No Quarter: The Collapse of Competence in Trump’s America

Inside the war crimes, the amateur diplomacy, the economic tremors, and the civic responsibility to refuse silence.

Good morning! It’s Sunday, traditionally a day of rest, reflection, and maybe pretending you’ll finally get around to sorting the mail. But not this Sunday. This Sunday arrives carrying an armload of horrors that the Founders could not have anticipated, not even in their darkest opium-dreams: war crimes at sea, a Congress that might actually grow vertebrae, a Federal Reserve being stalked by one of the great economic himbos of our era, redistricting drama brought to you by the letter “R” (and the slur that should have died in 1978), and a U.S. “peace plan” for Ukraine negotiated by the crowd that once tried to solve Middle East peace with a vibes deck and a handshake.

Let’s begin where decency compels us to: the bodies in the water.

What began Friday as a quietly horrifying Washington Post story detonated over the weekend into a rare moment of moral clarity: the U.S. military, under orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, killed two unarmed survivors clinging to boat wreckage after a first missile strike destroyed their vessel. A “double tap,” as if the U.S. Navy were reenacting a cartel execution.

The Former JAGs Working Group responded with the kind of icy precision you only get from people who have spent their lives reading war-crimes indictments in the original French. Their conclusion? The orders, “kill everybody,” followed by a second strike to kill the survivors, constitute war crimes, murder, or both. No hedging, no polite throat-clearing. Just the law, laid bare. A patently illegal order that every U.S. service member has a duty to disobey.

Adam Kinzinger, in an emergency video that should be required viewing for every American who thinks “toughness” means murdering drowning men, laid it out with military bluntness: This is the moral equivalent of shooting prisoners. It’s the kind of thing the U.S. condemned as a capital offense at Nuremberg.

In a move so rare you could bottle it as a collectible, the Republican chairs of both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees announced bipartisan investigations into the boat killings. The same Republicans who have spent the past year insisting Trump can do no wrong have suddenly discovered that maybe war crimes deserve a little follow-up.

Senate Chair Roger Wicker and House Chair Mike Rogers demanded the Pentagon’s legal rationale, which is a bit like demanding to see the blueprints for a house someone obviously set on fire. They’ve already warned the Pentagon that failure to comply violates statutory deadlines. Congress hasn’t sounded this annoyed since somebody suggested canceling August recess.

And here’s what makes this moment different: the bipartisan push itself is an indictment. It tells us two things.

First, Hegseth’s legal rationale is so thin that even Republicans won’t touch it.
Second, the administration’s refusal to answer basic questions has reached a breaking point. The patience of even the most pliant GOP committee chairs has finally snapped.

One Republican aide, speaking off the record, put it in language refreshingly free of Washington varnish: this is the first time in years that Armed Services staff have encountered a Trump military operation that Pentagon lawyers “literally cannot defend on paper.”

The Pentagon, of course, responded by refusing to bring any lawyers to briefings, because when you are truly, magnificently guilty, you do not bring the person whose entire job is to use words like “illegal,” “indefensible,” and “please stop talking.”

Hegseth fled to X to declare that every trafficker “killed” was affiliated with a terrorist organization, a claim that is flawlessly untrue but perfectly on-brand for a man whose understanding of international law can be written on a Cracker Barrel napkin.

While the Pentagon was reenacting Apocalypse Now: Inland Sea Edition, the financial system quietly started rattling like an idling Soviet tractor. Max from UNFTR sounded the alarm: the Fed has begun “losing control” of interest rates, a phrase that should make your fillings vibrate, and the repo market is spasming hard enough to make 2007 blush.

And looming over it all like an underqualified storm cloud is Kevin Hasset, the man Trump reportedly wants to elevate to Chair of the Federal Reserve. This is the same Kevin Hasset who once predicted COVID deaths would hit zero within ten days; who championed Brexit as if it were an inspirational self-help journey rather than a national economic faceplant; who delivers economic commentary with the chipper detachment of someone who believes the economy is less a system of global capital flows and more a vibes-based suggestion box. If Michael Scott from The Office were reincarnated as a macroeconomist, he would be Kevin Hasset, except Michael Scott occasionally had moments of competence.

Max takes us deeper: the private credit market is blowing up, subprime borrowers are spiraling, BlackRock just lost all of a $150 million loan to a company worth less than a suburban shed, and now Trump’s ultimate goal, a family-controlled stablecoin used to purchase U.S. Treasuries, is taking shape like a Bond villain subplot nobody asked for.

It turns out when you run the country as a kleptocratic casino for long enough, the economy eventually calls the pit boss.

Not all news this weekend involved human suffering. Indiana GOP senator Mike Bohacek discovered that words still mean things. After Trump called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz the “r-word” in a Thanksgiving meltdown, Bohacek announced he would vote against Trump’s redistricting push.

He noted, simply, that his daughter has Down syndrome, and that Trump’s cruelty is not strength, not leadership, and certainly not something he’s going to take home and normalize. For this, Bohacek will no doubt be visited by Trump’s goon squad of anonymous trolls, but at least one Republican has rediscovered that dignity is not a luxury item.

It’s a small thing in the avalanche of indecency, but it matters: standards don’t rise unless someone lifts them.

