Today's #ListenFirst Friday video focuses on the importance of overcoming political divides and coming together to combat climate change.
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America Cannot Function without Experts
Apr 13, 2026
America is facing a preventable national safety crisis because expertise is increasingly sidelined at the highest levels of government. In the first three months of 2026, at least 14 people have died in U.S. immigration detention centers — a surge that has drawn international criticism and underscored how life‑and‑death decisions depend on qualified leadership. When those entrusted with safeguarding the public lack the knowledge or are chosen for loyalty instead of competence, danger rarely announces itself. It arrives quietly, through misjudgments no one is prepared to correct.
That warning is urgent today. With Markwayne Mullin now leading the Department of Homeland Security amid rising scrutiny of immigration enforcement, questions about expertise are no longer abstract. Recent reporting shows a dozen detainee deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody this year, highlighting systemic risks where leadership decisions have life‑and‑death consequences.
The framers of the Constitution understood this risk. They expected presidents to choose individuals of character, competence, and relevant expertise — and the Senate to reject inexperienced nominees. The Appointments Clause created a shared duty to prevent the concentration of power. When Congress confirms unqualified nominees, that safeguard collapses. The result is a government exposed to failures in the very systems designed to keep people safe — precisely the danger the framers sought to prevent.
No president governs alone. The claim that a single leader can “fix it” contradicts a system built on reliance on expert advice. Today, that premise is being tested.
Americans have watched nominees placed in roles without the qualifications those positions demand — and confirmed despite concern. Reporting shows that leaders lack the experience to direct critical agencies. Measles cases have reached their highest levels since 1991, a reminder of what happens when public health expertise is dismissed. These outcomes are not policy disagreements; they are failures of safety, produced when leadership disregards knowledge.
What emerges is not a series of isolated errors but a pattern. Cronyism — elevating loyalists over experts — erodes trust and replaces judgment with political obedience. When ideologically driven directives override expertise, systems designed to protect citizens falter. As Steve Jobs observed, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do.” When loyalty outweighs competence, decisions degrade, and risk grows, affecting everything from disease control to disaster response.
Presidents are entitled to advisers they trust. But trust is no substitute for competence, especially where errors carry national consequences. Governing demands deep expertise across foreign policy, national security, science, education, and public health. Yet key advisory roles have too often been filled by individuals chosen for loyalty rather than experience, leaving critical gaps where judgment matters most.
Congress has enabled this pattern. It has confirmed nominees whose inexperience was evident. These were choices. Loyalty has been treated as a qualification, with nominees selected to advance agendas or disrupt institutional norms rather than provide competent leadership. Senators have feared retaliation, deferred to party loyalty, and invoked the claim that “a president deserves his team,” even when that team lacked the expertise required to protect the public. Nominations such as Mullin’s bring this failure into sharp focus — raising questions about whether loyalty is again being prioritized over relevant expertise. This is not abstract; when unqualified leaders direct policy, consequences fall on ordinary Americans.
Competence is not optional. It is the baseline of public safety — the foundation of national security, public trust, and democratic stability. No leader can master every field; that is why expertise is indispensable.
This is not theoretical. Early in my career, I was taught that incompetence is never harmless — it creates risk for everyone it touches. I am reminded of that lesson when nominees are advanced despite clear gaps in experience. Congress has confirmed individuals it knew were unprepared, then expressed frustration when they failed. Advancing nominees while recognizing deficiencies calls judgment itself into question and undermines the system designed to check power before harm occurs.
The consequences extend beyond appointments to governance. Many voters once believed that business experience would translate into effective leadership. The record proved more complicated — marked by bankruptcies, legal disputes, and unpaid vendors. These patterns raised questions about judgment. Yet rather than surrounding himself with seasoned experts to offset gaps, the president has often elevated advisers chosen for loyalty over skill. That choice concentrates power while weakening the expertise required to govern.
This approach is now being formalized. Proposals such as Schedule F and initiatives like Project 2025 would allow tens of thousands of career civil servants — scientists, cybersecurity specialists, public health experts — to be replaced with political loyalists. The consequences are clear: when experienced personnel are removed, safety inspections stall and emergency response slows. Scholars warn that such changes would degrade the government’s capacity to respond to crises. A government cannot function when expertise is treated as optional.
The warning signs are already visible. Reporting has documented instances in which national security experts were excluded from conversations with foreign leaders while political advisers with little training were present. These advisers acted as gatekeepers, limiting expert input. When loyalty displaces competence, vulnerabilities emerge — unseen by the public but unmistakable to foreign leaders and adversaries.
