A loyalty-forward government has formed right before our eyes. Jared Kushner has been tapped to help lead the Israel–Hamas talks. He wasn’t chosen for his expertise in delicate diplomacy; he was chosen because he’s the president’s son-in-law—and because some around him seem to treat his Jewish identity as if that alone were a qualification aligned with a pro-Israel posture. Identity and proximity are not expertise. That’d be like putting Linda McMahon in charge of the Department of Education because she once (seemingly!) went to school. Oh wait, we did that too. What are we doing here?
Zoom out from the Kushner headline and the method snaps into focus. First, elevate friends, family, donors, and media allies into roles once filled by deeply vetted and experienced professionals. Second, lean on “acting” titles and novel personnel rules to dodge scrutiny and degrade accountability. Third, purge the referees—advisory boards, inspectors general, nonpartisan civil servants—so the only guardrail left is personal loyalty. It’s governing by who you know, not what you know.
This critique applies no matter who holds power; institutions should require and reward expertise and accountability over proximity in every administration.
The appointments tell the story better than any memo. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t qualified to steward evidence-based public health just because he has a famous name and contrarian vaccine takes; a viral message board isn’t an epidemiology degree, and dismissing all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel doesn’t make the science stronger. Kristi Noem isn’t qualified to run Homeland Security just because she once shot her own misbehaving puppy; that anecdote may sell books, but it’s not a credential in border security. Doug Burgum isn’t qualified to steward 500 million acres of public land at the Department of the Interior just because he rode a horse in a campaign ad; public lands require land managers, not pitchmen. Chris Wright isn’t qualified to referee disputes between energy companies and conservation requirements just because he ran a fracking company; that’s like having the owner of one team throw on the stripes to call the game. And Sean Duffy may have starred on The Real World, but that doesn’t mean he can steer us out of The Real Mess at DOT.
You can laugh—some of this begs for gallows humor—but the consequences are not funny. Expertise is actually the safety gear of a complex republic. Swap a diplomat for a son-in-law and you don’t just change the vibe; you change the odds of misunderstanding, escalation, and unforced error. Replace independent scientific advisers with loyalists and you don’t “balance” a conversation; you bias the conclusions toward what the boss already believes. Jam agency leadership with people chosen for proximity and performance and you don’t get “bold disruption”; you get brittle systems that fail under stress.
The personnel trick pairs neatly with a process trick. “Acting” titles have become a multipurpose bypass around the Senate’s advice and consent. Acting this, performing-the-duties-of that—if everyone is acting, then no one is accountable. Add in a push to revive a Schedule F–style reclassification to convert swaths of career roles into at-will positions, and the message to professionals is plain: your tenure depends on loyalty, not law. That chills dissent, silences warnings, and drains the institutional memory that keeps the federal government from repeating its worst mistakes.
If you’re tempted to shrug and say “elections have consequences,” sure. But the Constitution also has consequences. The founders didn’t build a government of vibes; they built one of institutions—messy, slow, and designed to force competence to rise over time. The vetting, the hearings, the career ladders, the advisory panels—those are the scaffolding of a stable government for the people, not just a Beltway formality. Hollow that out, and you don’t just get different policies; you get a different country—one where the state serves a person, not the public.
There’s a reason this has been sold as “draining the swamp” since 2016. It flatters the instinct to blow up anything that looks bureaucratic. But look closely: much of what’s being drained is competence. Once drained, the basin is quickly stocked with loyalists. And once you’ve replaced referees with fans in team jerseys, the home team rewrites the rules.
This is why the Kushner example matters more than the day’s headlines suggest. The Middle East desk at the State Department is not a thought experiment, and the families trapped in the crossfire aren’t extras in someone else’s theater. Diplomacy is a profession, honed over years by people who study maps, languages, histories, and the art of turning the temperature down. Treating it like a family franchise is tacky, sure—but mostly it’s dangerous.
So keep your eye on the method, not just the mayhem. When a loyalist appears in a role that used to demand deep expertise, say so. When an “acting” title lingers, ask why the Senate hasn’t been given its constitutional shot. When advisory boards are purged, don’t let it pass as a staffing footnote—explain what those boards do, who sits on them, and how their absence tilts decisions. When someone waves away criticism with “outsiders bring fresh thinking,” remind them that outsiders can and do serve—after transparent vetting, within the law, and alongside the experts who will still be there after the cameras leave.
We don’t have to accept government by entourage. Call it out in real time. Push back where you can—local hearings, public comments, professional associations, watchdog letters, sunshine requests—and refuse to trust a process that doesn’t value expertise, experience, and the checks and balances our Constitution requires and centuries of practice perfected. You’re watching it live. Don’t look away.Brent McKenzie is a writer and educator based in the United States. He is the creator of Idiots & Charlatans, a watchdog-style website focused on democratic values and climate change. He previously taught in Brussels and has spent the majority of his professional career in educational publishing.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.