Congressional Republicans Have Enabled Trump To Wreck The Country... They Need To Pay

Because Trump Was Never An Expert In Anything But Bullshit, He Fears Expertise

The anti-expertise cabinet

Expertise is critical to a successful society— mores to a technologically-driven one like our own— because it drives innovation, solves complex problems and ensures efficient systems. Specialists— whether in medicine, engineering, agriculture or even governance— enable societies to adapt, prosper and overcome seemingly insoluble challenges. Without expertise, critical functions like infrastructure, healthcare or economic systems would falter, leading to stagnation and, eventually, collapse.

The MAGA movement’s distrust of expertise, and the broader GOP’s shift toward skepticism of established institutions and professionals, poses existential risks to the U.S.

Expertise is essential for crafting evidence-based policies across the board. Distrust in experts can lead to decisions driven by ideology, misinformation and QAnon-level conspiracies rather than data. For example, the MAGA agenda’s penchant for slashing science funding, is already eroding research capacity and global scientific dominance. Historically, rejecting expertise has led to policy failures, such asthe Spanish Inquisition, the Know Nothing movement, McCarthyism, the Soviet Union’s embrace of Lysenkoism, the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s all of which crippled their societies for decades.

The GOP’s alignment with anti-expertise sentiment and a desire to replace neutral experts with partisan loyalists, risks politicizing technical roles, already weakening institutions like the CDC and FEMA, which rely on impartial expertise to function effectively. Skepticism of medical and scientific expertise, as seen in virtually all MAGA supporters and their rejection of vaccines and modern medicine is exacerbating public health crises. A 2021 University of Washington study found that MAGA supporters generally believed Trump’s claims about COVID-19, leading them to oppose restrictions, and amplifying pandemic-related harm. Unfortunately only thousands died instead of million, which would have been far healthy for society. Dismissal of expertise in areas like vaccine development or climate science will lead to preventable deaths or environmental disasters.

In the political and governmental spheres, distrust in expertise extends to distrust in institutions like the judiciary, media and electoral systems. The MAGA movement’s belief in widespread election fraud and endorsement of political violence threatens democratic stability. The replacement of competent professionals with loyalists is weakening the checks and balances that rely on institutional integrity, echoing historical examples like the politicization of bureaucracies in Weimar Germany before its collapse.

Rejecting expertise in fields like technology, economics and trade policy are harming U.S. competitiveness. MAGA’s anti-business policies, such as proposed tariffs or interference in markets, have drawn criticism from more traditional conservatives— including old line, pre-Trump Republicans—  for undermining free enterprise. Historically, nations that sidelined expertise— like China during the Cultural Revolution— suffered severe economic stagnation.

So what kind of people drive this? Looking at Republicans, from Trump on down the food chain, shows that struggles  and failures in formal education often fosters resentment toward academic systems and, by extension, experts associated with them. People who felt alienated, failed, or undervalued in school often view expertise as an elitist gatekeeping mechanism. Lower socioeconomic status often correlates with distrust in institutions, including experts. People in economically disadvantaged or rural areas may feel experts prioritize urban, elite interests. Populist movements, including MAGA, often frame experts as part of a detached, self-serving elite. This resonates with cultural narratives valuing “common sense” over credentials, especially in individualistic societies like the U.S. 

Distrust can stem from cognitive shortcuts like the Dunning-Kruger effect, where individuals overestimate their own knowledge and undervalue experts. Confirmation bias also leads people to seek information aligning with pre-existing skepticism. Feelings of being marginalized or disrespected by institutions can fuel grievance-based distrust and a broad sense of alienation. Jealousy can play a role but is generally  less central than grievance. Some may envy experts’ status or influence, especially if they feel excluded from those circles. However, this is supposedly more about perceived unfairness in power dynamics than personal envy. Lower educational attainment— Trump’s beloved “poorly educated— can correlate with distrust.

Travis Terrell is the progressive candidate running against lockstep Trump ally Mariannette Miller-Meeks, one of Congress’ most vulnerable incumbents. This morning, he told us that “Part of what made America the strongest country in the world was being a melting pot of brilliant minds from around the globe. Scientists, engineers, doctors and public servants who built the systems we all rely on. Now Mariannette Miller-Meeks is part of a movement determined to purge those experts and replace them with Trump puppets whose only qualification is being able to say, ‘Yes sir, President Trump.’   just to appease the deranged mind of a lunatic.”

Yesterday, a quintet of Washington Post reporters  wrote that Trump’s actions are pushing thousands of experts to flee government. That includes everything from the National Institutes of Health and the Federal Aviation Administration to the Treasury Department. “The scores of departures will have immediate consequences, government employees said, slowing or halting work such as the Food and Drug Administration’s issuance of food safety warnings and the Treasury Department’s disbursement of payments. Other effects will be felt over coming months and years, employees predicted, as agencies lose people representing decades of institutional knowledge— imperiling the quality of work done and services provided.”

