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People who know me know I love the word “jackleg.” When they first heard me use it they thought I had made it up.
Actually, it’s a real word, meaning “someone who is unskilled, untrained, or incompetent in their trade, often operating in an unprofessional or unscrupulous manner. It also describes work or items that are makeshift, temporary, or poorly built.”
I use it most often when I am referring to evangelical ministers who have had no theological education, some no education at all like Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White-Cain, but who speak as if they know what they’re talking about.
They don’t and never will as long as they live in the echo chamber of oversimplifications and manipulative emotionalism rather than engaging in serious theological study in order to learn as much as they can before daring to tell someone else how to live their life.
Jackleg preachers are the equivalent of using grandma’s old fashioned remedies to treat an illness instead of going to a real doctor.
But you don’t find jacklegs only in churches. Politics is filled with them, Donald Trump sitting in the first row among them.
A month or so ago I mentioned the word “kakistocracy” that I had first encountered in the writings of Mary Geddry. It was her description of the Trump administration.
As I noted at the time, it’s a real word, too, derived from the Greek root meaning “government by the worst.” A kakistocratic government is “a state where incompetent or corrupt individuals hold power,”
A kakistocracy, says Geddry, is “government by the worst people, colliding at speed with reality, and somehow still trying to sell the crash as a victory lap. “
That perfectly fits the Trump administration. It’s a kakistocracy that is the inevitable consequence of having a jackleg as president.
This situation would be funny if it weren’t so serious, for the simple reason, as Geddry says, that in practice “a kakistocracy government is one in which the absurd and the dangerous are no longer separate categories; they are the same thing, viewed from different angles.”
That is the state of our nation at the moment. We have a kakistocracy under a jackleg president who is saying and doing things that are both absurd and dangerous.
The Iranian war of choice is the prime example.
Assuming it will end soon, the best Trump can hope for is that we will be back to where things were before he started the war that led to the Iranians closing the Strait of Hormuz, shutting off a third of the world’s oil supply.
Trump the jackleg had already made the situation worse when he chose tear up the treaty the Obama administration along with several allies had spent months negotiating that was the kind of deal Trump now insists Iran must agree to before the war can end.
In other words, under Trump’s leadership we are in a war that when it ends our best hope will be that we will be back to status quo. Talk about incompetence.
The same situation is true with how he has handled the economy. He wasted no time showing his childish jealousy of Joe Biden by undoing an economy that was just beginning to shift in to high gear and was considered the envy of the world.
Trump’s jackleg solution to a problem that didn’t exist? Create a trade war with the world by imposing tariffs. Once again, his best hope now is to find a way to get the economy as close to where it was before he decided in his jackleg level of reasoning to destroy it.
The incompetence of jacklegs is nothing short of amazing. When it comes to Trump, it’s not as if no one could see it coming.
Before he was elected the first time Trump had bankrupted his Atlantic City casino six times, and then avoided personal bankruptcy by shifting all the risk to bondholders and stockholders.
Students at Trump university encountered his incompetence and his corruption when the place went belly-up. The same thing happened to the donors to his phony NY charity.
His latest jackleg deal was to offer people a ground floor chance to get a gold Trump cell phone and Trump mobile service by putting down a hundred dollar deposit.
What a deal, only, oops, as it turns out, Trump now says there might not ever be a Trump gold phone or phone service, but, as expected, the contract doesn’t allow customers (should I say “suckers”) to get their money back.
It is no wonder that people in other nations shake their heads in disbelief at what we have done to ourselves. I feel the same way.
The only consolation is that things are getting so bad that people’s eyes are beginning to open sooner than they would to just how incompetent Trump is.
No sensible argument can be made at this point in Trump’s presidency that he’s good at his job. He is fact terrible at his job.
There are numerous ways to describe how terrible he actually is, but for me it comes down to this:
Donald Trump is America’s first jackleg-in-chief president, and that is why we are living in a kakistocracy that will end only when he is gone.
linnposts.com 
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