The "he's too incompetent to do much harm" theory gets less plausible the closer you look at it, too.
The coup in Bolivia is the big counterpoint to the coup attempt in Venezuela. Clearly, the CIA was not that hobbled by Trump. This makes sense when you think about how closely Trump was involved in the ground-level details of these operations (not very) and how quickly the military/intelligence community figured out they could just do what they want and keep him in the dark:
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.
The Iran brinksmanship also shows how dangerous even an incompetent president can be. Trump posted his way from a major diplomatic agreement to a near-miss that -- had it materialized into a war -- would have killed millions. His incompetence got us closer to the neocons' Holy Grail than we've been since probably 1988.
The "he's too incompetent to do much harm" theory gets less plausible the closer you look at it, too.
The coup in Bolivia is the big counterpoint to the coup attempt in Venezuela. Clearly, the CIA was not that hobbled by Trump. This makes sense when you think about how closely Trump was involved in the ground-level details of these operations (not very) and how quickly the military/intelligence community figured out they could just do what they want and keep him in the dark:
The Iran brinksmanship also shows how dangerous even an incompetent president can be. Trump posted his way from a major diplomatic agreement to a near-miss that -- had it materialized into a war -- would have killed millions. His incompetence got us closer to the neocons' Holy Grail than we've been since probably 1988.