Clueless, Chaotic and Contemptuous

A crash course in how the Trump administration avoids answers and accountability

Images of Trump cabinet officials, courtesy of News 18

If you’ve spent any time listening to Trump officials at congressional hearings or in federal courtrooms, you’ve likely experienced disbelief, frustration and outrage. And that’s quite intentional, because these are the tools of the nation’s top gaslighters.

The Trump administration delivers its bullshit in three nasty bins, and yesterday’s Senate and court hearings help illuminate this.

First, they act—or at least pretend to act—completely clueless about the law, the facts and their duties. This is partly because most of them, such as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Health and Human Service Secretary RFK Jr., are largely unqualified for their positions. And those that have any competence, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, find it very convenient to plead total ignorance of what’s happening right under their noses.

Second, they preside over completely chaotic circumstances. That also is in part a function of their incompetence, but it’s also often by design. The more things fall apart or feel out of control, the more likely the public or the system will throw up its hands in surrender to the chaos. A good example of this is how Customs Border Patrol and ICE continue to remove migrants and put them on planes, in apparent contravention of direct judicial orders, forcing civil rights and immigration lawyers, as well as federal judges, to scramble to keep up.

Third, when cluelessness and chaos don’t serve them and they have to actually answer or be accountable, they respond with contempt. Trump officials, being largely picked for their media savvy, know how to turn aside questions and go on the attack, rather than answer in good faith.

Whenever anyone from the Trump administration, including 47 himself, answers questions, keep the three Cs in mind. You’ll find that in most cases, White House officials are falling back on or deploying these devices, acting clueless, chaotic, or contemptuous toward the questioner. It’s usually a strong tell that they have something to hide and that we really do need to know more.

Let’s look at some prime examples of the three Cs from yesterday’s hearings.

Clueless

Secretary Noem may have won for the most memorable moment of yesterday’s Senate hearings after she was asked a straightforward question: What is habeas corpus?

That’s of course the time-honored right in a democratic society for anyone being held by the government to demand a hearing to address the legality of their detention or arrest. It’s the thing that separates us from autocracies where people are disappeared into jails and no one has any way to even challenge the action.

You’d think that the DHS Secretary would know about habeas corpus. After all, it’s her department that’s being sued everywhere by migrants filing habeas petitions. Habeas corpus been the subject of major recent Supreme Court decisions, and her pal Stephen Miller made headlines by saying the Trump White House was considering suspending it.

But here was her truly clueless answer:

Yeah, no. Now, whether she was actually clueless or whether she was just trying clumsily to come back with a total reframe remains in doubt. After all, she noted that “President Lincoln used it,” which is true. He also sought congressional approval once that body was back in session. Then Noem seemed to remember her hearing prep talking points.

“I support habeas corpus,” she later stated. Then the twist: “I also recognize that the president of the United States has the authority under the Constitution to decide if it should be suspended or not.”

Bzzz, also wrong. Article I of the Constitution gives the power to suspend habeas corpus solely to Congress.

Noem wasn’t alone in her ignorance. In response to questioning about cuts to disease research funding, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. claimed he was unaware that his department had cut funding for ALS, the horrific neurodegenerative disease, and would need to go back and ask his staff about it. In fact, the first time he claimed to have heard about the cuts was when Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) read them to him at the hearing.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who should be smart and experienced enough to know better, professed that he was unaware of one of the biggest scandals to hit the Trump administration. It involves the issuance and pumping of $TRUMP meme coins that inure to the benefit of the Trumps and their associates. Donald Trump offered to dine with the 200 top holders of his coin, causing the price to skyrocket and inviting unknown foreign parties to purchase influence with the White House. Rubio remarkably claimed this was the “first I’ve heard of it.”

Here was the exchange between Rubio and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), as reported by Mediaite.

