U.S. President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., attend a cabinet meeting at the White House (Reuters)
I first heard the expression “strategic incompetence” in El Salvador in December 1993. Along with my partner and two friends, I’d been recruited to do some electoral training there. We were working with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, a coalition of leftist parties that had led a long-running guerrilla war against a series of US-backed autocratic governments. I’d visited El Salvador once before, during the 1989 elections, when armed troops were overseeing the voting. I remembered watching as people deposited their ballots into transparent plastic bags, their choices clearly visible to the world—and to the soldiers. (Not exactly what you’d call a “free and fair” election.)
A new round of national elections was scheduled for early 1994, and, for the first time, instead of boycotting it, the FMLN was running its own candidates. This was a risky choice. By the time we arrived to teach their members something about door-to-door canvassing, several FMLN candidates had already been assassinated.
It took us a few days to fully grasp just how profound a cultural shift such an election was for people whose project and lives had previously depended on clandestine organizing. For years, their members had kept contact among themselves to a minimum for security reasons. They also routinely limited contacts with other Salvadorans to those in whom they had the highest confidence. We knew we’d experienced a breakthrough when one of their comandantes said, “Oh, I see. Even my mother should be part of this campaign.”
It was one of those comandantes who taught me the term “strategic incompetence.” Not long before, many of their potential voters had been refugees, having only recently returned from camps in Guatemala. A number of them had lost whatever identification papers they once had and, in any case, it was all too normal for people in rural Central America to lack birth certificates. The most common proof of birth was a baptismal record at a parish church, and many of those churches had been bombed to dust during the US-backed air war against the FMLN.
So, to be able to vote, many Salvadorans had to apply to the government in the capital, San Salvador, for a cédula—an official credential. The process of getting one was invariably lengthy. Those who lived far from a municipal center had to make weekly treks on foot to post offices in towns to check whether their ID had arrived. All too often, the answer would be: no. As that comandante explained to me, this was an example of the autocratic government’s “strategic incompetence”—a systemic failure, in other words, that served the interests of those then in power by discouraging people from voting.
Round and Round We Go
I was reminded of that expression recently, when I accompanied a young immigrant to file his application for asylum in the United States. What should have been a 10-minute errand devolved into a multi-hour ordeal. I have no way of knowing whether the incompetence involved was strategic or simply run-of-the-mill stupidity, but I do know that it nearly cost him his chance to stay in this country.
My friend Joan and I, two old lady gringas, had spent the weekend with him working on the application, which was due the following Tuesday. We’d made the requisite copies, one for the judge in the case and the other for the lawyers of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), all located in a building in downtown San Francisco.
On Monday morning, we met there. We knew he’d have to pay a $100 filing fee and, not having a bank account, he came prepared with cash. With some trepidation—Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents occupied part of the same building and there was always the risk of an immigrant being snatched up—we passed through security and made it to the floor where the immigration judges, including the one overseeing his case, had their offices.
Trump 2.0 displays a familiar (if also stunning) amount of ordinary incompetence along with its will to power.
We entered a small waiting room with some chairs and a cashier’s window in one corner. The nice woman behind the glass informed us that, unfortunately, she couldn’t accept his $100. The only way to pay the fee was online. She pointed to the QR code on a poster beside the window. Paying online isn’t easy for someone without a bank account. Fortunately, the two gringas had credit cards. We assumed that the record of the payment would appear in his online file.
It soon became clear, however, that, while the fee has to be paid online, the application could only be accepted with a physical copy of a receipt for that payment. The three of us stared at each other, and at our three cell phones—none of which, of course, had printers attached. We’d have to find a place to print the receipt.
First up, a UPS shop. “Just email the file you want printed to this address,” the clerk said. We navigated to the immigration site, found his record, and clicked on the button to email a copy of the receipt. A few minutes later, the clerk told us, “I’m sorry; I can’t print that. All it sent was a link and we’re not allowed to click on links.” (A reasonable enough prohibition, since clicking on an unknown link is a great way to install a virus or ransomware on your system.)
Undaunted, we trudged over to FedEx to see if we’d do better there. What we found was a self-service copier-printer and some reasonably clear instructions. As it turned out, though, we couldn’t download a picture of the receipt to our phones. When we tried, all we got was the text of the link to the government site, not the receipt itself. (Whoever designed the site should have done a little more beta testing.)
In the end, we managed to solve the problem by taking a screenshot of the receipt and sending that to the printer. Victory!
Since the offices of the judges and the DHS office were in the same building, all we now had to do was leave one copy on each floor and we’d be done, right? Not quite. Although the judge’s copy could be handed in personally at the same window where we’d begun our saga, the DHS copy could only be mailed in. No matter that we would soon be standing in the very building to which it had to be mailed. Fortunately, we’d twigged to that part of the puzzle before we left the building in pursuit of a printer for the receipt. So, while we were at FedEx, we shelled out another $45 to make sure the copy for DHS lawyers (and the receipt) got there the next day.
Back at the immigration building, the judge’s copy of the application and receipt were accepted and stamped, along with our friend’s own copy, and we watched as the clerk entered the information into a great database in the sky.
We were relieved. Failure at any point in the process would have left our friend vulnerable to immediate deportation to a country where, not so long ago, he’d been beaten and threatened with death by paramilitary forces.
Then came the only good part of the whole exercise. As soon as your asylum application has been accepted, your “clock” starts running on the six months that must pass before you can apply for a permit to work legally in the United States. (Who knows, of course, whether it actually takes six months, thanks to strategic incompetence or just to ordinary bureaucracy?) Our companion scanned another QR code, and there it was in beautiful black and white pixels, his “clock,” indicating how many days he had to wait before he could apply for a work permit.
