Plausible dumb fuckery is a term I am coining right now and I need you to hold onto it because it is going to explain everything in this article. It is not stupidity. Stupidity is real and it exists and it is its own problem. Plausible dumb fuckery is the deliberate performance of not-knowing by people who know exactly what they are doing. It is Doug Wilson calling slavery “mutually harmonious” and then looking at his Piers Morgan panelists like they are the unreasonable ones. It is Laura Loomer calling herself pro-white nationalist and then objecting to being called a racist. It is the Supreme Court ruling that you have to prove a racist intended to discriminate, in a country where racists have never once sent a memo.
It is Mike Johnson inventing an award for Donald Trump and then going on Newsmax to announce that Republicans are the grownups. It is Melania Trump absorbing a decade of her husband describing her as a business transaction and finding her outrage specifically for a late night widow joke. These people are not confused. They are performing confusion because the performance works, and it works because the rest of us keep arguing about whether they are really that dumb instead of holding them accountable for what they did on purpose. I am done with the argument. This is the field guide.
Mike Johnson is a grown ass man. He has a law degree. He is the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, third in the line of presidential succession, constitutionally responsible for the body that is supposed to check executive power. This week he went on Newsmax and told America they need to “keep the grownups in charge, and that’s the Republicans.” This is the same week his caucus could not move a procedural rule out of committee. The House was frozen. Senate Republicans were publicly furious at their House counterparts. The White House was fed up. Punchbowl News reported they “look like amateurs.” Mike Johnson said grownups. Mike Johnson said Republicans. In the same sentence. With his whole chest.
Earlier this month I wrote a piece called Trump’s Green-Ribbon Presidency about Johnson and the America First Award, which is simultaneously the most perfectly constructed piece of plausible dumb fuckery in modern political history and the most meaningless award in the entire recorded history of human achievement. We are talking about an honor so empty that if you handed it to literally anyone other than Donald Trump, they would immediately understand they had been insulted. Hand it to a neighbor, a coworker, your uncle who thinks he is very important — they look at it, look at you, and say “Did you make this?” and then put it face down in a junk drawer and never mention it again. Trump accepted it like it was the Nobel Prize, the Medal of Honor, and an Olympic gold medal he definitely earned and definitely did not cheat to get, all melted into one beautiful golden eagle. Johnson did this while TSA agents were waiting for paychecks during a government shutdown. Speaker. Of. The. House.
And Johnson is not even the most embarrassing participant in the flattery competition. At a July White House meeting, five visiting African heads of state decided to see how far they could push it. Two endorsed Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Senegal’s president informed Trump that the concentration and precision required by golf “also make for a great leader.” This is a man who has been documented cheating at golf by a Times reporter who followed him around the course. The Senegalese president owns a smartphone. He chose to say it anyway. That is what the price of access costs when the man setting the price has the emotional architecture of a seven-year-old at a birthday party who is upset that not every gift has his name on it.
Now let me explain what kind of man is calling the rest of us children. Mike Johnson helped write Louisiana’s covenant marriage law as a 28-year-old law student — legislation that strips couples of no-fault divorce and allows separation only in cases of abuse, abandonment, felony, or adultery — and then went on Good Morning America with his wife Kelly to promote it as the right choice for everybody. Not just them. Everybody. He was so committed to restricting other people’s exits from bad situations that he and Kelly became the literal poster couple for the movement. Then, separately, he installed an app called Covenant Eyes on his devices and his then-17-year-old son Jack’s devices, which scans all browsing activity and sends weekly reports to a designated accountability partner. His accountability partner was his teenage son. His teenage son’s accountability partner was his dad. Johnson announced this proudly at a church event and reported that Jack had “got a clean slate.” His wife Kelly’s counseling practice operates under documents that compare homosexuality to bestiality and incest. This is MAGA Mike. A man so committed to monitoring everyone else’s private behavior that his accountability partner is a child. He did not lose the right to call his caucus children. He surrendered it to a 17-year-old with access to his search history.
