By William Falk, Editor, “The Week”

[ August 8, 2025 edition of “The Week” magazine]:

“It’s a fierce competition, with no winners and only losers.  Which of the unqualified kooks and fawning toadies working for Donald Trump is the most incompetent?

Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel are currently the most visible contenders, thanks to their tragi-comic bungling of the Jeffrey Epstein debacle.  They promised the MAGA base the release of the full “Epstein files,” even though their boss was the sex trafficker’s best buddy for more than 15 years and noted during that time that Jeffrey liked women ‘on the younger side.’ (Ha, ha!)

When Bondi and Patel discovered with cold fear that Trump’s name appeared multiple times in the voluminous records, they announced, ‘Nothing to see here. Case closed!’ Now they’ve saddled the president with a festering scandal that won’t easily be reburied. (*Although JFK’s assassination and the truth has been fairly well buried for over 60 years.)

 

FBI Director Kash Patel.

 

But the self-inflicted Epstein wound is no anomaly.  It’s just the most lurid demonstration of the Trump gang’s pervasive ineptitude.  Pete Hegseth, a Fox News talking head chosen as Defense Secretary for his chiseled jaw and good hair, has blabbed classified information on an unsecured app about an imminent military attack, cut off defensive weapons to Ukraine without the president’s approval, and demanded that top aides and generals take polygraph tests to prove they weren’t telling the press he was unfit for his job. (*Not to mention including the Editor of “The Atlantic” on a Top Secret meeting about war plans.)

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a quack who thinks jet contrails are a Pentagon plot, is aggressively dismantling the country’s vaccination regimen and shutting down scientific research on viruses and cancer, while promoting suntanning, cod liver oil, cane sugar, and measles. (Whooping cough is also on the rise.)

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (rumored to be on the way out.)

The ghoulish senior advisor Stephen Miller does not hide his sadistic glee as he dispatches masked agents to drag away migrant workers from farms, construction sites, meat processing plants and restaurants.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, aka “ICE Barbie,” has shown up at migrant raids and El Salvador prisons while sporting cowboy outfits, tactical gear, false eyelashes, and a $50,000 Rolex (when she isn’t having her purse stolen at D.C. restaurants). After catastrophic floods killed 138 people in Texas, she delayed disaster relief for three days, because everything had to be “approved” by her personally.

And so it goes.

It’s a ship of fools, and we’re all passengers.”