And finally, because every collapsing republic eventually finds itself run by a rogue’s gallery of people who think diplomacy is just real estate with better wallpaper, we turn to Trump’s “peace plan” for Ukraine — a plan so amateurish that European diplomats are reportedly walking around muttering in multiple languages.

The latest proposal, drafted by developer Steve Witkoff and delivered with Jared Kushner’s signature brand of geopolitical derangement, would offer Russia what it has always wanted: U.S. recognition of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia as Russian territory. All of it, carved up like a foreclosure sale.

European allies are horrified. Ukraine is apoplectic. Putin is delighted. And the rest of us are left asking why the U.S. is letting two men whose chief qualifications are “owns hotels” and “once made a PowerPoint about the Middle East” redraw the borders of Europe.

But here’s where former Canadian MP, Charlie Angus enters like the historian with the receipts. According to him, this isn’t simply incompetence. It’s not just a kakistocracy improvising foreign policy like a mediocre improv troupe. It is compromise masquerading as policy.

Angus lays out what has been hiding in plain sight for 40 years: Trump has been in Russia’s orbit, financially, sexually, politically, since the late 1970s. First through InTourist, which former KGB officers themselves describe as a honey-trap machine (“everything’s free, the girls are lovely, the cameras are everywhere”), then through Trump Tower’s transformation into a laundromat for Mogilevich’s lieutenants, then through Russian oligarchs rescuing his failing empire in the 1990s, and finally through kompromat, the financial kind, the sexual kind, the “we bought your pageant and your penthouse” kind.

By 2013, the Miss Universe trip wasn’t some glitzy international spectacle. It was a surveillance operation with a gift bag.

By 2016, the Russians weren’t merely cheering for Trump, they were meeting in Trump Tower with his campaign staff, dangling Hillary kompromat while quietly reminding the entourage of the kompromat they had on Donald.

By the time Trump entered office, he was firing FBI directors at Putin’s request, cutting off aid to Ukraine, dismantling U.S. intelligence operations tracking Russian cyber warfare, and bragging to Russian diplomats in the Oval Office about obstructing justice. None of that was subtle, nor even secret. It was just… ignored.

So when Trump now sends Kushner and Witkoff to Moscow with a “peace plan” that rewards Putin with the territorial jackpot he’s been craving for a decade, it doesn’t read like statesmanship. It reads like a debtor settling a tab.

This is why Angus’ final line lands like a hammer:

“Trump is a construct, a product of Russian money and Russian influence. Fiction rested on fiction. A winner built to make his country lose.”

Which brings us back to Ukraine. Trump isn’t negotiating a peace plan.
He’s delivering an invoice. The amateurs aren’t in charge because America ran out of experts, they’re in charge because the experts know too much.

And the people paying the price, yet again, are Ukrainians, Europeans, and anyone with a stake in the idea that borders cannot be changed by force.

You might be wondering what ties today’s horrors together: the war crimes, the economic tremors, the ethical spasm in Indiana, the amateur hour in Moscow.

It’s this:

When you put amateurs in charge of systems designed by and for professionals, the systems break. They break violently, morally, economically, and they break geopolitically. And the people who pay the price are never the amateurs, it’s the drowning survivors, the strapped families, the soldiers, the allies, the economy, the world.

This is what a kakistocracy looks like in full bloom: The worst people, making the worst decisions, with the least understanding, on the largest stage.

And yet, even in this bleak landscape, there were flickers of resistance. Congress blinked. An Indiana senator said “no.” Experts across government, law, intelligence, and civil society are ringing alarm bells so loudly they can be heard over Trump’s perpetual tantrum carousel. These moments matter not because they are sufficient, but because they prove something essential: the machinery of democracy shudders but has not stopped.

Here’s the part we cannot allow ourselves to forget. Silence is complicity. Outrage is not optional. It is our job, yours, mine, everyone who still believes in a lawful and humane America, to flood Congress with demands for answers, to make the public consequences of these crimes impossible to ignore, to ensure the world sees clearly that these atrocities are committed by an administration, not in our name.

There is still a country here worth fighting for. But Sundays like this remind us: the fight doesn’t continue because institutions save us. It continues because we refuse to be silent. Because we refuse to normalize murder, corruption, or the normalization of cruelty as policy. Because the alternative, shrugging, scrolling, letting it slide — would make us complicit in everything we claim to oppose.

So yes, we keep going. We keep speaking. We keep pushing.
Not because it’s easy, or comfortable, but because history has a simple rule: democracies don’t survive on wishful thinking, they survive on people who refuse to shut up. Hope is what we cling to when we’ve already surrendered the field. Action is what keeps a country alive. Outrage is what signals we still recognize right from wrong. Accountability is what separates a nation from a mob. Silence, in moments like this, isn’t neutrality, it’s permission.

So we don’t “hope” Congress does the right thing, we demand they do.
We don’t “hope” the world understands where the American people stand, we tell them. We don’t “hope” the tide turns, we push until it does.

There is still a country here worth fighting for, not because some abstract future might deliver salvation, but because millions of ordinary people refuse to abandon their agency to criminals, cowards, or strongmen. Sundays like this remind us that democracy isn’t a spectator sport. It’s a chorus. And the only unforgivable act is choosing not to sing.