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Donald Trump made a career of selling himself as a smart cookie. The trouble is his own party bought it.

Trump’s extreme emphasis on loyalty, and his outsized belief in his own ability to sniff out losers, has left the Republican Party stocked primarily with the sort of people who are willing to believe Trump’s fabrications. His Cabinet is full of rubes or, in cases like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, people so willing to play one for the cameras that it makes no difference.

Take Pam Bondi (Please! — DJT). The outgoing attorney general never tried too hard to cover up Donald Trump’s presence in the Epstein files, seemingly believing the president when he swore that he had nothing to hide. The sloppy release of Epstein docs, complete with baffling redactions that could be circumvented with easy keyboard shortcuts, showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the ruse the president was pulling. Her overflowing rage during a February congressional hearing came across like a planted mark getting genuinely angry when the ball isn’t under cup No. 2.

And while we’re talking Floridians, let’s pay a visit to Bondi’s successor in the Sunshine State. Florida A.G. James Uthmeier and Gov. Ron DeSantis have launched a crusade against the NFL’s vague efforts to diversify its coaching ranks. Uthmeier has called the league’s Rooney Rule — a requirement that teams interview minority candidates for open coaching and front office positions — a violation of Florida’s law barring racial considerations in hiring.

To be sure, the Rooney Rule has helped promote a more diverse league, especially under a 2022 amendment that required at least one minority coach on each team’s staff. But the rule wasn’t born out of the kindness of the league’s ancient billionaire owner class. Like many corporate diversity initiatives, the rule works as a way to avoid litigation. It only came into existence after megalawyers Johnnie Cochran and Cyrus Mehri made noise about a potential lawsuit against the league’s overwhelmingly white leadership. But it’s no surprise that DeSantis and Uthmeier bought the press release spin. Everywhere you look in the post-Trump GOP, there’s another mark.

What unifies the party of Trump, outside of slavish devotion to the big man, is buying the neoconservative canard on just about everything. The “spreading democracy” myth, used to publicly justify wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is now parroted uncritically by a Pentagon that changes its justification for Iran attacks by the day. Unpopular attacks on LGBTQ rights are apparently still animated by the family-values fig leaf that past Republicans used to cover their belief that gay people were icky.

If these losers weren’t facing off against the entirely ineffectual Democrats, this baked-in suckerdom would be laughable. As it stands, America is in the grip of the kind of people who bought swampy South Florida real estate after it got expensive. It would be a great joke, if it weren’t being played on the rest of us.

What do you think? How did we end up in a country run entirely by saps? Is there a fence-painting scheme that will get us out of it? Sound off in the comments.

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