The same pattern appears in public communication. Americans have watched leaders make claims about climate science, military operations, and foreign affairs that contradict the assessments of career professionals and scientists. Experts have publicly pushed back against statements that misrepresent complex realities. These moments feel dismissive — as though both their judgment and the expertise of those who serve are being set aside. These are not debates over perspective; they are disagreements rooted in elevated risk when empirical understanding is replaced with political convenience.
At a human level, the risk is clear. Everyone has encountered someone who pretends to be an expert. In ordinary life, it is uncomfortable; in government, it is dangerous. Every sector of American life depends on trained professionals — surgeons, engineers, scientists — whose work prevents risks we rarely see. Government is no different. The stakes are higher.
When leaders dismiss expertise and rely on improvisation, the risks fall not on politicians but on ordinary Americans — our families and our future. A nation cannot navigate danger without expertise at the helm.
My experience reinforces this. I spent my career as a generalist — capable across many areas but aware of my limits. Effective leadership requires recognizing those limits and relying on those with deeper expertise. Healthy institutions depend on leaders who surround themselves with capable professionals. Today, Americans see the opposite: turnover, conflict with experts, and appointments that prioritize loyalty over knowledge. The result is a government that feels unsteady — less able to meet crises.
If the problem is structural, the remedy must be as well. It is not partisan; it is constitutional. Americans can demand transparency about qualifications, support independent oversight, and expect the press to scrutinize qualifications and the confirmation process. But when leaders refuse to listen, citizens must act — through voting, peaceful protest, petitions, and civic engagement that places country above party. Congress must fulfill its duty: confirm qualified nominees, reject those without relevant experience, and exercise oversight.
Competence is a constitutional requirement. It is the minimum the American people deserve.
Americans need experts. The country cannot function without trained professionals guiding national security, public health, science, and diplomacy. It cannot protect its people when expertise is dismissed, and it cannot endure if competence is treated as optional. To neglect expertise in the highest offices is to gamble with public safety. Republics do not fall from force alone, but from folly.
Competence is not a luxury. It is the minimum the American people deserve.
Carolyn Goode is a retired educational leader and advocate for ethical leadership, government accountability, and civic renewal. She writes about democratic resilience, institutional responsibility, and the conditions that support sustained civic engagement.
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From left to right: Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer and France's President Emmanuel Macron hold a meeting during a summit at Lancaster House on March 2, 2025, in London, England.
(Justin Tallis/WPA Pool/Getty Images/TNS)
Why Trump’s antics don’t work on our allies
Apr 09, 2026
It is among the most familiar patterns of the Trump era. First, the president says or does something weird, rude or otherwise norm-defying. Some elected Republicans object, and the response from Trump and his minions is to shoot the messenger. The dynamic holds constant whether it’s big (January 6 pardons) or small (tweeting “covfefe” just after midnight).
The essence of this low-road-for-me-high-road-for-thee dynamic rests on the belief that Trumpism is a one-way road. Insulting Trump, deservedly or not, is forbidden, while Trump’s antics should be celebrated when possible, defended when necessary, or ignored when neither of those responses is possible. But he should never, ever face consequences for his own actions.
This was the week Trump’s routine went global.
A number of longtime defenders of the transatlantic alliance are very angry at our allies.
NATO members have refused to allow American jets to launch from, or even over, their territory. They won’t help secure the Strait of Hormuz. French President Emmanuel Macron has even called for a coalition to “stand up” against both the United States and China.
I think these are serious strategic mistakes, especially Macron’s posturing to go out like a modern-day de Gaulle instead of as a lame duck. But politically, they are hardly shocking.
Let’s review how we got here.
Trump has routinely mocked our allies. For efficiency’s sake, let’s forgive all of the petty jabs from the first term ostensibly intended to get them to spend more on defense. In Trump’s second term, he claimed our NATO allies would never fight on our behalf, despite the fact that the only time NATO invoked Article 5 — an attack on one is an attack on all — was in the wake of 9/11.
Back in January, in Davos, Switzerland, Trump revised this false claim, admitting that some did fight in Afghanistan, but that “they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.” This infuriated not just allied leaders, but their voters. Indeed, Trump is even unpopular with the populist right across most of Europe.
On a per capita basis, Denmark, not America, had the most casualties in Afghanistan.
Speaking of Denmark, Trump threatened to go to war with the Danes to take possession of Greenland. The threats, public and private, were so relentless and serious that Denmark had to actually plan for a war against the U.S.
Trump didn’t go as far with Canada, but he poisoned that alliance with his repeated insistence that Canada should become America’s 51st state.
Trump also cut off most direct military aid to Ukraine, opting instead to strong-arm Europe into buying American weapons to boost our defense industry. And all while lending rhetorical aid and comfort to Russian President Vladimir Putin as Trump’s “peace envoy” talked up business deals with Russia.
