The World Is Taking Notes

How Trump’s incompetence, corruption, and repression are teaching allies to hedge and adversaries to probe

Good morning! Let’s start with the part where the mask isn’t slipping so much as being hurled across the room. The Kyiv Independent published a quietly devastating piece that should have set off five-alarm bells across Washington: Donald Trump’s top envoy negotiating Ukraine’s fate appears not to understand Ukraine’s political system, the basic timeline of the war, or even what offices exist in the country he’s helping redraw. In a closed conversation with reporters, the envoy, Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer turned Trump confidant with no meaningful background in diplomacy or Eastern European politics, confidently referred to a Ukrainian “vice president”, a position that does not exist, and admitted he didn’t know when Russia’s full-scale invasion began. He then declared the war longer than World War II, which is not true unless one is working from a particularly imaginative calendar.

This is raw, incurious incompetence embedded at the highest level of life-and-death diplomacy. And if that weren’t bad enough, Ukrainian officials say Jared Kushner, yes, that Jared Kushner, is increasingly emerging as the dominant figure in the U.S. delegation. When Kushner is the adult in the room, you are no longer running a foreign policy; you are staging a confidence trick.

If there is a theme today it is kakistocracy, and what it looks like when it goes global: loyalty over literacy, vibes over knowledge, and negotiations conducted by people who mistake borders for real estate listings. Putin arrives with decades of institutional memory and a team of hardened professionals. Ukraine gets emissaries who don’t know what year it is. And the United States wonders why its credibility keeps evaporating.

That evaporation is no longer theoretical. It’s measurable. Trump’s tariffs and erratic governance were supposed to make America rich and feared. Instead, they’ve made America unreliable, which is far worse. As Washington thrashes, allies are doing the rational thing: hedging. Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, just met with Xi Jinping to deepen economic ties, openly citing the need for “stability and clarity” after years of U.S. unpredictability. The EU is doing the same. Canada is exploring alternatives. None of this is ideological love for Beijing. It’s risk management. When your longtime partner behaves like a drunk gambler flipping tables, you stop sitting at the table.

Trump promised to isolate China. Instead, he’s isolating the United States, and Beijing is happy to wait while the world quietly builds workarounds.

Back home, the kakistocracy is busy chewing through its own institutions. The Kennedy Center announced Kevin Couch as its shiny new senior vice president of artistic programming, praised his “commonsense” vision, and then watched him resign less than two weeks later, so quickly his name vanished from the website like a witness entering protection. This comes as major artists Philip Glass, Renée Fleming, Béla Fleck, and Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz have all pulled out of scheduled appearances in protest of the Trump rebrand. You can slap your name on marble, but you can’t compel legitimacy, because culture doesn’t work by executive order.

No Trump presidency is complete without brinkmanship, so Congress is once again lurching toward a government shutdown. This time, the flashpoint is Homeland Security. Democrats are refusing to rubber-stamp ICE funding without reforms after two people were killed in Minnesota by federal agents, killings the administration immediately dismissed by labeling the victims “domestic terrorists.” Republicans are privately admitting they’ve “seen this vampire movie before” while publicly posturing, threatening a shutdown rather than accepting accountability. Under Trump, dysfunction is a governing philosophy.

On the Senate floor, that reality finally snapped into focus. Senator Peter Welch stripped away the procedural excuses and told the story plainly: a mother shot through her windshield, a legally armed observer disarmed and then shot ten times, and a Department of Homeland Security that responded not with remorse, but with smears. “Two people got shot for absolutely no reason,” Welch said, detailing how Renee Good was killed while sitting in her car and how Alex Pretti was gunned down after being fully subdued. What followed, Welch noted, was not accountability but erasure, victims recast as “domestic terrorists,” and an agency demanding full funding while refusing even to discuss reforms. “I’m not going to vote to give a blank check,” Welch said, calling ICE an agency “totally out of control” and condemning leadership that showed “not an inkling of acceptance of responsibility.”

Chris Murphy followed, and if Welch delivered the indictment, Murphy delivered the crime-scene photos. He described nursery schools in Minneapolis with blinds drawn and recess canceled because masked federal agents were “hunting” people, including people here legally, and he didn’t mince words about how that looks to everyday Americans. “No more secret police,” Murphy insisted, arguing that in the United States “we don’t allow masked, unidentified men to be wandering up to you on the street and ripping you into a car.” He described immigration courts where asylum seekers comply with the law only to be grabbed by plainclothes ICE officers waiting outside, disappeared into detention without families even knowing where they went. He recounted visits to “baby jail,” being denied entry to inspect facilities despite formal oversight authority, and noted that at least 30 people have died in ICE custody in the past year, a toll that underscores the depth of the crisis.

Bernie Sanders widened the lens even further on the Senate floor, reminding everyone that what’s happening in Minneapolis isn’t an isolated tragedy but a symptom of national decline, democratic, moral, and economic. Where Welch focused on immediate accountability and Murphy on the mechanics of federal violence, Sanders tied the violence to the broader erosion of democratic norms and economic inequality. “We used to have the highest standard of living of any country on earth,” Sanders said, lamenting how the American middle class has been hollowed out and how younger generations now face a lower standard of living than their parents. He didn’t shrink from his diagnosis: the United States was once admired for its generosity and democracy, but today people around the world look at the country and ask, “What in God’s name is happening?”