Irving Janis, whose work on groupthink is foundational to my doctoral research on preference falsification in political behavior, identified exactly what we are watching in Trump’s orbit: when the cost of dissent rises high enough, honest counsel disappears and competitive flattery fills the vacuum. Nobody in Johnson’s world has any incentive to tell Trump the truth about anything. So nobody does. Johnson is not spineless. He did the math and decided the Speaker’s gavel was worth whatever he had to hand over to keep it. That is a choice made by a grown adult who knows exactly what he is doing. That is plausible dumb fuckery as a career strategy.
MAGA calls it Trump Derangement Syndrome. TDS. As in: the real problem is not the 34 felony convictions, the two impeachments, the $83 million defamation judgment, the $500 million fraud penalty, the sexual assault civil liability finding, the Access Hollywood tape, or the more than twenty women who have accused this man of some form of sexual misconduct. The real problem is that you noticed. You are the deranged one. You, for noticing.
How dare you get upset that a 34-time convicted felon is running the country. I guess it is weird to think that a man accused of sexual assault by over twenty women maybe should not have the nuclear codes. Obviously it makes perfect sense that an innocent man would refuse to release the Epstein files. It is completely normal behavior to laugh at Paul Pelosi after he gets his skull cracked open with a hammer in his own home. Totally reasonable to have your sycophants invent awards for you because the real ones keep not showing up. And it is absolutely unhinged to get offended by any of this, which is why when Rob and Michele Reiner were stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home, Trump posted that Reiner died “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” A couple got murdered and the President used their deaths to diagnose their politics. Totally normal.
Three months after that, former FBI Director Robert Mueller died at 81. Decorated Marine. Bronze Star. Purple Heart. Decades of public service. Trump posted within minutes: “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” And Republicans want to know why Democrats are so upset. This is the man whose supporters accuse us of heated rhetoric. This is the man whose wife demanded a comedian be fired for a widow joke. This is the behavior that MAGA wants you to argue is not that bad, and the moment you explain why it is that bad, they perform confusion about your tone and call it derangement.
TDS is not a diagnosis. It is a dare. It is a dare to say the true thing out loud, with the understanding that the moment you do, they will perform confusion about why you are so upset. Every Democrat who responds to it with “well that is not actually a clinical term” has already lost. You accepted the frame. You agreed to play defense on a field designed to make you look foolish for standing on it. Stop taking the dare. Stop explaining yourself. Stop defending yourself against a charge that everyone in the room knows is bullshit, including the people filing it.
This morning the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Callais v. Louisiana and I am going to write about it at length separately because what happened today deserves more than a paragraph. But I cannot write this piece without naming it because it is plausible dumb fuckery operating at the highest institutional level in the country. In a 6-3 party-line decision, six Republican-appointed justices gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — sixty years of civil rights protection — without explicitly striking it down. Justice Alito wrote that VRA plaintiffs can only succeed when circumstances give rise to “a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” Justice Kagan said the ruling “eviscerate[s] the law.” What it means in plain English is that you now have to prove a racist meant to be racist, in a country where legislators have never once written “we are drawing this map to dilute Black voting power” in the actual bill, and where legislative privilege routinely blocks access to the private communications that would reveal exactly what the intentions were. Clarence Thomas wrote separately that the ruling should “largely put an end” to a system he has always opposed. My god. Even the fucking judges are children. The same move in robes: perform confusion about what the law says, rule the way you intended to rule from the beginning, and dare anyone to prove you meant it.
Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense. He has sexual assault allegations against him, a $50,000 confidentiality agreement with a woman who said he assaulted her, and a documented history of conduct that would have disqualified any other human being from a mid-level security clearance, let alone command of three million military personnel. He got the job because he performed loyalty on Fox News until the man who rewards loyalty above all other human qualities decided he was the right pick. And his pastor — the spiritual leader of the network Hegseth belongs to, whose school his children attend, whose writings the Pentagon confirmed Hegseth “very much appreciates” — is Doug Wilson, a man who wrote in 1996 that Southern slavery was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” who told the AP that women’s suffrage was “a bad idea,” who advocates recriminalizing homosexuality, and who calls himself a paleo-Confederate.