Trump abrogated trade agreements with our allies to levy massive tariffs on nearly all of them, forcing many countries to pursue trade agreements with China. His erratic shifting of policies and rates sent allied economies scrambling. Trump’s American defenders may roll their eyes at his openness to emoluments — a plane from Qatar, a gold bar and Rolex from Swiss business leaders, a crown from South Korea — but just imagine how this stuff is viewed by the broader public in allied countries. Trump mocks notions of shared values, but if you bring him a trinket, he’ll talk.
Then Trump launched a surprise war on Iran without consulting our allies. When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer suggested sending aircraft carriers to help, Trump mocked him.
“That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer,” Trump posted on Truth social. “But we will remember. We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
Trump has since changed his tune. In his national address last week, Trump essentially called our allies cowards who needed to muster some “delayed courage.” On Monday, he explained he was done with NATO because they refused to give him Greenland.
Trump’s one-way-street antics work domestically because of his support within the GOP base. But he can’t incite a primary challenge to elected allied leaders, not when he’s loathed. In January his approval rating in the U.K. was 16 percent (and in Denmark just 4 percent). One in 5 Europeans see America as a greater threat than China or North Korea.
Again, I think it would be good for Europe—which has seen energy prices skyrocket because of the war and still needs the U.S. for its security—to swallow some of the humiliation and help. But the refusal of Trump and his defenders to acknowledge why it’s politically hard at this point is maddening.
Trump would never dream of taking a devastating political hit for an ally. But he and his defenders cannot fathom why allies feel the same way about him.
(Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.)
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President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, on March 23, 2026. President Donald Trump said Monday that there are "major points of agreement" in US- Iran talks which he said must result in Tehran giving up its nuclear ambitions and enriched uranium stockpile.
(TNS)
Trump never actually had a plan
Apr 07, 2026
US President Trump spoke at the Saudi Future Investment Initiative on Friday, March 27. He offered a pristine example of what he calls “the weave.” What detractors take for incontinent verbal rambling is, in his own telling, genius-level embroidery of a rhetorical mosaic.
While spinning his tapestry of soundbites, the wartime president declared that the Iranians “have to open up the Strait of Trump — I mean, Hormuz. Excuse me, for — I’m so sorry, such a terrible mistake. The fake news will say he ‘accidentally said’ (chuckle), now there’s no accidents with me. Not too many. If there were, we’d have a major story. No. Well, we had that with the Gulf of Mexico. Remember the Gulf of Mexico? And one day I said, ‘Why is it the Gulf of Mexico?’ ”
Trump then digressed — sorry, weaved — for a while about the “renaming” of the Gulf of Mexico before getting back to the war.
If you watch the video, the “joke” about renaming the Strait of Hormuz was clearly deliberate. Trump said it was no accident. He has a tendency to float outrageous ideas as jokes to see how they fly — remember his “joke” that Canada should become the 51st state? Whether a joke or trial balloon, it was a terrible thing to say, and even worse idea, lending rhetorical confirmation that the president’s ego — and imperialist ambitions — is the author of this war.
But I don’t want to write a whole column about this relatively minor inanity. I just bring it up to illustrate a point. The president you see ad-libbing whatever pops into his head is the president we’ve got. When the commander-in-chief weaved in some observations about the Saudi crown prince “kissing my ass” because Trump isn’t a “loser” like previous American presidents, that was him, too.
In other words, there is no secret serious, detail-oriented Trump with “encyclopedic molecular knowledge” about matters of state, as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims. What we see is what we’ve got.
This is very hard for some people to believe, and even harder for some people to acknowledge. These twin difficulties are the origin of all those cliches about Trump being a three- or four-dimensional chess master thinking many moves ahead of us mere checkers-playing mortals. When Trump does something unexplainable or indefensible, the best explanation and best defense for his superfans is to simply say the ways of Trump are mysterious, but rest assured he has a plan.
Entering our second month of the war with Iran, the superfans who oppose this war, for various reasons, are left in a pickle. How could this leader with an oak spine, unassailable instincts, deep knowledge and wisdom make such a mistake? How could the man they’ve defended as a genius for so long make what is in their eyes such a monumental blunder?
He was misled, of course.
For some — as it so often is when events don’t go the way they want — blame lands on the Jews, or Israel (a tomayto-tomahto distinction for many). This is how Joe Kent, who recently resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, explained it. It’s Tucker Carlson’s explanation too: We’re in this war because Israel’s prime minister “demanded it.”
Others make the same argument, at one remove. “As this thing goes south, we need to know exactly who talked him into it,” Megyn Kelly demands. “What representations were made to convince the president that this was a good idea. Who? Who specifically?”