“Let me ask you about the dinner that’s happening this Thursday night. The president has offered access to him to the 200 top purchasers of his meme coin. Reports are that maybe about half or more of those individuals who will be meeting with him, many in a VIP reception, are foreigners. Do you have a list of those foreign individuals who’ll be meeting with the president?” Murphy began.

“I don’t. I don’t even know there was a dinner on Thursday night, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to,” Rubio replied.

“So you don’t know whether any of the foreign individuals who are going to be meeting with the president this Thursday night, for instance, are on our list of sanctioned individuals or whether any of those individuals have connections to, let’s say, terrorist organizations abroad?” Murphy pressed.

“Well, I think if they had terrorist links, the Department of Homeland Security probably would not have allowed them into the country. But again, I don’t even know there is a dinner on Thursday. You’re asking me about something I don’t — I don’t know about,” Rubio replied.

The fact that the Secretary of State claims not to even have heard about Trump’s direct interaction with foreign buyers of his coins, along with the dinner at which he is gathering them all together, should alarm everyone. It has made headlines for some time, and it defies credulity that he was not briefed or informed about it.

Along these same lines, where officials who ought to be in the know claim not to be, federal judges have grappled with cases where the lawyers sent in to argue cases aren’t given any critical information by their clients, or have claimed the information is off-limits and they can’t answer. The latter occurred just yesterday as a lawyer for the government claimed during a hastily called hearing over more unlawfully ordered migrant flights that the government could not even say to which country one of the migrants was sent.

Apparently, that is now a classified “state secret.”

Chaotic

Even Republican leaders are starting (finally?) to understand that chaos at the top levels of government can have serious detrimental consequences for their own constituents.

Take Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), whose state has been ravaged by tornados and storms. In a normal world with a normal functioning federal government, FEMA would be on the ground with assistance right away. But it’s been days, and they are still wholly absent. Sen. Hawley used his time to ask Secretary Noem what she would do about pending disaster relief requests that have gone unanswered by the White House.

“The state has pending three requests for major disaster declarations from earlier storms we’ve lost over a dozen people. Well, actually, if you count the folks we lost just on Friday, we’ve lost almost 20 people now in major storms just in the last two months in Missouri,” Hawley said. “Will you commit to helping, for those three major disaster declaration requests that are pending, will you expedite those, Secretary Noem, and get those in front of the president, get those approved? We are desperate for the assistance in Missouri.”

Secretary Noem agreed to get the requests before Trump as soon as possible and to expedite individual requests from Missouri. But it’s quite something that Hawley even had to use his time to beg her to do her job.

Another person who isn’t doing his job is RFK Jr. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) wanted him to know that his department had eliminated a team that addresses lead poisoning in children. “The entire childhood lead poisoning branch has been fired. In the words of a Milwaukee mom: it really sends the message that you don’t matter,” she declared.

Six Milwaukee schools have been shut down over lead in the water, but RFK Jr. claimed that the CDC had been on the site. That wasn’t true, according to Milwaukee officials, and in any event the CDC office there had been shut down. In fact, according to local reporting,

In early April, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) notified Milwaukee Public Schools that they would not be able to receive on-site help from lead experts because the Trump administration shut down the lead poisoning branch and fired the experts.

And yet RFK Jr. falsely insisted at the hearing that the CDC was on the job and that the federal government had “a team in Milwaukee” to help with the crisis. Not true, said other officials, who note that the CDC’s experts have not been rehired.

“None have been rehired from our lead program or our division,” Dr. Erik Svendsen, who was director of the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, which oversaw the childhood lead program, told CNN after the hearing.

Top officials not even knowing about emergency FEMA requests or whether their own teams were on the ground or had even been rehired is emblematic of the chaos caused by official incompetence.

But there is also intentional chaos, as we’ve witnessed with the administration’s efforts to remove as many migrants as possible. This forced civil rights and immigration attorneys to bring the latest illegal actions to the courts’ attention.

That happened again yesterday, as lawyers once again had to scramble to stop flights bearing migrants to third countries in defiance of direct court orders.

