I totally agree, but for those who voted for him, watched this idiot gut policies, devastate them and their sector in a dozen different ways, and leave many of them hanging on or totally bankrupt, I am just trying to figure out how they can justify continuing their support.  They have choices.  They can do that, but they also have to deal with the consequences.  It’s not just the commodities market destruction…..it’s the immigration policies that leave farms bereft of the staff they need to operate. And its the gutting of agencies like USDA and the cadre of professional agronomists and plant researchers and technical experts whose expertise and commitment are vital to our economy but rarely appreciated in good times and systematically attacked at the present.  You can get details via Michael Lewis and Vanity Fair from his series of articles on the transition in 2017.

www.vanityfair.com/…

“In many cases [the new appointees] demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy, let alone deep roots in agriculture,” wrote Hopkinson. “Some of those appointees appear to lack the credentials, such as a college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries.”  What these people had in common, she pointed out, was loyalty to Donald Trump.

Nine months after they’d arrived a man I’d been told was the best informed of all the department’s career employees about the haphazard transition couldn’t tell me how many of these people were still roaming the halls. And what fingerprints they left were characteristically bizarre. They sent certified letters to several senior career civil servants, for instance, telling them they were being reassigned—from jobs they were good at to jobs they knew little about. “Too close to the Obama administration is what people are saying,” noted one U.S.D.A. career staffer. They instructed the staff to stop using the phrase “climate change.” They removed the inspection reports on businesses that abused animals—roadside circuses, puppy mills, research labs—from the department’s Web site. When reporters from National Geographic contacted the U.S.D.A. to ask what was going on with animal-abuse issues, “they told us all of this information was public, except now you had to FOIA it,” said Rachael Bale. “We asked for the files, and they sent us 1,700 completely blacked-out pages.”

Let us pray he doesn’t drag every sector of our economy into a death spiral and/or get us into some nasty global war through stupidity or accident.

You want another chance to freak the f…k out, get a cup of coffee and read Politico’s recent lengthy piece on the early days of the transition in the National Security Council….truly horrifying….people whose only concern was eradicating the “deep state,” and who felt policies and procedures as far as security goes are for idiots.

politi.co/…

In a particularly telling example, one former NSC staffer recalled informing a Trump political appointee that the administration should re-think a proposed executive order because it could undercut efforts to protect human rights. “I said, ‘This could make the president look really bad,’” the former staffer told POLITICO. The political appointee replied: “The president doesn’t care about the things you care about, and the sooner that you know about it, the better.”