The president of the United States is incompetent — and that's good for democracy

There’s a strain of thought that Republicans in Congress will stick with Donald Trump despite the heartburn, because he’s helping to finally enact the privatized trickle-down objectivist America of their dreams.

The problem with that logic is that Trump isn’t doing that. 

Set aside the fact that Trump couldn’t explain conservative philosophy if you promised him three scoops of ice cream and retroactive unconditional love as a child. Ignore that Trump exhibits absolutely no interest in or aptitude for learning the policies behind the ideology that supposedly got him elected.

The biggest impediment to the creation of a country where guns are cheaper than birth control and Blackwater runs our elementary schools is that Trump is simply incompetent. And progressives had better hope he stays that way. 

Republicans are once again gearing up to repeal Obamacare. And this time it could work.

They’re banking on the country being too distracted by James Comey bombshells to flood the phone lines and fill the town halls. They need our collective failure to notice the secret meetings — the “group of guys in a back room somewhere” — that are bringing a bill dangerously close to passage in the Senate.

But they also need another ingredient: They need the president to act like a competent leader. And so far, that just hasn’t happened for them. 

If Trump understood the branches of government, the nominations process, or how a bill becomes a law, Republicans might have already succeeded in taking health care away from 24 million Americans, enacting tax reform to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the working class, or banning Muslims from entering the U.S.

But progressive values have been pulled from the fire time and time again by the sheer ineptitude of the Trump White House. 

If Trump helps hand the GOP yet another loss on health care, we may see their alliance finally crumble.

It’s becoming harder to ignore the fact that there aren’t any Republican leaders standing up to assure the public that the Russia investigation will yield nothing and the president has their full confidence. Expecting them to stay on board while impeachment calls mount is asking a lot.

For an expense of political capital like that, one would expect something in return. So far, all Trump seems capable of delivering is embarrassing self-owns.

We’d better get ready to help him hand them another one. The president is incompetent — and that might just save the republic from the GOP.