Trump Is Paying A Price For His Reign Of Error

Trump's rank incompetence may be his undoing

US President Donald Trump raises a fist as he steps off Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, on April 11, 2025. Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images.

Whoopsie! Our bad!

That may as well be Trump 2.0’s catchphrase.

The incompetence of Trump and his administration was wholly predictable, of course—and in fact was widely predicted. After all, Trump not only had a disastrous first term, his nominees to top posts this term have lacked basic qualifications.

As I touched on back in February, by nominating such epically unqualified people to his administration, Trump was trolling us. His position is that competency in government is something only the left cares about, so getting his nominees confirmed through the Senate was an act of owning the libs.

Nailed it!

But now, we have to live with this disaster of a cabinet. And the incompetence chickens are coming home to roost.

Whether it’s Elon Musk’s admission that DOGE accidentally defunded Ebola research—whoopsie! Or Mike Waltz’s mistakenly inviting journalist Jeffrey Goldberg into their top secret Signal war plans chat. Or ICE’s admission that its deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was due to “an administrative error.” Or now, the revelation that the letter Trump’s antisemitism task force sent to Harvard with their bonkers list of demands was “unauthorized” and never should have been sent… The blunders keep piling up.

And we’re not even 100 days in.

In today’s piece, I’ll take a look at the seemingly endless parade of errors by the Trump administration and explore the very real toll they are taking on Trump’s approval rating, even on the issues that have traditionally been his strongest.

“We Will Make Mistakes…”

While Donald Trump’s first term was its own level of disaster, Trump 2.0 certainly feels far more error-prone far more quickly. And this should come as little surprise since there are far fewer adults in the room this time to provide Trump with much-needed guardrails.

This, of course, is by design. In Trump’s mind, one of the reasons he didn’t accomplish more in his first term was that he was hamstrung by normie RINOs who didn’t let Trump be Trump.

Purge the normie RINOs and what do you get? Well, for one thing: Elon Musk.

The first clue that Trump’s second term was going to be a nonstop string of mistakes came mere days into the term when Karoline Leavitt announced that DOGE had halted a $50 million payment of taxpayer dollars to “fund condoms in Gaza.” It was quickly revealed that “Gaza” in this context actually referred to a province in Mozambique, and that the funding was part of HIV/AIDS prevention in Africa, not a program to send condoms to Hamas terrorists as Trump insisted.

In response to this blunder, Musk pleaded innocence, declaring in the Oval Office on February 11:

“Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” Musk replied. “Nobody is going to bat 1,000. We will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

The notion that such an amateur hour error was no big deal because it was an unintentional, innocent mistake is not only the ultimate in narcissistic privilege, but it also represents a head-spinning double standard: The right would never give a Democrat such grace. But for Musk, there was virtue in the act of admitting the mistake, and he would go on to admit even more.

Just two weeks later during Trump’s first cabinet meeting, Elon Musk trotted out the same excuse after his NIH cuts resulted in the halting of funding of Ebola prevention research.

During that meeting, Musk famously chuckled that:

“We will make mistakes, we won’t be perfect. But when we make mistakes, we’ll fix it very quickly.”

Here’s the thing though: He didn’t fix the Ebola prevention funding “very quickly” at all, as Global Press Journal made very clear in an article just last month. “If USAID funds for Ebola prevention were restored immediately, how come we were not told?” asked a public health specialist working on the Ebola response effort on the ground in Uganda.

Also, there’s the matter of the continuous firehose of errors perpetrated by DOGE, damningly documented by Politico in a scathing April 3rd piece:

Reuters reported earlier today that the termination notices delivered to USAID workers were “so rife with errors” that the agency had to bring staff back from leave to issue corrected ones. It’s the latest in a long list of DOGE errors and corrections:

• Firing key scientists, pandemic experts and nuclear safety officials who had to be brought back

• Repeatedly miscalculating and misrepresenting DOGE’s savings

• Granting a DOGE staffer access to edit sensitive Treasury systems, prompting an internal “forensic investigation”

• Gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau only to unsuspend staffers and uncancel contracts after the agency’s inability to perform its legally required functions became apparent

• Inadvertently canceling funding for Ebola prevention

• Uncancelling lease terminations after agency and congressional pushback

While Trump would never hold Musk publicly accountable for such unmitigated incompetence, it does seem to have taken a toll. Tesla profits are down 71% amid consumer backlash to his DOGE cuts (and his pro-Nazi stances) and just this week, Musk announced that he’ll be stepping away from his government work as soon as next month.

In the meantime, this pattern has continued apace: an embarrassing administration blunder, followed by Trump’s failure to hold anyone accountable for it, and even doubling down on the mistake.

Double Down!

There’s a central conflict at the heart of Trump’s personality: He is at once completely incapable of competent management or governance, yet unable to ever admit when he’s wrong.

Even as members of his administration have admitted errors, Trump has decided, much like Musk with DOGE, to just push ahead and ignore the issue altogether. Trump does this regularly while speaking, flubbing a line during a speech but continuing on as if he totally meant to say that wrong thing he just said.

Yeah, it’s like that.

Take the time when Trump’s National Security Director Mike Waltz mistakenly added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to their war plans Signal chat. The parties, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, exchanged actual classified information about an impending attack, all over a nonsecure commercial messaging app.

