When are we going to talk about the fact that Trump and his people have no idea what the hell they’re doing?

| 10:10 am EDT May 28, 2024
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You never want to underestimate your adversary, because it can lead to complacency and leave you caught off guard. But it’s every bit as important to never overestimate your opponent. If you’re playing against a football team with a weak rushing defense, for instance, you need to be able to identify that weakness so you can attack it. This brings us to Donald Trump, and more specifically, the people he has around him.

Every time Donald Trump’s attorneys do something ineffective and dumb in any of his legal cases or in the political arena, people on TV and Twitter immediately begin spelling out why this is actually part of Team Trump’s secret evil genius master plan. But in reality the people saying this stuff are just trying to prove to us how smart and perceptive they think they are (“I’m smart enough to spot Trump’s secret genius plan”), and Trump’s people are indeed simply doing dumb things. We know this because the track record keeps confirming as much.

Think about it: not one move made by Trump, his legal handlers, or his political handlers has worked out well for him over the past year. Not one. His approach to his civil trials was disastrous enough to cost him a half a billion dollars. His approach to his criminal trial has him on the verge of conviction. And his approach to his 2024 “campaign” has him getting booed off the stage at events that any political observer would have known he should never have gone near.

But even now, with the literally zero percent track record of success that Trump and his advisers have been putting on the board, we’re still subjected to contrarian hot takes about how Trump finally has us right where he wants us. Trump’s attorneys ineptly made a court filing over the weekend that confused civil court with criminal court? That’s a secret evil genius plan to magically delay the trial forever! Trump’s campaign people got him booed off the stage? That’s a secret evil genius plan to somehow get him more votes in some other way!

It’s all exhausting, really, because it’s always so plainly obvious that Trump and his people simply have no idea what they’re doing – even as we’re forced to listen to increasingly convoluted claims that their idiotic moves are actually just too smart for us to understand.

If Trump and his people had a track record of success, it would be one thing. But over the past few years, whatever they’ve tried, all they’ve done is lose. That alone proves that what we’re seeing from them is not some secret evil genius plan that we’re not smart enough to understand, but indeed simply incompetence on their part.