump was certainly right that the Bush administration did a lot of stupid things there. They assumed that because the U.S. military is very good at killing people and blowing things up, that would solve most of their problems. They thought it was a waste of time to understand the complexities of Iraqi society. To do the work of rebuilding the country they sent a bunch of 20-something ignoramuses whose chief qualifications were having had a Heritage Foundation internship or being the kid of some conservative pundit.

So as he embarked on his war on Iran, Trump believed he was being smart by avoiding those particular mistakes. But because Trump does not in fact have a very good brain, he didn’t grasp that the Bush administration’s error was more fundamental than simply thinking we could build a stable democracy out of the destruction it created. The real error was believing that the war would be simple and easy, and we didn’t really need to understand anything about the place we were invading — its history, its internal politics, the motivations of the key actors there, the incentives those actors face, and so on.

Trump may not be interested in nation-building, but he and his administration are repeating precisely that mistake. And like the Bush administration, the Trump administration views expertise, experience, knowledge, and planning with contempt.

You can see it in the person tasked with overseeing this war, the former weekend Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth, who puffs out his chest and preens for the camera while proclaiming that the military is all about “maximum lethality” now, having purged the women and minorities who were dragging down the “warfighters” with their concern about boring things like logistics and their whining about rules of engagement. As part of that effort, he gutted the office charged with reducing civilian casualties in our military engagements. And if that means the military is using outdated target lists that lead us to bomb a girls’ school and kill 175 people, mostly children? Only losers would care. To judge Hegseth by his overcompensating public comments, this war is a spectacular success, because we’re blowing lots of stuff up. Strategic thinking is for pantywaists.

This is Trump’s Derp State in action, an administration full of people who are not only ignorant and stupid, but believe that anyone who knows what they’re doing or tries to anticipate problems that might arise is a traitor to the cause. This is not something unique in history; authoritarian regimes are often characterized by the way they elevate idiots to positions of power. As Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf explain from their study of the Argentine military, dictatorships offer career advancement to the least capable people, who benefit when professionalism is discarded:

But in Argentina in the 1970s, the military dictatorship offered another option: a parallel unit that needed staffing, valued loyalty over competence, and offered career-pressured officers a second chance. The dirty work of state terror — kidnapping, torture, disappearing people — was psychologically repugnant enough that high-performing officers with smooth career trajectories had every reason to avoid it. But for the men at the bottom of the cohort, it was a ladder … The worse an officer’s academic record, the more likely he was to join the secret police. Once inside, the worst performers were assigned to the most brutal departments, where the work was most repugnant and the career reward for doing it most valuable.

This is exactly what is playing out most visibly in ICE and CBP, which have dramatically increased their head count as they build an army of masked thugs sent out to terrorize the citizenry. But it applies to the entirety of the Trump administration, which has given thousands of mediocrities and simpletons more power and responsibility than they could ever have dreamed of in an even marginally well-functioning government.

You can see it everywhere you look, from the FBI director who thinks that what his agents need is to learn MMA fighting techniques, to the DOGE bros cancelling hundreds of grants and programs despite neither knowing or caring what they actually did, to the DoJ’s constant faceplants (the most recent: “Donald Trump’s Department of Justice spent weeks emailing its request for Oklahoma’s voter rolls to the wrong email address. Then it sued Oklahoma for not complying”), to the federal workers fired and then frantically rehired when it turned out they did important things like securing nuclear weapons, to the war plans mistakenly shared with a journalist over a Signal group chat (“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” or operational security, Hegseth confidently proclaimed). Presiding over the whole enterprise is the biggest halfwit of them all — and even those who have an inkling of what they’re doing know that if they tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, they won’t be long for their jobs.

Through it all, they tell us that they have finally restored “meritocracy.” But what we actually have is a government run by the dumbest people, who think they’re the smartest people. Because they’re so dumb, they can’t see how dumb they are. And it will only get worse.

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