The Immune System

How kakistocracy really works: it doesn't hire bad people. It fires the good ones.

The standard critique of kakistocracy is that it puts bad people in charge. That’s true as far as it goes, which isn’t very far. The more precise and more damning truth is that it puts the right people in charge, credentialed, camera-ready, plausibly competent, and then fires them the moment they try to actually govern.

Marty Makary was a Johns Hopkins surgeon. He was also, briefly, the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. He got the job because he was a useful face for an administration that needed someone who could pass a confirmation hearing without embarrassing anyone. He lost the job, reportedly, because he declined to approve blueberry and mango vape flavors on youth health grounds, reversed course under White House pressure, and was then deemed insufficiently loyal by the same people who pressured him. Also because he didn’t block a generic form of the abortion pill when he apparently could have, and because Marjorie Dannenfelser said so.

This is the immune system working exactly as designed. The kakistocracy doesn’t accidentally hire people with judgment. It hires them deliberately, extracts their credibility, and ejects them when the judgment becomes inconvenient. What looks like chaos is actually a remarkably efficient filtering mechanism. The survivors are the ones who learned not to bite back.

The reward structure works in the opposite direction. While the immune system is busy rejecting competence at the FDA, the people closest to the president are quietly building portfolios in the industries his administration is actively reshaping.

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are anchor investors in American Ventures, a Palm Beach vehicle that has spent the last ten months channeling hundreds of millions of dollars from family offices and wealthy individuals into drone manufacturers, crypto platforms, AI companies, and defense tech. Their father has signed executive orders accelerating domestic drone production. He has pledged to make the United States the crypto capital of the world. He is prosecuting an active shooting war in the world’s most critical oil chokepoint.

The brothers are, their spokespeople are careful to note, passive investors. They have no operational involvement. They do not interface with the federal government on behalf of any company they invest in.

The drone company they backed just received a Pentagon procurement order. The construction shell they backed just landed $1.6 billion in letters of interest from federally funded agencies. The firm managing their money is named Dominari Holdings, in Latin, “to dominate.”

But passive. Very passive.

This is the kakistocracy’s rewards structure: proximity to power converted into returns, with just enough legal daylight between the president’s signature and his sons’ portfolio to make the whole arrangement technically articulable as legitimate. The deniability is built into the architecture.

The externalities, of course, go on the other ledger, the one nobody is keeping. Since February 28th, the United States and Israel have been at war with Iran. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes, has been effectively closed. Rubio is doing press conferences. Trump is insisting the ceasefire is holding while the Navy is disabling tankers on video.

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers has tallied the true cost at hundreds of billions, possibly trillions. The Pentagon’s stated $25 billion figure, he notes, is “cash flow accounting,” meaning the missiles already fired, the planes already lost. It doesn’t count the million fewer Americans likely to be working in a year, or the roughly $400 billion in lost income Goldman Sachs has projected, or the $4,000 per household buried in the new defense budget request. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told Congress he didn’t have a ballpark. Wolfers does, and even he didn’t count the oil spill.

Off Kharg Island, Iran’s main crude export terminal, a slick covering 71 square kilometers is spreading southwest toward the coastlines of the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Eighty thousand barrels and counting, leaking into an active war zone where no cleanup is possible, and no one is coming. The Pentagon won’t confirm whether it’s tracking it. The people whose investment vehicles are positioned in the companies selling the weapons that may have caused it are not required to comment.

This is what kakistocracy looks like at scale. Not the cartoonish incompetence of the standard critique, but something more structural and more durable: a government that has methodically removed every mechanism, institutional, legal, diplomatic, environmental, designed to make the people running it answer for what they break.

The immune system rejects competence. The rewards flow to proximity. The externalities spread, unchecked, toward someone else’s shore, while the passive investors are already pivoting to the next deal.