While Waltz did take “full responsibility” for the blunder—because as even the administration admitted, Waltz was the one who invited Goldberg into the chat—in the end the administration went on the offensive. Rather than holding anyone accountable or fixing the problem, the administration attacked Goldberg, suggesting he did something to hide himself from the others in the chat and that he should have left the chat earlier than he did.

Neither Waltz nor Hegseth was fired for the screw-up, with Trump ultimately declaring:

"Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man," Trump said Tuesday in a phone interview with NBC News…

The situation, Trump said, was "the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one."

Hegseth, we have since learned, has shared classified information in other unsecured Signal chats, including with his wife, brother, and personal attorney. Calls for his resignation are growing.

So, no harm, no foul, I guess!?

More recently, the Trump administration deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a gulag in El Salvador. It did this despite a clear 2019 “withholding of removal” order prohibiting his deportation to that country. Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency admitted in a sworn declaration that an “administrative error” led to the wrongful deportation.

Despite this and multiple other such admissions, Trump and his cronies, including Stephen Miller and AG Pam Bondi, simply doubled down on Abrego Garcia’s deportation. They called him a “terrorist” without any evidence, claimed they are powerless to return him despite a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling ordering Trump to “facilitate” his return to the U.S., and argued Abrego Garcia was in fact “the right person sent to the right place,” even dramatically attributing the claim the deportation was an “error” to a Democratic “saboteur.”

“Administrative error”? What “administrative error”?

Then, on April 11 the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force sent Harvard a letter laying out a “series of demands about hiring, admissions and curriculum.” The demands were so onerous and radical that Harvard took a hard line against the administration, refusing to comply with their demands even though billions in federal funding were on the line.

The clown show continued. Subsequently, per The New York Times:

Then, almost immediately, came a frantic call from a Trump official.

The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter said.

But even so…

A senior White House official said the administration stood by the letter, calling the university’s decision to publicly rebuff the administration overblown and blaming Harvard for not continuing discussions.

“It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks,” said May Mailman, the White House senior policy strategist. “Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.”

Sensing a pattern?

The American people sure are, and they’re not happy about it.

Trump’s Approval Ratings On The Slide

Trump famously declared in 2016 that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.” And often over the past nine years, that has felt painfully true. What would be a career-ending scandal for any other politician, for Trump is just another Tuesday. Normal political rules don’t seem to apply.

Except that, of course, in 2020, Donald Trump did pay a price for his failure. After four years of chaos and a year-plus of mismanagement of the Covid epidemic, U.S. voters ousted him in an electoral rout. It is admittedly sadly unclear why in 2024 voters’ memories were so short that they forgot why they had voted him out before. But it at least now appears once again that, the political gravity of his chaos, his bad decisions, and his utter incompetence is inescapable.

As Axios reports, multiple surveys are showing Trump’s approval rating plummeting, particularly on two of his traditionally strongest issues:

The economy:

• A Reuters/Ipsos poll out Wednesday found 37% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of the economy — his lowest rating ever, going back to the start of his first presidency.

• A Pew Research Center survey found Trump's overall approval rating has fallen to 40%, while confidence in his economic leadership has dropped to 45% — the lowest since tracking began in 2019.

And immigration:

• Despite a sealed-off border and a wave of high-profile deportations, Trump is now barely above water on his best issue, according to an average of polls by data journalist G. Elliott Morris.

• A new YouGov/Economist poll found Trump's immigration approval rating has dropped 10 points since April 16 — down to 45% — amid an escalating standoff with the courts over his deportation tactics.

But notably, it’s not that voters are shifting away from him on issues per se. It’s how he’s running the country that’s the issue.

Trump's approval rating is cratering not because voters reject his goals — but because they're increasingly alarmed by his methods. That disconnect threatens to collapse the two most durable pillars of his political brand.

Or put another way, as Taegan Godard framed it over at Political Wire:

Incompetence Is Undoing Trump’s Approval Rating

This is consistent with the findings of Pew Research Center, whose poll has Trump’s approval down at 40%, down 7% since 2 months ago.

It’s clear from their survey that voters’ biggest concern about Trump and Musk’s cuts to the federal government is that it has been too careless.

And when it comes to the variety of issue areas polled, Trump’s decline in approval is due to voters’ lack of confidence in him to handle them, with even immigration underwater.

Will Saletan in The Bulwark puts it this way:

The result, politically, is a gap between public support for his goals and public support for his methods.

You can see the results in two polls taken earlier this month, a few days after he announced his tariffs. In a CBS News/YouGov survey, 51 percent of Americans said they liked Trump’s goals in pursuing tariffs, but 63 percent didn’t like “the way he is going about it.” In a Harvard-Harris poll, voters split three ways. Forty-eight percent said Trump’s tariffs were “the right idea” but “required more patience.” On the other side, 31 percent said the tariffs were “the wrong idea regardless of execution.” The pivotal group, 21 percent, said the tariffs were “the right idea but it has been executed badly.”

And as Saletan makes clear, there is a lesson for Democrats here when it comes to regaining the support of the American people, including even Trump voters:

To break Trump’s coalition and reclaim our government, we need to talk not just about the administration’s corruption and its abuse of power, but about its pervasive incompetence…

When the question is execution instead of goals, the middle of the electorate turns against him.

When I wrote in December that Trump would likely be undone by his inevitable overreach, just as George W. Bush had been 20 years before, I should have added a bit about his “inevitable incompetence” as well.

Because while murder on Fifth Avenue may not be a dealbreaker, it turns out incompetence just might be.