The Kramden Kabinet
In entertainment, laziness is comedy gold. In government it's terrifying.
Just about every occupant of the clown car that is this belligerent, misbegotten, pathetic administration does two things:
takes obsequiousness and lack of self-respect to new, historic lows (think: Marianas Trench, and you might be halfway there)
makes an art of performative outrage, whether before the press or congressional oversight committees
Pam Bondi shrieking, “Oversight!” at Senator Adam Schiff earlier this year was typical, but lately Pete Hegseth’s obnoxious talking over and shouting in his testimony, not to mention his press conferences, might set a new standard for peevish arrested development in adults: because it is truly an administration of toddlers, whose defiant, “Oh yeah?”s and “Who’s gonna make me?”s might be suitable for the playground (through, say, pre-K) but are inappropriate, indefensible, and for the most part unintelligible in government.
The model for this low standard was set sixty years ago, in “The Honeymooners,” where the answer every difficult question is either:
“a-humina-humina-humina,” an awkward non-word that announces, “You’ve flustered me!” or
“The reason! You want to know the reason? I’ll tell you the reason….. WHY SHOULD I TELL YOU THE REASON!?” the kind of non-answer intended to put the questioner back on his heels through sheer force of delivery, but which universally says that
Todd BlancheRalph has no actual motivation other than ego and stubbornness.
This is what happens when the schoolyard bully is given the bully pulpit. Chaos agents thrive in an environment of minimal accountability; they achieve this by collapsing the norms that have maintained economic and strategic stability for the better part of a century. They do this partly by design, and partly by dint of their sheer laziness. Government is hard; maintaining the structures (and even the customs) of accountability, in addition to actually accomplishing concrete goals for the people (as opposed to basic grift for yourself) makes it harder still. Government is not a place for people of very limited intellect, limited imagination, and limited ethics. It’s up to the voters, of course, to keep such people away from the levers of power; and the voters seem to become more credulous with each cycle, entrenching a system in which (with the collusion of the Supreme Court, most recently in Louisiana v. Callais) the officials effectively choose their voters, rather than the other way around. The Voting Rights Act, it seems, now serves to protect White majorities from “racial gerrymandering” that might threaten their stranglehold on redistricting. In other words: gerrymandering to protect Whites, good; to protect Blacks or other minorities, bad. Got it.
As for the undeclared and illegal war (or is it a war? Trump and his stooges can’t seem to agree) in Iran:
The Constitution requires that only Congress, not the President, can declare war.
The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the President to notify Congress, in writing, no more than sixty days after hostilities are initiated and to either request a formal declaration of war, or to cease the military action.
May 1, 2026 was the 60-day mark, and the administration’s position is that the two-week cease-fire of April 7 tolled the countdown. It does not. Now Congress is (conveniently) in recess, and Trump has trumpeted that the war is “effectively over” — hoping, it appears, to buy himself another eight and a half weeks. Even the casual observer will note that Trump has said much the same thing every few days: whenever the market indicators tick down, or Brent crude futures tick up. Nobody really believes him, and yet the market manipulation continues even while his approval craters.
A friend in London told me about his own recent fish-out-of-water experience in Las Vegas. A half-dozen Brits, doing the Vegas bachelor party.
“I understand now how Trump got elected. The whole place was full of ‘his people’. They’d ask me why we [Britain] weren’t jumping to support Trump’s war in Iran. ‘You’ve got to support the biggest bully in the schoolyard!’”
He went on: “I took away quite the opposite lesson from the schoolyard.”
Exactly. As Columbia, Harvard, Paul Weiss, and many others have learned — or should have learned — it’s that the bully is never satisfied, and giving in only encourages him to press for more. It’s the same with any blackmailer, any protection racket, or any negotiation with an untrustworthy partner. Why (for example) should Iran trust any “deal” reached with Trump? The man has over a half-century history of deceitful and dishonest behavior, from stiffing tradesmen who worked on his properties to declaring bankruptcy to avoid repaying loans. (Let’s not get started on the mystery of why Deutsche Bank nevertheless kept extending him credit. Perhaps the Epstein files contain a clue.)
With few exceptions the congress has lost any sense that it is a co-equal branch of government, and that one of its responsibilities is to hold the other branches accountable. SCOTUS wants to grant criminal immunity to the criminal executive? There are numerous ways to reform the Court without waiting for its members to die, one by one, and hope that the president who appoints their successors is not equally corrupt. Term limits, for one; court expansion, for another. The Constitution states only that federal judges have lifetime appointments; it does not therefore follow that that lifetime is to be served on a particular court. After, say, eighteen years, a Justice would be retired to Senior Status on the Circuit Court bench. Neither is nine any kind of magic number; it would make more sense as a matter of both administration and jurisprudence to match the number of Justices to the number of circuit courts, which currently stands at thirteen.
A more urgent question than court reform — which is quite urgent — is the matter of the executive branch, which is bent on turning all of the levers of government into instruments of either revenge or personal enrichment. Companies associated with Trump’s sons were recently granted plum defense contracts; one could be forgiven for asking, what possible expertise or experience do Don and Eric have? The grift doesn’t stop there. The newest indictment of James Comey — for taking a photograph of sea shells arranged in an “86 47” pattern — is one more example of how far the Justice Department has strayed from the path of actual justice.
Many of the Epstein class in the private sector — in law firms, in universities, in business — have been publicly shamed but have not faced any legal consequences. The Epsteiners in government — Lutnick, RFK Jr, and Trump himself — have faced no real music of any kind, and continue to deny wrongdoing. Well, release the files. Let’s see them, shall we? Why have they not been released? To paraphrase Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche: “The reason? I’ll tell you the reason. WHY SHOULD I TELL YOU THE REASON?”
This kind of “comedy” isn’t funny in government: it’s kakistocracy.