Turning from economics to ICE, Sanders was blunt about federal enforcement in American cities. “America is not about, and must never be about, a domestic military force called ICE… terrorizing the American people.” He connected that repression to what he called the administration’s broader drift toward authoritarianism, from threats against allies in Europe to cozying up with autocrats halfway across the world. Sanders didn’t mince words about the influence of money in politics either, arguing that when billionaires sit front-row at inaugurations and bankroll policy through Super PACs, that’s not democracy, that’s ownership. In his telling, the problems in Minnesota, in Washington, and in the economy are not disconnected glitches, they are interconnected failures of governance playing out in real human cost and eroding confidence in America’s future.

Then came the foreign policy hearings where the line between kakistocracy and corruption blurred into something uglier. Senators grilled Marco Rubio over Venezuela, and what emerged was not confusion, but deliberate vagueness. The U.S. has effectively seized Venezuelan oil, sold it through donor-linked traders, parked the proceeds offshore, and promised audits that do not yet exist. Oversight is always coming later. Democracy is always just around the corner. Force is never intended, but never ruled out. When senators asked whether military action used to compel oil cooperation would require congressional authorization, Rubio danced around the answer like it was radioactive.

Then Senator Chris Van Hollen cut through the fog and said the quiet part out loud: maybe this isn’t incompetence at all. Maybe it’s a corrupt enterprise. Van Hollen laid out the numbers plainly, Trump and his family have pocketed more than $1.4 billion since returning to office, much of it intertwined with tariff decisions, foreign policy favors, and overseas deals. He pointed to Trump’s own words after the Venezuela operation, noting that the president described it using a single word, repeated nineteen times: “oil, oil, oil,” while never once mentioning democracy, freedom, or human rights. “By any measure, this is the most corrupt administration in American history,” Van Hollen said, describing a pattern where donors prosper, licenses flow, assets appreciate, and U.S. power is wielded in ways that just happen, always coincidentally, to enrich the president’s circle. When pressed on whether oil executives or major donors had advance knowledge or influence, the administration denied it, even as Trump publicly claimed the opposite. The denial, Van Hollen made clear, strains credulity.

Whether the US is a kakistocracy or kleptocracy becomes almost academic. Either way, the country is being strip-mined, which brings us to Max at UNFTR, who offered something rare in this moment: not a dunk, but an intervention. His target wasn’t Trump, it was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a man smart enough to know better and apparently determined to prove that intelligence is no defense against institutional rot. Bessent has become the administration’s most visible economic attack dog, parroting talking points, wading into culture war sludge, and grinning on television while the dollar slides, consumer confidence craters, and bond markets flash warning lights.

Max’s argument is devastating because it’s generous: Bessent isn’t a clown like Navarro or Hassett. Nor is he a true believer like Stephen Miller. He’s worse, he’s a capable person choosing to act incompetently in service of policies that are actively accelerating U.S. decline. Manufacturing claims don’t match the data; tariffs are backfiring in politically catastrophic ways, and the dollar is weakening at the wrong moment. Allies are quietly reducing exposure to U.S. assets, and so China benefits not because it’s brilliant, but because America is behaving like it’s allergic to coherence.

Then there’s Trump himself, whose social media output over the past 24 hours reads like a manic spiral. Hundreds of posts. Accusations of treason against Barack Obama. Recycled election conspiracy fantasies. Repeatedly labeling a dead man a “domestic terrorist.” Racist smears against entire communities. Simultaneous claims of calm leadership and posts telling critics to “shut the [expletive] up.” The President of the United States is literally broadcasting his unfiltered inner monologue.

At the same time, his administration sent federal agents, with the director of national intelligence personally present, to seize 2020 election ballots in Georgia. Whatever legal fig leaf exists here, the optics are chilling: a president obsessed with re-litigating his loss, deploying state power to reopen conspiracies that every court already rejected. Even Fox News, grimacing through the data, is now acknowledging that voters don’t feel better off and that Trump’s immigration crackdown has blown past the public’s tolerance. Latino approval has collapsed; support is hemorrhaging, and Trump, naturally, is handing out “gold cards” to celebrity loyalists while the country burns.

We started with an envoy who doesn’t know what country he’s negotiating over. We end with a president who cannot distinguish a U.S. city, Minneapolis, from a foreign invasion, Venezuela, and allies who are making their own deals with China to escape U.S. volatility, institutions hollowing out, and an economy being managed by people who confuse performance with policy.

There is no 4D chess; hell, it’s not even checkers. It’s a kakistocracy, rule by the least fit, drifting steadily into outright corruption, where chaos doubles as cover and loyalty substitutes for competence. The danger isn’t just that this administration doesn’t know what it’s doing. It’s that the rest of the world now knows it, too, and is acting accordingly. Allies no longer wait for Washington to lead; they hedge, diversify, and cut their own deals. Europe talks to Beijing, Canada recalibrates, and the UK reopens channels once considered radioactive. They’re not defecting out of ideology, but out of prudence. When U.S. policy is erratic, personalized, and openly transactional, reliability becomes a liability. And while allies quietly adjust, adversaries are watching even more closely. Russia probes. China studies. Authoritarians test boundaries, examine response times, and catalogue contradictions. The spectacle of incompetence, corruption, and internal repression isn’t just embarrassing; it’s instructional. It teaches the world where the seams are, where the guardrails have failed, and how much pressure the system can take before it cracks. This is decline in real time: not a sudden collapse, but a steady loss of credibility, influence, and trust.

I’ll have more to say about accountability later today in a longer essay, because none of this is abstract and none of it ends with observation. When the noise finally dies down at night, Marz and I will keep our moonbeam vigils, a small, stubborn act of imagination, envisioning peace, justice, and sustainability for all. In times like these, clarity matters. So does care. And so does refusing to accept this as normal.