The man with the Gong

We've entered the Age of Amateurs

Update: good news! Matt Gaetz is a patriot after all. He has withdrawn his name as nominee for Attorney General. GONG.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/21/matt-gaetz-withdraws-consideration-attorney-general/76480095007/

Do you remember “The Gong Show”? In the late 70s, this was the ancestor to “America’s Got Talent,” but with much less talent and a lot of gong. The whole idea behind it was to see how bad amateur performers could be before the B-list celebrity panel hits the gong, and the performer gets the hook (literally). Sometimes, you’d get a ringer—a good performance—but most were deliberately bizarre, quirky, or just plain bad on purpose. The goal was to make you cringe, and laugh.

Image: ChatGPT 4o, DALL-e

In other areas, like local talent shows, or sixth grade orchestral performances, the goal isn’t to make you laugh, but the result is equally cringeworthy. But with kids who have little experience playing musical instruments, we have plenty of patience (at least parents who have to be there do). In other areas of our lives, we are a bit more picky, but you know, there’s lots of sloppy room to slide.

Take DEI, for instance. For years, the “inclusion” crowd has been yelping about Silicon Valley and its preference for white or Asian, male, workers in engineering and technical positions. Despite big goals for diversity, companies like Google, Facebook, and Intel haven’t been able to make much of a dent in their very male, very white makeup. In 2015, Facebook (now Meta) committed to doubling the number of women and minorities—it failed miserably. Intel threw $300 million at DEI in 2015, then cooked the books to make the numbers seem reasonable. By 2024, the bloom was off the rose, and Google, Meta, and Zoom cut their underperforming DEI hires. That gong show wasn’t funny, and most people didn’t even cringe, because Americans like our smartphones, apps, and chips to work, and we like them cheap.

There’s just no room to hire people based solely on diversity in most industries where performance matters. Unless you’re talking about education, where for years DEI has been the formal goal, superior to performance. That has bred a culture where piercing the equity bubble is tantamount to heresy. But there are other bubbles too, and some are pretty gong-prone.

How about doctors? George Carlin used to joke that somewhere, there’s the world’s worst doctor, and someone has an appointment to see him tomorrow. It would be funny if it wasn’t true—actually it’s funny because it’s true—and we cringe at the truth. It’s not a joke that over 30 percent of Pakistani civilian pilots have fake flying licenses. And airlines who hire these people are putting your lives in the hands of amateurs. I’m sure my friend and co-writer David Thornton takes his flying seriously (he’s a professional jet pilot), and the thought of a faked-up logbook is not just something to cringe at, but to be reported and kept out of the cockpit at all costs.

Yet Boeing spent a decade killing its quality program by a thousand cuts. And the chief whistleblower, John Barnett, was found dead in the midst of giving a deposition in his lawsuit against the company. Investigators said it was a suicide, and found a note, yet Barnett reportedly told a friend “if anything happens to me it's not suicide” before his death. Boeing’s incompetence bubble is super strong, stronger than its airplanes, or its space capsules. About 40 percent of the company’s revenue comes from various government contracts (mostly the U.S. government). Perhaps the bean counters running Boeing, pretending to know what engineers do, need to be gonged.

I’ve come a long way around a tour of amateurs doing professional acts badly to talk about the man with the gong. And of course I mean the executive branch of the government, which has its management overthrown every four to eight years.

Down into the dark cave of amateur-hour employment bubbles, did you know that 100 percent of government-agency spending comes from the government? That bubble is surely the strongest in the country. Between 1.5 and 1.9 percent of total nonfarm workers in America work for Uncle Sam (depending on if you count the USPS—I do). The federal government is the largest single employer in the country, with almost twice the number of U.S. employees as Walmart, the largest private employer. You’re probably right if you think that some nontrivial number of these employees don’t have a clue what they really do, and some should be gonged off the stage.

How many? A hundred thousand? A million? Nobody knows. But Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy say they know. Musk is a professional deleter: “delete, delete, delete!” Ramaswamy is a professional jackass with money. I don’t know how these two, who between them have near-zero knowledge of how government agencies, or the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) work, are going to sniff out the gong-worthy federal employees and yank them out of their jobs. Because to make government more efficient, which is arguably what the Department of Government Efficiency is supposed to do (it itself is not a government agency, but I have no idea how that is going to work, either), they have to cut payroll.

So we’ve got two amateur public policy jerk-faces trying to work the levers of federal spending and employment. What could go wrong? Likely nothing, because they don’t know how to work that machine and none of the levers they will pull, or the knobs they will turn, or the buttons they will push, will do anything.

And this is just a taste of the Gong Show cast that incoming President-elect, the Once and Future POTUS, Donald Trump, has in store for us. And it’s not like they’re hiring structural engineers with faked-up credentials to build a bridge, or quack doctors to heal a body, or Pakistani pilots. Trump is hiring full-on amateurs to run the entire federal government. His only requirement is that he be amused and tickled by those who work for him—until he himself gongs them off the stage.

Now, calm down. There’s a difference between hiring outsiders to come in and give fresh perspective to an organization, and hiring unqualified morons to run it. Everyone knows a story of an aging business owner who brought in the favored son to run the place, and the kid is just an entitled idiot with no semblance of skills to do the job. Sometimes it works because other trusted employees pick up the slack and cover for the heir. Sometimes it kills the company. President John F. Kennedy famously brought in his own brother as Attorney General, and staffed the DOD with “whiz kids.”

