Josh Marshall:

One thought I keep returning to: if there were a functioning federal government we’d be seeing regular press conferences updating the public on on-going arrests, health status of the injured, progress of the investigation. As far as I can tell there hasn’t been a single one. Nothing from DOJ, FBI, Capitol Police, the Pentagon. Normally you might expect such information to be channeled through press conferences at the White House. But, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s not clear or perhaps too clear which side the White House is on.

It’s not like we’ve had much in the way of a functioning federal government for the past four years, of course. But now that most of the cabinet has resigned and gone home, political hacks/Trump loyalists are still in charge of most federal agencies, and Trump himself has stopped even going through the motions of being POTUS, which was all he ever did, we’re pretty much just drifting at this point. No one is really in charge of anything in Washington.

You may have missed this — on November 6, while we were distracted, Beijing moved to completely wipe out the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. There were mass raids and arrests. A lot of people will now disappear. Washington, of course, said nothing. One wonders what might have been if we’d had a functioning State Department in recent years, never mind a functioning federal government. Trump was always just faking being tough on China; he never really was. And Mike Pompeo has been more tuned in to domestic politics than anything going on beyond our shores.

Also, one suspects Beijing chose to move during our transitionless transition knowing there would be no response whatsoever from the U.S. Yesterday the State Department posted a tepid joint statement (with Australia, Canada, and the UK) opposing the crackdown, but that’s it in the way of a response from the U.S. And the joint statement doesn’t have Mike Pompeo’s name on it anywhere. It’s possible some assistant to an assistant released it, since no one else was doing anything.

We’ll be very lucky if China is the only foreign power to take advantage of our vulnerable state in the next ten days. And given the lack of cooperation with the transition from the Department of Defense, it may take the Biden Administration longer than usual to get up to speed on national security.

Again, though, we can ask if anyone has really been in charge of much of anything these past four years. Trump is less of a leader than a bullying and abusive head of household. Instead of doing their jobs, family members — people who had to report to him — learned that what they had to do to survive was not piss him off. This is one of the factors that hindered our pandemic response, I’m sure. For example, as I wrote in March, one of the several reasons we fell so far behind in testing is that the FDA sat on its hands and did not give independent labs permission to get to work. This would have been a routine thing to do in previous administrations. It appears Trump Administration officials have been afraid to breathe without  permission from Dear Leader. They didn’t dare even exercise their own authority.

Here’s a prescient column by Michael Gerson from February 2017, the very beginning of the fiasco:

In early January, House Speaker Paul Ryan met on the issue of tax reform with a delegation from the president-elect. Attending were future chief strategist and senior counselor Stephen K. Bannon, future chief of staff Reince Priebus, future senior adviser Jared Kushner, future counselor Kellyanne Conway and future senior policy adviser Stephen Miller. As the meeting began, Ryan pointedly asked, “Who’s in charge?”

Silence. …

… Trump has run a family business but never a large organization. Nor has he seen such an organization as an employee. “Trump,” says another former official, “is ill-suited to appreciate the importance of a coherent chain of command and decision-making process. On the contrary, his instincts run instead toward multiple mini power centers, which rewards competing aggressively for Trump’s favor.”

And while personnel came and went, that pattern didn’t change. This might not have been a total disaster if the person at the head, Trump, knew what he was doing and followed a consistent plan. But Trump is both ignorant and mercurial, and he doesn’t do plans. Schemes and scams, sure, but not not long-term, comprehensive planning. That’s way over his head. So, not only were there no consistent directions or cohesive policies coming from the White House, all the heads of agencies and departments were kept tied up in knots, afraid to act on their own in fear that any action would run afoul of whatever mood Trump was in at the moment.

That’s one reason I haven’t been critical of Joe Biden’s cabinet picks, by the way. Although I’ve seen a lot of grumbling on the Left about people not being progressive enough, what we’re going to need at the beginning is just plain old experience and competence. A lot of the agencies and offices and departments of the federal government are going to have to be rebuilt to make them functional again before anything else much gets done.

There is still a lot of investigating to do to determine why the many law enforcement and security agencies in and around Washington DC so utterly failed to protect the Capitol on Wednesday. I don’t blame the Capitol cops as much as I blame people higher up the security hierarchy who simply did not act to send reinforcents. Whether that was by design or simply because they didn’t want to piss off Daddy, I do not know. But it’s clear that something, probably a lot of somethings, just weren’t working as they were designed to work.

David Ignatius wrote in late December,