Empire in Decline: A Field Guide

From missiles in the Caribbean to the firing memo from hell, the Trump era reaches new depths of incompetence, cruelty, and farce.

Good morning! Washington staggered into a new week already on fire, only to discover that the White House had decided to pour kerosene by holding one of the most openly dystopian press briefings of this second Trump term. Karoline Leavitt, a human push-notification in blazer form, marched out to assure the country that everything is fine, the president is brimming with vitality, and if the U.S. military kills shipwreck survivors in international waters, that’s just “self-defense.” The subtext of the entire briefing was, No questions please, we’re committing war crimes.

Leavitt began with scheduling fluff, as though rattling off Trump’s calendar might disguise the scent of panic in the room. Then she pivoted, with the subtlety of a car crash, into weaponizing last week’s tragic D.C. shooting by an Afghan national, a moment of genuine horror turned instantly into a nativist morality play about “foreigners who hate our country” and the sacred duty to preserve “the integrity and character of our national identity.” This is the rhetoric of ethnic purification wearing a Stars and Stripes lapel pin.

From there, she announced what amounted to a de facto freeze on asylum or, in her exact phrasing, “we are now pausing all asylum adjudications for additional vetting” paired with a halt to Afghan Special Immigrant Visas, which she said “have now been paused since the tragic shooting last week.” She then broadened the sweep, declaring that the administration is “re-examining all the Afghans imported into the country by Joe Biden,” a phrase that treats human beings like defective shipments returned to sender. The message was unmistakable: mass deportation season is officially open. And as she rattled off her greatest hits of alleged migrant wrongdoing, insisting that past presidents “allowed foreigners who outright hate our country” to “flood peaceful American communities,” and warning that Democrats were enabling refugees who “rip off American taxpayers”, it had the theatrical cadence of someone reading lines written by a Heritage Foundation intern mainlining Fox News at 3 a.m.

But it was the Venezuela exchange where the briefing veered into The Hague fan fiction. Reporters asked repeatedly, explicitly, whether two survivors of a U.S. missile strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat were deliberately killed after the first explosion. Leavitt refused repeatedly, explicitly, to deny it. Instead, she delivered the same chilling line over and over: Adm. Frank Bradley acted “within his authority… to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat eliminated.” The “threat,” of course, being two unarmed men clinging to debris in the water.

That single sentence was the diplomatic equivalent of blood on the podium.

And now we know why. The Washington Post followed up with reporting that landed like a depth charge: Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War cosplay enthusiast, allegedly gave a verbal order for no survivors. When two men were still alive, Bradley obeyed the order. And now, shocker, the White House is doing everything possible to pin the atrocity on Bradley while Hegseth sprints behind a Pentagon-shaped human shield.

Inside the Defense Department, the fury is incandescent. Military officials are leaking like the hull of the boat they just vaporized: calling the White House statement “protect Pete bullshit,” accusing Leavitt of throwing service members “under the bus,” and openly considering resignations. These aren’t liberal activists. These are the people Trump claims to worship, and they are begging Congress for accountability.

Sensing the walls closing in, the administration has been quietly workshopping its next scapegoat, and wouldn’t you know it, the Patel firing memo has begun circulating in the West Wing like an undercooked fugu platter. It’s a familiar choreography by now: break the law, order the illegal act, deny everything, then ceremonially toss someone expendable overboard to “restore trust.” Hegseth gets absolution. Trump gets deniability. Bradley gets destroyed. And Patel, the White House’s endlessly promoted chaos intern, is queued up as the next body fed into the ethical woodchipper.

Let’s be clear: Patel didn’t stumble into this position. He earned his place in the sacrificial lineup through a long, proud career of being the exact wrong man for every job he’s ever held. This is the same guy who once tried to brief Intelligence Community analysts using a PowerPoint deck he found on Reddit. The same official who mixed up the Defense Production Act with a DoorDash rewards program during COVID supply-chain discussions. The same national-security “expert” who confused Slovenia and Slovakia in writing, twice, on a memo that went to NATO partners. And of course, the same Patel who reportedly attempted to pressure career DOJ lawyers by telling them he had “watched a lot of espionage movies” and therefore understood “how these things go.”

And then came February 2025, when the Senate, in a moment historians will someday struggle to classify as hubris, chaos, or an epileptic episode, confirmed Kash Patel as Director of the FBI. Overnight, the man who once needed written instructions to operate a secure printer became head of the world’s premier domestic law-enforcement agency. And with that power came a firing memo so thick with horror stories that it reads like a satirical novella about bureaucratic collapse.

Staffers documented Patel insisted on wearing an FBI windbreaker before appearing in public, not because he needed to cosplay authority, but because he believed the jacket alone could “boost public confidence” in his leadership as if the Bureau’s problem was insufficient outerwear. Another entry in the memo noted that Patel once tried to order a foreign intelligence service to conduct surveillance via a WhatsApp voice note, a method that would alarm even the least competent Bond villain. And then there was the incident where he requested “sirens” for his entrance into a routine press briefing, explaining that it would “show strength,” only to be reminded, gently, that he was not the President, nor in the line of succession, nor, frankly, trusted to operate a microwave without supervision.

