The wheels are flying off the wagon

Today, for regular or occasional readers of this column, and for those of you tuning in for the first time, I only have only one request. Before reading any further, please put your partisanship on hold.

Forget about politics for the moment and consider shocking cases of mismanagement we saw last week alone from the Trump White House between Oct. 11 and Oct. 18. The facts do not lie.

First, President Trump himself named Katie Zacharia the new White House press secretary. She gave one disastrous 15-minute press briefing. She lasted all of five days. Trump has no one to blame but himself.

Unlike other potential candidates, during the two months since former press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced she was stepping down, Zacharia was never interviewed or vetted for the job. She called herself a lawyer , which she’s not. She flunked her bar exam . She also had no prior journalism experience, other than occasional appearances on Fox News. For Trump, that was enough to give her the job — reportedly over the objections of chief of staff Susie Wiles. One major self-inflicted embarrassment.

Second, reportedly over the objections of top staffers, Trump announced his support for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to publicly televise the firing squad execution of 2009 Fort Hood shooter and former U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan. It would be, he wrote on Truth Social , “a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan.” It would also, Trump did not add, put the United States in the company of Iran and Afghanistan, the only other countries which carried out public executions in 2025.

The response to Trump’s announcement was immediate and fierce. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress condemned the plan. Eighty percent of Americans expressed their opposition.

The archbishop who oversees the Catholic Church’s pastoral services to Catholics in the U.S. military urged Catholics not to take part in the firing squad . Vice President JD Vance said he wouldn’t watch it.

A few days later, stung by the backlash, Trump cancelled the livestream, but not before handing himself a third self-inflicted wound. On Sept. 18, in an elaborate Oval Office ceremony, he had signed into law the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, imposing new sanctions and tariffs on Russia for its continued war against Ukraine. Trump hailed the act, which passed the House in a lopsided, bipartisan 262-159 vote , as a posthumous tribute to Graham, his No. 1 supporter in the Senate.

Yet on Oct. 16, two days before the new sanctions were to take effect, Trump signed an executive order taking all teeth out of them, making a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin for Russia to sell diesel fuel to the U.S.

Again, the backlash was furious. Republican senators accused Trump of betraying them and Graham. Critics pointed out that Trump was providing Putin with funding to continue his war against Ukraine — a war, remember, Trump promised to end on Day One. Moreover, the first installment of Trump’s Putin deal would only provide Americans with less than half a day of average diesel consumption. All three installments in the Trump-Putin agreement would provide Americans with less than two weeks of fuel . It was a rotten deal and another big embarrassment.

Fourth, and perhaps most bizarrely, hours after posting video of a mentally ill man climbing into a tiger enclosure in an English zoo and getting mauled to death, Trump released an AI-generated video of himself wrestling with a tiger and, of course, tackling it into submission.

The victim’s British family accused Trump of cruelty by publicly releasing video of their son’s gruesome death, while Americans were left scratching their head over what message Trump was trying to send by posting fake videos.

Now, I remind you: These are only shocking actions taken by Trump between Oct. 11 and Oct. 18. This isn’t about his waging a pointless, ongoing war with Iran, trying to kick reporters whose stories he doesn’t like out of the White House, tearing down the East Wing of the White House, shutting down the Kennedy Center, and running illegal, self-promotional television ads paid for by taxpayers.

Again, putting any partisanship aside, you must admit: Trump is out of control. If any CEO ran his company like this, he’d be fired before he could open his golden parachute.