LIVING UNDER A KAKISTOCRACY

Polluting Politics on Purpose

The people who built it said so out loud before they did it. In February 2017, Steve Bannon stood on a stage and said the cabinet nominees had been “selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.” In 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought told private audiences he wanted federal workers “traumatically affected,” so they would wake up and not want to go to work. In 2025 both men got the government they had described.

Then came the staff. A housing finance chief with no intelligence background was named acting Director of National Intelligence during a war. A corporate lawyer with no medical degree ended up running the Food and Drug Administration. A press secretary hired from the president’s own social media company lasted five days. Seventeen inspectors general were fired on a single Friday night by identical two-sentence emails, and the federal judge who later ruled the firings unlawful still could not put them back.

The damage did not stay in Washington. Social Security lost the largest share of its staff in its history and phone waits reached five hours. The weather service entered a severe-weather season hundreds of people short. In Kerr County, Texas, after the July 2025 flood that killed 28 children at one summer camp, federal search and rescue teams did not deploy for 72 hours, because every contract over $100,000 needed one cabinet secretary’s personal signature.

Living Under a Kakistocracy is the reported account of how the second Trump administration filled the government with the loyal and the unqualified on purpose, pushed out the people who knew how things worked, and what broke when they left. It is written in a dry, documented voice, with names, dates, vote counts, and the source for every one of them. It is not a case against Republicans. It names, with respect, the Republicans and former supporters who have walked away, and it is written for anyone in either party who is fed up.

Inside:

• The blueprint in the planners’ own words: Bannon, Vought, Musk, and the Project 2025 authors who were disavowed and then hired

• The departure ledger: four of eight women at cabinet level gone within three months in 2026, all replaced by men, and the men who survived worse

• Schedule F reborn: how about 8,000 career positions lost their civil service protections in June 2026

• The Epstein files, the Signal group chat, the Minneapolis shootings, and the Iran war, told through the people in charge of each

• What broke for ordinary Americans: Social Security, the weather service, the IRS, and a 43-day shutdown

• The polls, the defectors, and the 143-year-old merit system Washington built after a president was shot by a rejected office-seeker

For anyone who has watched the headlines and wondered whether it was really this bad, this is the documented answer.