Earlier this month, I wrote about how the Trump administration is forcing courts to play whack-a-flight by having unauthorized migrant transports suddenly pop up. The administration even sought to fly migrant detainees from Asia to the country of Libya, where none of them is from and which is known for its dangerous migrant camps and widespread human rights abuses. U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy stopped those flights and ordered the government to halt future ones, but the government didn’t listen.

Lawyers brought to Judge Murphy’s attention that another flight bearing Asian migrants was bound for South Sudan:

The government was brazen (stupid?) enough to note the date of May 19, 2025—two days ago, well after Judge Murphy’s order to not remove any more migrants to third countries without obeying his notice and due process requirements.

The chaos surrounding these flights, and the constant need to stay on top of bad faith actors, is a distinct feature of the Trump administration. In a normal world, a federal judge’s order would be communicated from the top down to each and every official who might be impacted by it. The goal would be to work hard to avoid violating the court order. But here, it seems apparent that the goal is something else entirely: to find ways to flout it.

Contempt

When cluelessness and chaos aren’t sufficient to meet a moment under questioning, Trump officials turn contemptuous. It reminds me of the old lawyer saying:

When you don’t have the law, pound the facts.

When you don’t have the facts, pound the law.

When you don’t have the facts or the law, pound the table.

Secretary Noem’s go-to, shared by her counterpart in the Transportation Department, Secretary Sean Duffy, is to show utter contempt for the prior administration, even when the question has nothing to do with it. We saw this when Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked Noem a very straightforward question: Given that FEMA was losing a fifth of its workforce due to cuts, what was her plan to replace them?

Noem “responded” that FEMA had failed the American people under Joe Biden.

When Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) asked RFK Jr., “Whose decision was it to withhold childcare and development block grant funding,” he chose to “respond” by showing contempt for Sen. Murray’s decades of service in Congress.

“You presided over the destruction of the health of the American people,” he retorted, without basis. “Our people are now the sickest people in the world because you have not done your job.”

Perhaps the most shocking full-MAGA conversion came from Secretary of State Rubio, who used his time to malign Kilmar Abrego García as a “gang banger” and “human trafficker” (all without basis) and to suggest that Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) shared a margarita with him—a claim already debunked as a set-up by El Salvadoran officials. When his former Senate colleagues grew aghast at his performative contempt for the rule of law, saying they regretted their votes to confirm him, Rubio shot back, “Your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job.”

And in federal court yesterday, Judge Brian Murphy has now had to warn the government that anyone who knew of his order not to render migrants to third countries without adequate due process but defied it anyway could face criminal sanctions. That even includes the pilots of the planes involved.

Minding the 3Cs

Knowing how Trump officials often leverage the three Cs—being clueless, chaotic and contemptuous—is key to staying on top of them. I would recommend that anyone, whether in Congress or on the bench, who is asking questions of Trump officials preface their remarks by noting they aren’t here to allow officials to fall back on or deploy any of these excuses or tricks.

The next time you’re listening to Trump or his minions address reporters, appear before Congress or argue in federal court, keep the three Cs in mind. “Ah, there Trump goes again, saying he hasn’t heard about it!” “Ding ding, there’s RFK Jr. with the chaos move on our nation’s health.” And the most disruptive of them all: “That’s the government acting with contempt toward the reporter, the senator, even the judge, going on the attack to avoid answering the question.”

The ability to recognize these tricks provides critical context for the listener to not succumb to the gaslighting. After all, the goal of the gaslighter is to overturn the listener’s sense of reality and make them question their own sanity. As soon as you understand that the gaslighting has begun and what form it has taken, you can stay better focused and on message, listening for the true substance of an answer, undistracted by smokescreens and diversions.

Of course, knowing how they try to avoid accountability isn’t the same thing as actually getting to the accountability part. But at a minimum, it will help clear the air, and hopefully your brain, of any lingering gaslit fumes and keep us all better focused on what matters.