Greetings and welcome to this 33rd edition of the Carnival of Fools! This is the moment in our political Grand Guignol when everybody forgets their blocking, because the dramatist and choreographer never bothered to write past the second act. (“We never expected things to even get this far! Somebody was supposed to shut us down!”) Half the people onstage are now improvising desperately, tossing out lackwit ad hoc lines to accompany lazy somersaults; the other half are pretending for the sake of a paying (and increasingly restive) audience that they still remember the plot. Such is the nature of American politics in Trump’s 2025. Let us try to make some sense out of the chaos.
There Is No Plan, Only Instinct
Mike Tyson once philosophized that “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Would that it were so. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the people manning the second Trump administration — outside of Stephen Miller, perhaps — primarily have instincts as opposed to plans; many seem not to have bothered to come up with even the concept of a plan before leading with their weak chins straight into an uppercut from reality.
Everybody’s making it up as they go along, for the most part: working according to their own personal script, hoping it will happen to meld with a master narrative dictated by President Trump. And this applies most of all to Donald Trump himself, whose entire nature is that of a chancer — testing limits and taking risks. This chaotic decision-making process has predictably led to an administration even more torn by internecine rivalries and political bloodletting than Trump’s first turn at the wheel, now that everyone involved is seemingly playing the same great game of intrigue and backstabbery to win the ear and the affections of the sovereign.
We learned the other day from the Wall Street Journal that the madness of Trump’s tariff regime was only (partially) relieved after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick lured economic adviser Peter Navarro away from Donald Trump’s side so they could plead with the president alone. They gave Navarro a meeting elsewhere in the White House to yell at rival economic adviser Kevin Hassett, like a junkyard dog tempted away from its ward by the prospect of gnawing on a day-old steak.
This is an administration whose major decisions — ones with economic and frankly world-historical consequences — are being made on a whim, often decided on contingency. (Bessent and Lutnick sat with Trump as he tweeted his economic de-escalation, to make sure it was official.) Later, those decisions may be reversed. In the meantime, they are left to be implemented by subordinates too busy warring with one another to execute the boss’s inscrutable desires.
The Piranhas Gather for Pete Hegseth
That brings us to the current state of the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has had quite the interesting month, and I mean “interesting” in the sense of the apocryphal ancient Chinese curse. The former Fox News weekend-morning host already had a rough enough ride to his present position, of course: Dogged immediately upon his nomination to lead the Department of Defense by revelations of sordid sexual conduct and accusations of intemperance and incompetence, he only narrowly squeaked by his confirmation vote, 51–50, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaking vote in a deadlocked Senate. (Notably, former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was one of three Republican “nay” votes.)
His first months in office passed by mostly under the radar, if for no other reason than the fact that other doings of the Trump administration — Elon Musk’s DOGE antics, a slew of executive orders, an attempt to strong-arm universities, and various deportation controversies — gobbled up all media attention. Then National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally invited the Trump administration’s most prominent journalistic enemy onto a privately hosted group chat to plan a military strike against the Houthis, and nothing has been the same since. Mike Waltz may have been the one who accidentally “sucked” the phone number of Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg into an off-the-books Signal debate of highly classified military policy, but it was Hegseth who dropped in to detail America’s strike plans against the Houthis.
Hegseth survived that controversy primarily because “Liberation Day” soon brought global markets to their knees, shrieking in arthritic agony, and after that, Trump moved to lock horns with the federal courts over his deportation policy. Manpower and attention span are very real limitations for the media, and with so many other governmental institutions either malfunctioning or being set ablaze, the Pentagon didn’t seem like it was currently in flames, at the very least. But not long afterwards — and somewhat off the radar given where media coverage was focused — heads began to roll, although likely not for the reasons one might have expected.
Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot was the first to go, on April 16 — a resignation and not a termination, although the tense language of Ullyot’s official press release clearly suggested something was amiss. That same week — the timing cannot be coincidental — the DOD placed Hegseth’s senior adviser, Dan Caldwell, his deputy chief of staff, Darin Selnick, and another staffer, Colin Carroll, on administrative leave, later firing them. On Friday, to seemingly cap a week of chaos at the Pentagon, Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, handed in his resignation.
The next shoe dropped on Sunday afternoon: First, the New York Times published a major story alleging that Hegseth had shared details (many more details, in fact, down to schedules for American bombing runs) about the Houthi strike plan in a second Signal group chat, one including his wife, brother, and personal attorney. Almost simultaneously, Politico published an op-ed by none other than former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot (the Chekhov’s gun of this story, apparently) describing his “month from hell” at the Pentagon and warning ominously (but nonspecifically) that “there are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week.” (As the two pieces were published simultaneously, this may well refer to the NYT scoop.)
The news continues to boil: Through Trump dismissed the issues to reporters, yesterday afternoon, NPR reported that the White House has begun “looking to replace” Hegseth as secretary of defense. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately went to social media to shoot it down, saying, “This @NPR story is total FAKE NEWS based on one anonymous source who clearly has no idea what they are talking about.” Although I have learned as a rule to never believe a word of what White House spokesmen say, my inclination this time might be to believe Leavitt, since NPR doesn’t strike me as the source most “plugged-in” to the internal doings of the Trump administration. But when Erick Erickson — in whom I do have confidence — announced that “NPR is correct,” I paid more attention. As Erickson explains it:
Here’s what I know: People in the White House are looking at possible SecDef replacements. Trump is not inclined to replace the SecDef. People in the White House believe more is coming on Hegseth that will turn Trump towards wanting a replacement.
We shall see; I have my doubts. Trump has a tendency to dig in his heels when pressured by the media — rather than by Laura Loomer, apparently — and I would be interested in what more could possibly be coming down the pike that would tip Trump’s hand. Internal revolt is seemingly insufficient — pretty much everybody who could be fired just has been. What could be worse? Is Hegseth back to tippling on the job? Did he share operational details of the Houthi strike with his chiropractor?
What is far more interesting about the “will he/won’t he” question surrounding Hegseth is the way it is clearly being driven by internal leaks from disgruntled (and likely cashiered) Pentagon officials. Our own Jim Geraghty laid out his suspicions about Dan Caldwell and Tucker Carlson; I will only say that they’re very convincing and make me wonder as to the provenance of the New York Times scoop about Hegseth’s second Signal chat.
Perhaps this is mere vulgar Kremlinology. But it is the appropriate analogy and approach during an administration whose global tariff policy, for example, depends on whether Peter Navarro is on an extended bathroom break at the moment. Given that, it should surprise observers not a whit that the Pentagon — the largest, most procedurally complex bureaucracy in the world — is now collapsing into internecine leak wars outside the chain of authority. Trump’s second administration has — fascinatingly and tellingly — ended up staffed in much the same way Stalinist Russia staffed the Red Army: Every leader must contend with the “political commissars” intentionally placed underneath them, always leaking, sniping, and backstabbing to keep them in line with what “Trumpism” is — and to grind their own personal axes under the pretext of serving the president. China could not be more pleased.
How Not to Respond to Famous Deaths in Public
Pope Francis passed away yesterday morning, the day after Easter. His last public audience, as it turns out, may have been with Vice President (and Catholic convert) JD Vance, who had met with Francis briefly the day before. I am not a Catholic, so I feel ill-equipped to pass judgment on his papacy — as a Protestant, I understand him primarily as a political rather than spiritual figure. (I was raised as, and grudgingly remain, Episcopalian — as I like to think of it, “as Episcopalian as humanly possible under present leadership.”) I can only wish his soul eternal rest, in sympathy with the millions of devout Catholics worldwide who looked to him for guidance, and beg America’s politicians to find a better way to respond than that of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Until next week.