High-profile officials are fleeing in bunches across agencies.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, part of the Transportation Department which coordinates responses to gas leaks and chemical spills, lost more than half of its senior executives to the first resignation offer, according to an email obtained by The Post. Departures include the executive director, the deputy chief counsel, the head of the Office of Pipeline Safety, two associate administrators and two top advisers, the email says.

Multiple employees described deep brain drain throughout the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Nearly all of the executive leadership for the chief information officer retired or resigned. The Office of Public and Indian Housing— which oversees public housing and rental assistance programs nationwide— lost its highest-ranking civil servant, two deputy assistant secretaries, a chief strategy officer and multiple directors.

At the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, a small, specialized team focused on autonomous vehicles has lost most of its staff, according to two former agency employees. Comprised mostly of staffers with engineering and technical experience from the private sector, the Office of Automation Safety was dedicated to developing new safety and regulatory standards for self-driving cars — something the new administration has labeled a priority.

In the second-round resignation offer, the FAA is losing not only its chief air traffic officer but its associate administrator for commercial space, his deputy, the director of the audit and evaluation office, the assistant administrator for civil rights and the assistant administrator for finance and management, The Post reported. The Air Traffic Organization, which is responsible for the safety of U.S. airspace as the operational arm of the FAA, is losing the vice presidents and deputy vice presidents of five major programs including mission support, and safety and technical training. The agency is already confronting a series of crises including a fatal January crash at Reagan National Airport, which left 67 dead, and communications outages in recent weeks at Newark Liberty International Airport.

The Internal Revenue Service, meanwhile, has lost senior staff representing hundreds of years of government experience. The agency has gone through four commissioners since the start of the year as well as two chief counsels. The agency’s chief of staff, chief procurement officer, acting chief procurement officer, chief human capital officer, chief transformation and strategy officer and numerous senior advisers have departed.

… The list of vacated jobs can be mind-numbing, federal workers said. It is hard for the public to understand what many government employees did, or why they were crucial, especially if they do not number among the highest-ranking leaders with easy-to-grasp titles like “director” or “administrator.”

Those exiting government, employees said, are people who entered public service right after college and never left. Who spent decades becoming experts in their small slices of America’s sprawling federal bureaucracy. Whose names were never known to more than a handful of colleagues, but who made the government run.

“These are the people who know why things have been done a certain way for years and years and years,” said an employee with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “Not all of this is written down, or able to find. With them gone, we won’t know what the history is, so we’re liable to make mistakes or to do things in an inefficient way.”

One tiny corner of the General Services Administration is losing about a dozen staffers who’ve been there for 20 or 30 years each, in unglamorous roles oiling the gears of the U.S. bureaucracy, said an employee there. Their job titles include a sea of acronyms impenetrable to most people— such as “COOP,” for “Continuity of Operations”— but it all adds up to getting things done, the employee said.

“We’re losing people who know how to navigate bureaucracies and red tape, to make things happen somewhat effectively and efficiently,” the GSA employee said. “They were the doers.”

At the Justice Department, an attorney who joined government in the 1980s is ending her career earlier than planned, said an employee there, depriving the office of an indispensable source of institutional knowledge. Whenever staff encountered an unfamiliar case, she’d say something like: “Oh, I did that 18 years ago,” the employee said. “And then a task that would have taken us three days of work to reinvent the wheel, we’d be able to get done in half the day, because she had seen it before.”

And Treasury is losing a senior staffer who worked for decades on one program centered on one particular country, said an employee there, who spoke on the condition that neither he nor his workplace be named for fear of retaliation. Usually the staffer toiled quietly— but whenever there was some incident or flare-up related to the country this person studied, the employee said, everyone in the office would make a beeline for them.

“We’d be all sitting there, trying to figure this out, and this person would say, ‘Oh, I remember in 2003 we had a similar problem, I’ll find the [records],’” the employee said. “That’s what we’re losing. It will be the difference between reading through legal briefs from a trial and just being able to go straight to the judge.”

A message from IronStache (Randy Bryce): “I’ve been looking at needs for the 1st CD in Wisconsin but we’re worse off than I can ever recall in my entire life. People are afraid. Had an event that was filmed. Originally a badass friend who is both a nurse and a veteran was going to take part. She backed out because she had a child that fits in a demographic now under attack. I called a local food pantry to see if they could provide a volunteer once a month to collect food as people are about to go hungry when the shelves are empty. They told me they’re afraid to lose their funding. Steil won’t even meet with the people who hired him and ask what we’re supposed to do or what’s going on. He needs to go because he definitely doesn’t care about southeastern Wisconsin. We need someone who does care.”

Randy cares.