Incompetence as a defense???

Long-time Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank gets my vote for the column headline of the week:

"Trump talks like Joseph Stalin, but he governs like Homer Simpson."

And then Milbank writes:
"After two years of investigation, Mueller's findings about Team Trump can be roughly summarized as:  Too stupid to conspire.   Too incompetent to obstruct. . . .I'd submit only one addendum:   Too dumb to govern."

But is ignorance and incompetence truly a defense?    Milbank goes on to list some examples:

"Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration at least 63 times so far, an 'extraordinary record of legal defeat,' the Post reported last week.

"Trump routinely proposes illegal acts to top aides . . . and they ignore him.  Though Trump claimed Monday that 'nobody disobeys my orders,' The Post's Aaron Blake assembled a list of 15 instances of aides doing just that.

"His advisers quit and are fired at a record pace, leaving vacancies, placeholders and semi-functioning agencies. . . .

"He spews falsehoods by the thousand and announces policies that don't exist. . . .

"He eschews briefing books and devises policy with a toddler's attention span . . . .

"And the man who claimed he had 'one of the best memories in the world' said more than three dozen times in response to Mueller's [written] questions that he couldn't recall the answer.'

And Milbank concludes with this:
"Does incompetence fit the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors?  That's up to the House.  I, for one, celebrate Trump's clumsiness.  His fondness for authoritarianism and his disdain for the free press and the rule of law would be much more worrisome if he were effective.  Trump, with his 'enemy of the people' shtick, might talk like Joseph Stalin, but -- fortunately -- he governs more like Homer Simpson."

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That's a clever, amusing bit of snark from Milbank.   But stop and think about what he writes.    What a low bar of expectations we have come to accept in the era of this Trump presidency.

The best we can hope for is . . .  incompetence?

No, we are better than that.  Trumpism is no longer amusing.   What is being done to undermine our democratic institutions is alarming.   Attention must be paid.   Congressional action must be demanded by the people.

Ralph