The sheer stunning incompetence of Donald Trump’s firing of H.R. McMaster

| 4:01 pm EDT March 23, 2018
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Donald Trump decided to fire his National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster on Thursday. So be it. It’s the presidents prerogative to fire any adviser he doesn’t think is serving him well. But even momentarily setting aside the fact that his replacement John Bolton might be the most ill-suited person on earth for the job, it’s difficult to look past the sheer stunning incompetence of this firing, and the fact that Trump has absolutely no idea what he’s doing with these things.

Trump announced via Tweet on Thursday afternoon that H.R. McMaster was being fired. Did he even bother to tell McMaster in advance? Who knows. When Trump abruptly fired his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week, no one told Tillerson ahead of the tweet, and he ended up getting the news while he was sitting on the toilet. If that alone didn’t define the sheer incompetence of the Trump administration, consider the fact that it then leaked that Tillerson was on the toilet. But this firing might be even more inept.

Last week, Trump was so dead-set on immediately pulling the trigger on McMaster’s firing, five of his own people told the Washington Post that it was a done deal. After the WaPo printed the story, Trump’s White House quickly refuted the story by insisting that Trump wasn’t even considering firing him. Now the firing has indeed happened. In other words, Trump’s own people went to the media to reveal the firing while Trump was still waffling over whether or not to do it, and then they couldn’t even get their response right.

John Bolton is Donald Trump’s fifth choice for National Security Adviser. The first person to hold the position, Michael Flynn, has since pleaded guilty in Trump’s Russia scandal. Trump’s second choice Bob Harward turned it down and called it a “shit sandwich.” Trump’s third choice David Petraeus also turned the job down, and might not have been able to do the job because he’s still on probation. Trump’s fourth choice was H.R. McMaster, whom he just fired. More than his treason, more than his racism, more than his repugnant nature, Donald Trump’s time in office may be most urgently defined by his historic level of incompetence.