Word for the Year And Maybe the Next Four Years...

Somebody at work told me to look this up:

Kakistocracy.

It comes from the Greek. Kákistos which means "worst" and then Kratia which covers "rule," "power," essentially government.

It's not a newly coined word: it's been around since 1829. The most apt definition is "government by the worst persons". Not exactly a kleptocracy, which is "government by thieves," but it's close.

It's a situation where the people in power are those you can't even trust to work as janitors in the White House let alone run the West Wing.

It's not so much a question of ideology but a question of competence. Where the people being put in power have ANY clue about what the hell they're doing.

There are reasons why experience in government should be a virtue in electing someone for the Presidency: because the system of government - especially the Executive branch - runs by rules, and those rules are there for a reason. Not out of bureaucratic snobbery or power-grabbing but because previous experience and general ethics teach us those rules work.

So here we are getting a President-Elect in Trump whose entire campaign and transition team are demonstrating utter cluelessness about what to do next (from Salon.com and via the Wall Street Journal):

According to a report on Sunday from The Wall Street Journal, Trump’s victory surprised his own top advisers so much so that the team didn’t prep the president-elect in the day-to-day operations of the West Wing. As a result, Trump now needs a crash course in how to do the presidency...

During their private White House meeting on Thursday, Mr. Obama walked his successor through the duties of running the country, and Mr. Trump seemed surprised by the scope, said people familiar with the meeting. Trump aides were described by those people as unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced at the end of Mr. Obama’s term.

Combine these reports with the previous reports of how Trump failed to grok the intelligence briefings he was getting, and we're getting a guy who hasn't the foggiest clue what being President is all about (hint: it's not about golfing all the time).

Then again, should we be at all surprised that Trump is where he is? He won out in a primary challenge where most of his fellow Republican opponents kept getting facts wrong, had few ideas outside of "tax cuts and deregulate," and couldn't debate their way out of a fight with Trump even when he wasn't at that debate.

The GOP has been demonstrating ever since the tail-end of the Bush the Lesser administration a level of managerial incompetence that should normally shame most political parties into quitting out of common decency and starting anew with a relabeled brand.

Just try to imagine a Trump administration that openly pursues the same leadership model as the administration that mismanaged two wars, crashed an economy by letting banks too big to fail to actually fail, and delayed a response to a natural disaster that killed thousands it shouldn't have.

And Trump is going to be building his Cabinet and Executive officers from the ranks of a political party that can't even pass a no-brainer Farm Bill, that kept fighting over BS issues for headlines instead of focusing on genuine policy initiatives, and was led by arrogant narcissists like Gingrich and Giuliani - both of them likely Cabinet figures - who were never as smart as their press releases claimed.

Here's the terrifying thing: A lot of Americans - even the ones who voted for Trump - know this is coming. It's a train wreck at least two years down the line at best (at worst we're going to get hit with disaster within the first 100 days), and we're already seeing it happen and nobody is going to be able to stop it.

These guys did not win because they were geniuses. They won because they were able to lie and demagogue enough to feed the rage of too many angry White voters.

Here comes the kakistocracy, Angry White Guys. It's exactly what you asked for.