His incompetence isn’t a bug; it’s the feature that made him useful. Patel has always been the guy they send into rooms where plausible deniability is required because no one can ever tell whether he’s lying, clueless, improvising, or simply misreading the script like a substitute teacher covering AP Chemistry. And now, with the firing memo circulating, he is poised to become exactly what he has always been groomed to be: the disposable loyalist, the patsy of last resort, the man whose downfall can be staged as “accountability” while everyone above him continues doing the same things that required a scapegoat in the first place.

And so the internal memo, the one quietly drafted by senior staffers who are suddenly Very Concerned About Accountability, reads like a pre-obituary for a loyal foot soldier. It outlines “concerns about operational judgment,” “reputational vulnerabilities,” and “inconsistencies in briefings,” which is a polite way of saying: this man cannot be trusted with a stapler, let alone national security. The goal is to create the illusion of house-cleaning: fire Patel, keep the system. Fire Patel, keep the war crimes. Fire Patel, keep the deportation machine humming. Patel becomes the smoldering offering laid at the altar of performative responsibility. A governing philosophy that can be summarized in one sentence: when in doubt, sacrifice the help.

An upside to a kakistocracy, if one can call it that without spraining something, is that there’s never any shortage of equally incompetent replacements waiting in the wings. In a normal administration, firing Patel would trigger a frantic search for a qualified successor. Here, it triggers nothing more strenuous than spinning the Rolodex of Misfits and Marginals that Trump keeps on his desk like a novelty toy. Why agonize over a shortlist when every loyalist on payroll is as unqualified as the last? Swap one for another and the average IQ of the operation remains perfectly stable, hovering somewhere between a malfunctioning Ring camera and a stale bagel. In this system, the supply of incompetence is not a crisis, it’s the fuel.

Nothing in this White House happens without an international side plot, so we learned this week that Trump called Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro last month and attempted to give him a one-way ticket out of Caracas. Trump reportedly told him to leave the country “now” in exchange for safe passage for his family. Maduro, who has survived assassination attempts, hyperinflation, oil collapse, U.S. sabotage, and Juan Guaidó, said no. In fact, he demanded global amnesty and control of the armed forces. The man countered a threat with a shopping list.

Trump claims the call “went fine,” which is how he also describes slurred teleprompter readings and falling asleep during briefings. Maduro went on television and thundered that Venezuela would not accept “a slave’s peace.”

Just to make the whole saga more poisonous, the naval campaign Trump is using as “pressure” turns out not to be intercepting fentanyl headed for U.S. cities, but cocaine headed for Europe. We’re committing war crimes on behalf of Belgium now.

Back on the home front, nature delivered the only good news of the week: the 2025 hurricane season ended without a single U.S. landfall — the first time in a decade. Not because of competence, planning, or FEMA readiness (ha!), but because the atmosphere rolled a natural 20 on our behalf. Scientists say a persistent, anomalous trough parked itself over the southeastern United States during the peak hurricane months, August, September, and October, creating a kind of mid-level atmospheric force field. As storms churned toward the coast, this trough generated counterclockwise steering currents that nudged them northward and away from land. In other words, the East Coast experienced a temporary meteorological bouncer who kept telling Category 5 hurricanes, “Sorry folks, private event.”

The Caribbean wasn’t so lucky. Hurricane Melissa, a hellstorm fed by ocean temperatures supercharged by climate change, went from 70 to 140 mph in 18 hours, a case of “extreme rapid intensification” usually reserved for scientific horror stories. It topped out at 185 mph, tying the second most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record, and leveling island nations already buckling under economic crisis. The ocean is hot enough now that storms don’t weaken when they churn colder water up from below, because even the deeper layers have warmed. Climate change turned the Atlantic into a vertical column of jet fuel. America survived by accident.

One can only imagine Mother Nature eyeing Trump’s half-dismantled FEMA, the administration’s war-effort cosplay, and the general fragility of U.S. governance, then deciding, “Not this year. They can’t even get through a press briefing without breaking the Geneva Conventions.” So the storms curved away, not out of mercy, but pity. When an overheated ocean system shows more foresight than your president, perhaps it’s time to rethink national priorities.

Through it all, the kakistocracy remains undefeated. Textbooks will someday use characters like Hegseth and Patel to define the word. Linguists will coin future prefixes like “trump-” to denote decline, grift, and theatrical incompetence. Trumpian will come to mean a lie so loud it drowns itself. Trumponomics, a theory in which tariffs cure everything except the economy. Trumpocracy, a government where the worst rise fastest.

If readers need one final example of the rot, look no further than Alina Habba, the administration’s legal mascot. The federal appeals court rejected her latest brief with the exhausted energy of judges who have read one too many filings held together by hope, vibes, and a stapler. Habba continues to redefine the boundaries of legal malpractice, performing jurisprudence like a malfunctioning Roomba stuck under a sofa. She is the perfect attorney for a president who insists his MRI “proves perfect health” while tripping over the constitutional furniture.

America is being run by the least qualified, most self-serving cast of characters ever assembled in one government. They are incompetent at peace, reckless in war, allergic to accountability, and physically incapable of telling the truth. But boy, do they keep the news cycle lively.