Many historians think Robert McNamara was one of the most infamous amateurs ever to run the Department of Defense. His micromanagement and arrogance caused many needless deaths and crimes. Henry Ford originally hired these people because they based their decisions on facts and numbers. But in government, they made a right mess of many things. This is how I think of Elon Musk, who now claims to be Donald Trump’s bestest buddy and close companion. Trump’s “whiz kid” is going to do a lot of damage if he gets a hold of real power.

But at least Musk isn’t an unqualified moron. That’s not true about former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who is definitely unqualified to do anything useful. Matthew Louis Gaetz II is a member of the Florida bar in good standing, and that’s about all he does in good standing. As far as I know, Gaetz never litigated a criminal trial as a prosecutor, and I’m not sure he ever appeared as a criminal defense lawyer (maybe in traffic court?). But I do know that Gaetz was never a judge, and was never a chief prosecutor, district attorney, or attorney general, anywhere.

I might not agree with Merrick Garland’s hacked politics, or his reflexive defense of his boss, Joe Biden, but I do think that Garland is qualified to sit in the chair of Attorney General. Similarly, Biden brought in the former governor of Rhode Island, founder of Point Judith Capital, Gina Raimondo, to run the Commerce Department. A good pick? Meh, but qualified. Xavier Becerra is a terrible HHS secretary. I can’t stand him or his stupid woke politics. But he held the same post as Kamala Harris before she became Vice President, as California’s attorney general, so as bad as Becerra is, he’s not poison.

Jen Psaki, Mike Morrell, and Anthony Blinken, when they weren’t in government positions, subbed in with CNN and CBS News as commentators and on-air contributors. That doesn’t make them media monkeys, but this is how modern people side-hustle themselves into money when they aren’t doing the public servant thing. Not everyone has the skill to market gold sneakers or $100,000 watches to the public to make bank. The Biden administration is filled with some outsiders, donors and political hangabouts. Pete Buttigieg is a bad administrator, and has done zero favors for the Department of Transportation, but at least he served as mayor of a mid-size city. Biden’s crew isn’t A-list, but I can’t say that it’s all Gong Show.

Neither is the incoming Trump slate, but the degree to which Trump has brought in the Gong Show contestants far exceeds anyone in the modern era. RFK Jr. is no whiz kid. He’s a rent-seeking lawyer, nutcase crank, and not a drop of conservative in him. Pete Hegseth has some creds with the military, as does Tulsi Gabbard, but neither of them have the slightest idea how to lead organizations employing tens of thousands—never mind millions—of employees, many of whom are bound by oaths to defend the Constitution with their lives.

The most qualified member of Trump’s crew is Tom Homan, who will be the so-called Deportation Border Czar. Homan has pledged to end the era of sanctuary cities. If anyone can do it, Homan can. He was the deputy executive in charge of deportations under President Barack Obama, and before that, he rose through the ranks of the Border Patrol. He’s no amateur. You may not agree with Homan’s politics, or his policies, but he, like Merrick Garland, is qualified to sit in the chair. You can see Trump’s actual priorities by the people he is bringing in.

Trump wants to make deals with foreign leaders, and to bully, harass, or insult allies, in person, as in by himself. So he brought a toady, Sen. Marco Rubio, in to sit at the Department of State, and to keep those damnable career foreign service people out of Trump’s way. Rubio is an amateur, but that’s the point. If he tries to, you know, actually be the nation’s top diplomat—GONG!

At HHS, Trump wants that organization to catch the flu, as in an organizational virus which will keep domestic issues and embedded bureaucrats, akin to Anthony Fauci, out of his hair, and his limelight. Want to make Trump look stupid on stage, like he did daily in his COVID briefings? Well, here’s the revenge. Now you all look stupid. This is the government equivalent of Jake Paul fighting Mike Tyson: an amateur pretending to be professional by going up against a has-been. Should RFK Jr. decide to actually do something that make Trump look bad—GONG!

Nobody is going to outshine the man with the gong in the White House in the Trump 2.0 era. If the full slate of Trump nominees gets approved by the Senate, and I have no reason to believe that the performative monkeys in the Republican Party won’t do exactly that, then we can look forward to the equivalent of a heart surgeon flying a 747 (you’ve never encountered a God complex until you’ve seen a flying doctor), and every counterfeit, unqualified moron possible running large chunks of the federal government. And the lifers at those agencies are going to say, let it go! Let the shinola hit the fan and watch the show.

But one thing Trump’s crew of amateurs will accomplish: the true ideologues, the chewy, woke, DEI-loving center, of certain agencies, like the Department of Education, the EPA, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Justice, will rise up as one, and in a great fit of pique, resign. The woke swamp, with a single wave of the hand, will be largely emptied. Or maybe they’ll stay, and be the resistance—if they’re not fired first under Schedule F. But Schedule F doesn’t cover everyone, just the policy-makers. The rank-and-file is going to stay put, and in many cases, boy howdy, Mr. Musk will get a lesson in the effectiveness of passive aggressive workplaces.

And I can only look forward with relish to the day when the man with the gong sees the whiz kid getting to big for his britches, and then—GONG. In the age of amateurs, nobody is allowed to become a professional.

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