The plummeting polls showing that in every public policy issue category, the Trump administration is facing 40% approval to 60% disapproval is not just a partisan divide, but one that cuts into his own ideologically compatible base. If a voter approved Trump's announced agenda at the beginning of this term, they are seeing that promises are broken. It is not just policies, but bungled execution. They are seeing incompetent leadership, particularly among cabinet members. The buck stops at Trump's desk, and the pile is growing. Trump appointed people he called "the best people" who met the media criteria of a TV face and were slavishly loyal to him. But many were mostly amateurs with no experience in their appointed positions as cabinet heads. The result: incompetent execution of whatever they thought the boss wanted."Affordability" as a promise has been is trashed, but " incompetence" is also rampant, disdained across the partisan divide..https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-approval-hits-new-36-low-fuel-prices-surge-amid-iran-war-reutersipsos-2026-03-24/
Case in point is the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, a former FOX host, who thinks war is like a video game, and he is carrying out his personal religious crusade. Any military background he had did not prepare him for the position. He claims the military does not need to abide by the Geneva Convention, the avoidance of intentional damage to civilians, and the destruction of their infrastructure. He seems ignorant of the history of this, from Nuremberg to the Balkan wars of the 1990s. If his intent is acted out, he would be committing war crimes we used to condemn other dictators for committing and sent them to The Hague. His lack of high-level military experience in planning for an attack is glaring, given the anticipated closure of the Straits of Hormuz, yet there was no plan or force ready to deal with it. The military brass and the military forces themselves are doing their job in assigned targeting successes with professionalism and skill that deserve our praise and respect. That there was no strategy tied to military targeting that would lead to an outcome that met an ever-changing goal was not Hegseth's fault, except that what he did was, without question, and what he thinks Trump wanted. That one lands right on DJT's desk.
DHS (Department of Homeland Security) is the most obvious case of incompetence, with one former head, Kristi Noem, who had her personal priorities and wanted to look her best on TV and sound like a tough lady. She had a history of cruelty to animals that apparently carried over to the cruel treatment of immigrants of color and even to US citizens. Noem managed to turn lemonade into lemons, as public opinion turned from approval of immigration policy to disapproval. She had absolutely no experience in law enforcement. Her priorities were to fund ICE like a militia, a private army, recruiting with messages to appeal to those who were violent thugs. Then she failed to train them or make them abide by the standards of other law enforcement entities. At the end of March, she left DHS with the homeland unprotected from international bad actors by reducing funding for cybersecurity and the TSA, and disaster relief, as we are approaching tornado, wildfires, and hurricane season, and the fallout from the Iran war.
Noem's replacement is yet to be tested, but he is a former mixed-martial artist who has even made physical threats against fellow members of Congress with whom he disagreed as a way to settle disagreements. President Donald Trump appointed Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin to replace Kristi Noem. Mullin has no direct experience in law enforcement, the military, or federal disaster response.
There is no change in priorities or the unstated racist goals of the Trump administration. His only deviation from prior marching orders to Sen. Mullin was to stay out of the headlines. No wonder public opinion shifted from approving Trump's closing of the border and arresting gang members to disapproval of ICE's violent and cruel treatment of migrants to disapproval of ICE's violent and cruel treatment of migrants, as shown in polling.
With the new head of DHS, there has been no change in an unstated mission and priorities: to kick out as many brown people or put them into gulags as possible, and hunt them down. Noem's policies are continuing. This mass deportation policy is still executed to the nth degree, regardless of whether the migrant had a criminal record or not. Most deportees had only committed a misdemeanor by not having legal documents, yet they were snatched and put into the black hole of a former warehouse gulag, or put secretly on a charter plane or even on a commercial flight to a country of origin, or to a converted warehouse with no access to lawyers, men, women, and children. As politicians like to say, "this is not a good look".
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