From Vanity Fair:
n February 2016, Donald Trump the candidate had no idea he was required by law to put a transition team in place to initiate preparations to run the federal government. Months later, after he had clinched the nomination, he still didn’t get that the people he’d begrudgingly allowed Chris Christie to hire for the job had to be paid, and tried to shutter the whole operation because he thought transition workers were “stealing” his money. In November, after he had won the election, President-Elect Slow-on-the-Uptake fired everyone who’d been manning the transition team, threw their work in the trash, and decided, per Michael Lewis, that he was going to handle things “more or less by himself,” a bone-chilling determination that he made right around the time it came out that he thought Barack Obama’s West Wing staff came with the White House. In the words of his own campaign chairman-turned-senior adviser, Trump didn’t “know anything,” and worse, he didn’t “give a shit.” And apparently, not much has changed since then, only now, he’s like, y‘know, the actual president.
The Washington Post reports that, two weeks after Trump shut down the government over his ridiculous border wall, the administration—only then!—“recognized . . . the breadth of the potential impact” of the president’s actions. In other words, the people in charge of the most powerful nation in the world evidently had no idea that the government actually does stuff, and that when it runs out of money, that stuff ceases to function:
That Trump, whose mental impairment is made obvious every time he opens his mouth or sends out a tweet, wouldn’t understand the impact of a government shutdown is entirely wholly unsurprising. Still, you might think that someone in his administration—perhaps the people who just got a sweet raise?—would have been aware of the consequences ahead of time. But you’d think wrong!