I started out today wanting to write a blog post about this news article about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and how the Trump administration’s dragging of their feet and insistence that his return is out of their hands is both an example of their own use of weaponized incompetence as a political tactic, and another connection between Trumpism and Patriarchal Misogyny, because I assumed it was common knowledge and commonly agreed to that weaponized incompetence was well understood to be a tactic employed by men to shift arduous and difficult labor onto the women in their lives. As I searched for articles to share to provide further reading on this connection, I realized that the vast majority of these conversations have been happening on social media and people’s personal blogs, and that without any academic credentials to use a research library, the free resources available to me to talk about this connection are very thin.
So in the process of wanting to write that article about how Trumpism combines Elon Musk’s mantra of “move fast and break stuff” with a form of weaponized incompetence focused on avoiding accountability for prioritizing the appearance of accomplishing goals over responsibility for the consequences of acting so recklessly, it seems like I am going to have to write first about weaponized incompetence and misogyny. Firstly, this is very much not my original idea. It blew up on social media about 2 years ago, and you can still find components of reddit threads and social media posts people have made about this topic if you search for it, but any academic takes on it have yet to seep down from sources constrained to academic libraries to the general public.
I think part of this is because weaponized incompetence is not just a tool men use to make women do work for them, but is actually a deep-seeded tool of social identity construction that includes race, sexuality, gender and class, and might be so deeply imbedded for some people that calling it “weaponized” just feels confusing and misleading. What labor is worth doing, who should do it, and how they should be compensated for it, are questions of critical social analysis that are essential to feminism, socialism, anti-racist activism, anarchism, queer theory, environmentalism…really just most strains of leftism or radical thought. It is almost a given that any form of conservatism is going to make moves to essentialize certain labor divisions as natural or ordained by god, and that this is kind of a question at the heart of all culture war issues. So maybe one reason discussions about “weaponized incompetence,” and the inability of certain groups to complete certain kinds of labor for themselves hasn’t really become topics of common discussion is because that feels like a conversation that can only happen after one side acknowledges that, in a fair system, that labor would be done by everyone. In other words, maybe the idea of “weaponized incompetence” in areas like domestic labor could only become something people could talk about as possible once it became commonly accepted that it is possible for domestic situations to exist where the labor of cleaning, cooking and maintaining the household could be equally shared and not just dumped on one person because of their expected subservient role in the relationship. It is only possible to label something as failure based upon incompetence when someone even bothers to try in the first place…to demonstrate…that, to accomplish…the task…they…just…cannot.
When the offending party just reacts with hostility to being asked to do the work in the first place, and insists that it is other people’s natural responsibility to do the task, then we can’t really call that weaponized incompetence, just something like misogyny, when it is based on the expectations of men to have free access to the labor of women, or racism or classism, or some other form of discriminatory identity expectation. But this is exactly why I think it is important to call out Trumpism specifically for employing the tool of weaponized incompetence, especially within the same kind of patterns that we it used by patriarchal misogynists that are trying to hide the extent of their misogynistic ideologies.
“Well sure Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported accidentally, but now he is out of the US so there is nothing the US can do about it!”
***what happened to Abrego Garcia was not deportation. Deportation is the act of expelling a foreigner from a country on grounds of illegal immigration status or for having committed a crime. Abrego Garcia was disappeared from the United States into an incredibly hostile environment from which he had received official guarantee that he would not be subjected to. I really wish US media would stop using the word deportation to describe governmental criminal acts***
This is the same kind of “whoopsies!” logic that has followed most of the actions of D.O.D.G.E, the mishandling of classified documents (all the way back from Trumps first administration through to the Signal app scandal), his handling of tariffs and the world reaction to them, and has become a hallmark of Trumpism past and present. What makes it obviously shallow and transparently weaponized incompetence is how frequently Trump himself will contradict the official statements of his advisors and representatives on social media, making it abundantly clear that he responds first with incompetence to see what the reaction will be, and then steps forward to insist the act was intentional and to take credit for it, after he has tested the water and thinks there is something to gain from his base by appearing to be deliberate in his cruelty instead of just absent-mindedly incompetent. He does it over and over again and it is clearly a weapon in his playbook that he uses personally within his own life, and has mastered using as a political tool. He is paving the way for patriarchal misogynists across the globe to confidently act first, on minimal information, and push accountability off onto others as often as possible when incompetence is the necessary defense against culpability.
I don’t know if this behavior is new to the fascist authoritarianism of today, but it is an essential part of the “chaos offensive” that has allowed Trump to expertly dodge any consequence for his law breaking, cruelty, and disaster diplomacy. Long term, he is paving the way for future Jeffery Epsteins, Weinsteins, P-Diddys, to delay and prevent being called to task for their crimes, and the authoritarian right around the world is watching and taking notes.