Trump’s Incompetence Is Incredibly Dangerous Part A Billion

Restrictions on covid vaccines are bad for us…and bad for Trump too.

Yesterday the Trump administration announced new restrictions on Covid vaccines; they will no longer be available yearly for adults under 65 without certain health conditions.

This is the latest effort by Trump to try to kick start a major US pandemic and degrade the health and welfare of the country. Trump has also rolled back food testing, including testing for bacteria in infant formula. He’s made major cuts at the FAA, leading to fears for airline safety—and a number of dramatic airline safety failures already may be related to the destruction of capacity. Cuts at the NOAA may diminish the ability to warn about dangerous weather events. The Republican proposals for Medicaid cuts are likely to lead to tens of thousands of deaths. And of course Trump’s senseless tariffs are increasing inflation, destroying jobs, and could still easily end us in a recession.

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Trump’s blitzkrieg effort to murder Americans through contagious disease, airplane accident, cancer, and a million other efforts have been justified, or half justified in a range of ways. RFK Jr., the head of HHS, is an anti vax crank who believes a range of debunked woo bullshit; Elon Musk, Trump’s billionaire sugar daddy and co president, doesn’t think government does anything useful and wants to hack everything off in the name of efficiency. Republicans say they want to cut Medicaid to balance the budget, though their tax cuts are going to hyperinflate the deficit anyway. Trump himself just really like tariffs and believes they are, as political scientist Jonathan Bernstein puts it, “magic beans”.

The common denominator of these justifications, in short, is “just because.” Republicans have long wanted to gut social programs like Medicaid, even though Trump promised not to, and Trump doesn’t care enough to stop them. Trump gave Kennedy a place in his cabinet because Kennedy endorsed him; he gave Musk sweeping powers in his campaign administration because Musk gave him campaign donations. Trump then let them pursue their own weird fetishes for murdering people because he can’t be bothered to pay much attention to what anyone in his administration is doing. He just wants to golf and hork magic beans and target immigrants. And yell at Bruce Springsteen.

Obviously, making the American people more vulnerable to covid, and measles, and food poisoning, and air traffic accidents, and cancer, is dangerous for everyone who lives in America. But it’s also dangerous for Trump.

There’s a reason presidents don’t usually remove safeguards on food borne illnesses or air safety, don’t embrace crank anti vaccine science, and don’t put massive tariffs in place on a whim. That’s because when disasters happen, presidents generally get blamed, which harms them and harms their party.

I know that people like to say that in the age of Trump nothing matters, but we have pretty solid evidence that presidents still do get blamed when things go wrong, and that that hurts them. Trump lost in 2020 after he mismanaged the covid pandemic. Biden lost in 2024 after inflation spiked—even though he handled it quite well. Now Trump is coming into office and rushing to…raise prices and see if he can kick start another pandemic (or more than one.) Why would you do that?

Trump has a lot of power and influence, and people just naturally assume that those with lots of power and influence must have a good reason for their actions. People argue that Trump knows there will be no elections and so can do what he wants—which ignores the fact that we are currently having elections and the Republicans are getting consistently crushed in part because Trump’s approval has cratered.

In any case, even authoritarians worry about popular approval, because if support falls to low they risk coups and mass protests and similar unpleasantness. And that’s even setting aside the obvious fact that when you target the health and welfare of the country you’re in, you can actually end up endangering yourself. Trump’s cavalier attitude towards Covid in his first term nearly killed him.

Trump is setting the US up for disaster, and undermining our defenses against financial collapse, pandemics, and weather events because he is a lazy fool who doesn’t understand and doesn’t care about basic cause and effect. Presidents generally try to reduce risks of serious disasters because those risks are their risks. They don’t want recessions because recessions hurt them politically; they don’t want inflation because inflation hurts them politically; they don’t want some sort of nightmarish pandemic for the same reason.

Presidents often screw up and fail to protect the public for ideological reasons (like Reagan ignoring the AIDS epidemic) or just because they make mistakes. But there are virtually no examples of a president just cavalierly dismantling basic health and safety protections across the board, because doing that is incredibly foolish. It’s hard to imagine that even a President DeSantis, for example, would give Kennedy or Musk carte blanche to take a wrecking ball to vaccines or the federal government with little oversight or pushback. Any president with even vague awareness of how government works would not let random crackpots put their whole administration at risk in that way.

This is why Trump is uniquely dangerous. If he were a better president, he might be more popular and more able to advance his agenda in some ways. But he also wouldn’t put lives at risk just for the hell of it, or because he can’t bother to pay attention.

Trump occasionally recognizes that he’s put himself in danger and will back and fill—which is why he keeps climbing down on tariffs as he belatedly realizes they’re unsustainable. But he is simply unwilling and unable to seek out decent information and make informed decisions before barrelling ahead with obviously dangerous and foolish policies. He’s constantly gutting his pandemic early warning systems because he thinks everything will work out…and then when it doesn’t, he just says, “well nobody could have foreseen”—or else he claims the problem isn’t a problem.

Trump believes his own lies and his own hype. He has no capacity to anticipate dangers, or to assimilate new information. He makes incredibly risky and dangerous decisions all the time and never learns from them. That puts him at risk in unprecedented ways—whether that means exposing himself to Covid or exposing himself to federal indictments. Unfortunately, it puts all of us at risk as well.