BREAKING: Trump and Hegseth ‘unserious’
President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “are not serious people,” Sen. Mark Kelly, the Arizona Democrat, told “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker on Sunday. Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey called Hegseth “an unserious man” on “Morning Joe” on Monday in responding to the meme Hegseth posted, an AI-generated image of Franklin the Turtle, a children’s book character, launching a rocket-propelled grenade against narco-terrorists in boats. (The book’s publisher has condemned Hegseth’s appropriation of Franklin’s name and image.)
This is not really breaking news. Trump is an emotionally stunted man-child, mentally unstable, amoral, deeply insecure, needy, venal, vain and vengeful, pathological liar and con man who has lived his entire life on the edge of the law (and outside it) using his father’s fortune to shield himself, and now the U.S. Supreme Court. All but the last was true before unserious Americans elected Trump president and he delivered that “American carnage” inauguration speech in January 2017 that former President George W. Bush described as “some weird shit.”
With Trump now in serious mental and political decline not one year into a second term, the United States of America looks to the rest of the planet as a deeply unserious country. With his on-again, off-again tariffs, his cabinet-load of cranks, and attempts to sell out Ukraine to Russia, Trump is quadrupling down on unserious.
Daily Beast this morning reports that Trump’s Truth Social account Monday night posted “over 160 times between 7:09 p.m. ET and 11:57 p.m. ET, with most posts shared twice. At one point the president was firing off more than a post a minute.” Many were reposts of others’ content, but Trump included some of his own targeting his usual list of enemies.
What serious world leader does that? What serious CEO does that?
For that matter, what world leader hires a weekend TV host with a drinking problem, a “kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out” ethos, and the immaturity revealed in the image at the top of this post to lead the world’s largest military? Or hires a vaccine crank to run his national health agency? Or men who don’t seem to understand economics to stand before cameras and spew economic inanities on his behalf? Or selects a psychopath as his chief advisor? Or puts a Christian nationalist in charge of dismantling the government he’s charged with leading? Or redecorates the storied Oval Office to look like Liberace’s bedroom?
If one were to conceive a plan for reducing the world’s last superpower and guarantor of world peace to a laughingstock, would it look any different from this Trump administration?
Update: Speaking of unserious.
2nd Update: Edited for clarity “With Trump now in serious mental and political decline….” (h/t DZ)
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