Kelly blames Israel, of course, but also advisers and Israel supporters such as Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro and various Fox News pundits (revealingly, she excludes the crown prince of Saudi Arabia).
Now, I think some of these arguments are ahistorical, antisemitic, deranged nonsense (e.g. Joe Kent’s fevered anti-Israel paranoia). Trump has said “no” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more than once, including during this war. But some claims have a patina of merit. If you buy the claim the war is a disaster, then the people around Trump have some culpability.
But not as much as the president himself. If Trump was like the senile “President Auto-Pen” he paints his predecessor to be, then maybe these claims would have more weight. But they don’t say that. They say this genius demigod infinity-level chess savant was deceived.
The leader cannot fail, he can only be failed.
The last resort for Trump’s defenders is to claim the decision to invade Iran was a “betrayal.” This claim at least grants Trump some agency. But for this to be true, the impulsive Trump we’ve seen weaving for a decade has to be different than the weaver in chief who launched this war. And I just don’t see it.
(Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.)
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Close-up of a rusty iron fence painted with stars and stripes at the American-Mexican border in Tijuana.
Border Communities Know ICE’s Impunity All Too Well
Apr 06, 2026
The Department of Homeland Security shutdown has officially passed one month as lawmakers continue to debate limits on ICE’s use of force. Though we’ve arrived at this legislative standoff due to aggressive, and sometimes fatal, immigration enforcement actions in cities in our country’s interior, for communities along the U.S.–Mexico border, such abuses are nothing new. As I reveal through my academic research, immigration agents have operated with near-total impunity at the border for decades.
I uncovered patterns of excessive violence, coercion, and abuse at land ports of entry, through which more than 200 million people including workers, students, and visitors legally enter the U.S. every single year. The link between agents’ actions on the streets of American cities and the way they operate at the southern border is inevitable—yet something the current conversation about ICE and potential reforms overlooks.
Take Antonio for example, a Mexican student from Tijuana who I interviewed for my research. Antonio explained that he learned from a young age that he had to comply with Customs and Border Patrol’s (CBP) authority, even when the agents’ practices infringed on his rights: “Basically, my mother instilled in me from a young age how CBP officers could do anything. They can take away my visa, they can beat me up, they can throw tear gas at me, they can insult me, and we can’t do anything.”
When such misconduct occurs, agents often intimidate and retaliate against people who cross the border to discourage them from filing complaints. Commuters and migrants are coerced to remain compliant even in situations of clear abuse. That parallels tactics used against legal observers of immigration enforcers in U.S cities—approaches that have stirred outrage among Americans across the political spectrum.
But even when complaints are filed, the current system protects agents. Investigators for the American Immigration Council revealed that 97 percent of grievances filed by migrants after suffering abuse from Border Patrol agents resulted in “no action taken.” This impunity is also evident in the lack of accountability in cases of fatal shootings involving migrants and U.S. citizens, deadly and reckless Border Patrol vehicle pursuits under Texas’ Operation Lone Star, and cross-border shootings by Border Patrol against Mexicans.
Despite the prevalence of lethal force and abuse at the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, they rarely receive national attention—though they resemble agents’ aggressive approaches in Minnesota, Chicago, and elsewhere that have shocked the nation. Broadening the public’s and our lawmakers’ understanding of the violence committed by immigration enforcement agents is crucial to create much needed systemic change, not only in our cities but also at the border.
For instance, the recent documentary Critical Incident: Death at the Border, focuses on Border Patrol’s cover-up of the death of Anastasio Hernández Rojas, a long-time San Diego resident who was in custody at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. In 2010, Border Patrol agents brutally tortured, beat, and suffocated Rojas. These injuries left him brain-dead at a San Diego hospital, where he died from his injuries three days later.
To finally stop such abuses from happening at our border, structural reforms are needed. One place to start is to make it easier to file complaints when abuse occurs, ensure those complaints are taken seriously, and ensure misconduct investigations are fully transparent through CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility. Meanwhile, in cities far from the border, it’s important to prohibit immigration enforcement agents from driving unmarked vehicles or wearing masks during their operations, which limits legal observers’ ability to identify and document civil and human rights violations.
But if lawmakers are truly invested in addressing ICE’s lethal practices, their vote should not further expand DHS’s already enormous budget, with the ultimate goal to defund and abolish ICE. The struggle of citizens killed in cities like Minneapolis is the struggle of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and vice versa.
Estefanía Castañeda Pérez, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. Her academic research examines border violence, race and ethnicity, and policing.
Border Communities Know ICE’s Impunity All Too Well was first published on Latino News Network and was republished with permission.
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