This week Wilson appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored and got methodically dismantled by Tim Miller of The Bulwark and Wajahat Ali of The New York Times simultaneously — a gay man and a Muslim man, which is not the demographic Wilson wrote his slavery pamphlet expecting to be held accountable by. Miller refused to call him pastor. When Wilson protested that he had been a pastor for nearly fifty years, Miller said: “You have to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, probably, if you want to be a real pastor.” Ali then delivered a point-by-point accounting of Wilson’s published record that left him nowhere to stand. His response to being taken apart on international television was a joke about Jesus not being a socialist because he could feed people. That is not a rebuttal. That is a man retreating to the intellectual equivalent of a bumper sticker. Plausible dumb fuckery: perform confusion about why anyone would object to what you clearly wrote, crack a joke, and pray the camera moves.
Melania Trump wants Jimmy Kimmel fired. Kimmel made one joke — during a mock Correspondents’ Dinner sketch that aired two days before the real event ended in an actual shooting — in which he said she had “a glow like an expectant widow.” One line. Melania called it “hateful and violent” and demanded ABC take action. Trump posted that Kimmel should be “immediately fired by Disney and ABC.” This is the second time they have mobilized the presidency against Kimmel’s job. The first was in September 2025, when FCC Chair Brendan Carr told a podcaster “we can do this the easy way or the hard way” and Disney suspended Kimmel for six days. Now hold something in your head. This is the same Donald Trump who on Howard Stern’s show described getting Melania “for the right price” on a billboard. The same man who put her on the phone with Stern in 1999 so Stern could make explicit comments about her body while Trump sat there and did not defend her. The same man who admitted to groping her in public. The same man who said on tape that fame lets you grab women by the genitals without waiting. Melania has issued no statement about any of that. No interviews. No demands. No accountability from the man she married for anything he has ever said about her, about women, about murder victims, or about the dead. But Jimmy Kimmel called her an expectant widow and she found her voice. Melania Trump does not get to discover her dignity over a late night joke. She is performing outrage she does not feel on behalf of a man who has never once extended to her the basic dignity she is now demanding from ABC. That is plausible dumb fuckery with a Birkin bag.
I have written at length — in I Watched Megyn Kelly’s White Grievance Show So You Don’t Have to, in Rank Maintenance in Real Time, and in This Equity Shit is a Total Bummer — about what I call the rank of whiteness: the idea that whiteness is not a culture or an ethnicity but a hierarchical position that has to be actively maintained because it was never natural to begin with. I am not rebuilding that whole framework here. What I will say is that every exhibit in this article is the same move in different clothes. Laura Loomer publicly called herself pro-white nationalist, referred to Black Democratic officials as “DEI Shaniquas,” said a Fani Willis event smelled like “fried chicken and marijuana,” called Ilhan Omar a “black dog,” and then when banned from PayPal complained that tech companies were falsely accusing her of being a racist. She named herself. The accusation was not false.
She filed it. And then she retreated to the position that she was not what she called herself. That is the motte-and-bailey fallacy: deploy the weapon, deny the weapon exists, dare anyone to reconcile the two things. This woman — blocked from an official White House role not once but twice — has become the de facto personnel director of the federal government, getting officials fired through what she calls being “Loomered.” A self-described pro-white nationalist with no official title is vetting federal employees. I wrote recently about Candace Owens and how Owens did not just fail to stop people like Loomer — she built the permission structure that made Loomer comfortable. Every time Owens told white conservatives their movement was not racist, she was providing the cover. Loomer used that cover and then called Owens a nappy-headed Black bitch and immediately insisted she was not racist. Owens built the room. Loomer just said out loud what everyone in it was already thinking. The grievance never stops because it was never about what they said it was about. Every working class voter recruited into de…
