How We’re All Now Paying the Price for the Myth of Trump’s Competence

At some point, early Wednesday morning, the cost of the Iran War will top $10 billion. The Center for Strategic and International Studies released a paper last week pegging the cost of this latest misadventure at $891 million a day. I’ve seen higher estimates, but CSIS is a respected nonpartisan outfit, so let’s go with their number for now. The report states that the vast majority of this money had not been previously budgeted, especially the spending on munitions. One Patriot interceptor missile costs close to $4 million, and we’re apparently burning through them. And “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth promises that we’re just getting revved up.

None of us knows how long this war is going to last. But it’s certainly no Venezuela, which took—ready?—two and a half hours. Donald Trump may have told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the weekend that the war was “already won.” But also over the weekend, a pre-war intelligence report was leaked to two Washington Post reporters showing that the National Intelligence Council, a panel of independent intel experts, seems to think that dislodging the regime could take a very long time indeed—at $37 million an hour, a rate that is almost sure to rise, especially if ground troops get involved.

Meanwhile, gas prices went up about 60 cents a gallon in the war’s first week. The Dow fell 453 points Friday. (It’s well below 50,000 now, so I guess that means, per Pam Bondi, that we’re now allowed to take the Jeffrey Epstein scandal seriously.) Also on Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February. In the year-and-change since Trump returned to office, the economy has added around 140,000 jobs. In a year. The St. Louis Fed estimated last spring that simply to keep pace with the growth in the number of people who age into the labor force, the economy needs to add around 150,000 jobs a month.

In other words, everywhere you look, the news isn’t merely bad. It’s terrible.

We’ve seen numerous examples in these last 13 months of Trump’s mendacity and malevolence. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans will never see him that way. There are those who adore him unconditionally, but beyond these dead-enders, there are others who know he’s not a good person but aren’t all that bothered by it.

That’s hard for millions of us to accept. But I hope to God that these people are finally starting to move themselves toward the conclusion that, even if they aren’t that troubled by the mendacity and malevolence, the man is just wildly incompetent. A mountain range of mythmaking has gone into creating the Trump persona over the years; by him, by a pliant business press in his real-estate days, and, since he entered politics, by a right-wing media that would make the old Soviet press agencies blush and a party of cowardly sycophants, most of whom know very well that he shouldn’t be in charge of a high-volume McDonald’s let alone the executive branch of the federal government but would rather let the country collapse than say so.

I remember a conversation I had with a Biden White House official in the spring of 2024, when Joe Biden was still running. I was asking about Trump’s weaknesses, and this official said something to me that may stand as the single most depressing couple of sentences I’ve ever had directed at me in 30-plus years of covering politics. We’re not going to dislodge people’s belief that he’s a great businessman, this official said; forget it. It’s hardwired in there, and undoing it, for a significant percentage of the people, just isn’t going to happen.

I believed this person, whom I’m known for a while; yet another part of me just couldn’t quite accept that people could be so—well, choose the word you prefer. And I was staggered during the 2024 campaign at all the voters who believed him when he said he’d bring down prices on day one.

Really. Who is that—okay, I’ll supply my own word—stupid? Presidents can’t control prices. Prices—of eggs, beef, oil, refrigerators, computers, you name it—depend on dozens of factors. Xi Jinping, who runs a command economy in a country where most electronics happen to be made, probably has far more control over the prices of refrigerators and computers than any president ever will. The price of beef has more to do with decisions made in Brazil than in Texas—and certainly at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

We all learn this in school. So how did so many millions of Americans unlearn it?

Another thing presidents don’t normally control is who runs other countries. At times, of course, American presidents have indeed made that choice for other countries. By the way, I can’t think of a single time that worked out well for the country in question. Cuba (in 1933, not 1959), Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, and perhaps most of all, back in 1953, the same Iran we’re now “re-obliterating.” I hate to say it: It never ends well.

But in more recent history, American presidents haven’t had, or exercised, that power. Yet Trump is going around now talking as if he has the power to appoint Iran’s next leader, as if it’s no more complicated than naming the next GOP chairman of Mississippi. As if there won’t be factions within the Iranian populace that will fight the elevation of anyone with the taint of a Trump association to the death.

Again, who can possibly believe his nonsense?

His poll numbers are bad. But they’re not nearly as bad as they ought to be. The man is, whatever his other faults, just way in over his head. Maybe Democrats should say that more often. The fact that he’s costing taxpayers a billion dollars a day on a war most of them didn’t want may be a good place to start.