What we didn’t know then was that a set of new fees for asylum and work permit applications was buried in President Donald Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill. The $100 our friend paid is now an annual fee, although, according to one immigration legal service, “the immigration court system has not provided information about how to pay the annual fee and has not provided information about how the process will work.” No one had bothered to tell us that. Perhaps they didn’t know. More strategic incompetence, I guess.
“Jokers to the Right of Us…”
As the Scottish folk group Stealers Wheel sang back in the 1970s, we’ve got all too many jokers to the right of us—and not just at the US Citizenship and Immigration Service, which runs the asylum process and the immigration courts. Those who remember the first Trump administration will undoubtedly not be shocked to learn that, even with dedicated autocrats like Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russell Vought and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller on board, Trump 2.0 displays a familiar (if also stunning) amount of ordinary incompetence along with its will to power.
Take, for example, the series of events now affectionately known as “Signalgate.” That little scandal arose when Mike Waltz, then Trump’s national security adviser, demonstrated his unfamiliarity with basic security practices by adding the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine and the moderator of PBS’ “Washington Week” to a group chat he was organizing. That would have been embarrassing enough, even if the conversation, which stretched across several days, had been any old group chat. But it wasn’t. In fact, it concerned a highly classified US military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. In it, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth revealed details of imminent attacks on the Houthis and CIA Director John Ratcliffe used the name of an active undercover agent, while Vice President JD Vance and Hegseth displayed their usual contempt for this country’s European allies. (That, of course, was hardly a great revelation to anyone who’d been paying attention.) If Donald Trump’s government were capable of embarrassment, it would have blushed.
Waltz took the fall and was exiled to the United Nations, where he now serves as US ambassador. Marco Rubio took over as national security adviser, adding another title to his portfolio. He also serves both as secretary of state and national archivist (in charge of the National Archives and Records Administration). I guess it’s hard to find good help these days! Until recently, Rubio also ran what was left of the destroyed US Agency for International Development, but he’s now handed that job to Project 2025 architect and OMB Director Russell Vought.
Strategic Incompetence Meets an Incompetent Strategy
There’s a consensus among many in the media that Pete Hegseth is a fine example of the Peter Principle (a management theory suggesting that, in any hierarchical organization, an individual will be promoted until he or she reaches his or her true level of incompetence and then remain there). Installed in January 2025, by April, Hegseth had already run through a whole series of top-level advisers, who quit or were fired, one after another.
In September, he would commandeer an embarrassing assembly of top generals and admirals to harangue them about masculinity, lethality, and beards. And that was before President Trump stepped to the same podium and indicated that the military should—and would—be turning its attention to “an invasion within.”
Even I can see that redirecting the power of the biggest military on Earth toward small boats in the Caribbean and the citizens of this country—particularly ones in cities with Democratic mayors—represents gross, if not grotesque incompetence.
During a 73-minute rehash of his greatest hits (Stolen election! Autopen! Where’s my peace prize?), he repeatedly implied to a stony-faced audience of military commanders that their focus would now be the country’s internal enemies. “I told Pete [Hegseth],” he said, “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
Directing the military against a supposed enemy within (be it “radical left lunatics” or the elusive Antifa) undoubtedly worries the top brass, and not just because it violates a centuries-old prohibition against using the US armed forces to police our own citizens. It also points to a deeper incompetence at the top of the Department of Defense. As Hegseth struggles to produce a National Defense Strategy, or NDS, document (a key task for any secretary of defense), the brass is clearly growing ever more worried. As the Washington Postreported, Hegseth’s version of “the Pentagon’s primary guide for how it prioritizes resources and positions US forces around the world” emphasizes military action within the Americas and, more worrying still, within the United States itself. Hegseth’s approach would appear to downplay what top military commanders consider the most serious threats: the growth of Russian power in Europe and of Chinese influence in the Pacific. Not surprisingly, in the age of Trump, strategic incompetence leads to incompetent strategies. As a source high in the Pentagon told the Post, “I don’t know if Hegseth even understands the magnitude of the NDS.”
(A disclaimer here: I hold no brief for this country’s post-World-War-II empire building, with its bloody record of torture, destabilization, and death. But even I can see that redirecting the power of the biggest military on Earth toward small boats in the Caribbean and the citizens of this country—particularly ones in cities with Democratic mayors—represents gross, if not grotesque incompetence.)
Revolving Doors
Just one more recent example of bumbling incompetence at the federal level: Trump and OMB Director Russell Vought (“he of PROJECT 2025 Fame,” as Trump posted on social media) have used the present government shutdown to fire a whole host of federal employees from what Trump calls “Democrat Agencies.” Among them were more than 1,000 employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). As a Trump functionary explained, “HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”
In the immortal word of El Salvador’s dictator Nayib Bukele, “Oopsie.” Here’s just a partial list of firings Trump and Vought then “raced to rescind,” according to the New York Times:
The top two leaders of the federal measles response team, those working to contain Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the team that assembles the C.D.C.’s vaunted scientific journal, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Those employees were among “hundreds” then hastily rehired, according to the Guardian, which reported that Trump officials attributed the firings to “a coding error.” We may never know whether the original action was due to strategic incompetence or just garden-variety stupidity.
Meanwhile, back at the immigration court system, where 3.4 million cases languish pending adjudication, the Trump administration has introduced yet another layer of strategic incompetence. They are now importing 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration court judges, despite their complete lack of qualifications, experience, or indeed, competency in the field.
It seems that what I learned all those years ago in El Salvador is increasingly becoming the essence of Donald Trump’s America. We now live in a country that’s being run both with bad intent, and unintentionally badly.
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