Like many of you, I love the old comic strip “Bloom County”, which originally roughly ran from 1980 to 1990. And if I had the ability to include a photo in my column, you could see I have a stuffed Opus the Penguin from that very clever cartoon sitting next to my computer. I loved the wit and honesty Opus embodied and have always kept him close. A quick web search for “Opus the Penguin” will return lots of cute pictures.

My stuffed Opus was not a sedentary creature. During the years I sat nuclear alert as a “finger-on-the-button” guy during the Cold War, I took the Opus with me on alert and perched him atop my launch console. Good old Opus was deep underground at nearly every top-secret launch control center, and when not on alert, he sat on my computer monitor at my work desk, also in a top-secret area.

In later years, during my time teaching political science at the Air Force Academy, he sat on my bookcase at the academy, and during the summer academic breaks of 1997 and 1998, when I served as a staffer on the National Security Council at the White House, Opus came with me and resumed his usual place atop my computer, this time in the White House complex, where I dealt daily with materials having our nation’s highest classification, TS-SCI (top-secret, sensitive compartmented information). True to his character, my stuffed Opus never said a word about what passed before him. He kept his beak shut, largely, I suspect, because he was, and is, an inanimate object.

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I was reminded of Opus by a couple of recent stories in Colorado Politics regarding behavior in Washington D.C. First up was the story about the Trump national security team’s (if we want to call that collection of incompetents a “team”) use of a commercially available phone app, “Signal” to communicate with each other (some apparently even using their personal phones, and not their government-issued secure phones) to discuss the minute-by-minute details of an upcoming attack.

Having been in the national security business for many years, I was, and remain, shocked and stunned by the use of Signal and, of course, the Trump national security advisor’s decision to loop a reporter into the whole thing.

And let’s be very clear. I know war plans. I dealt with war plans for years. Heck, I was an instrument of war planning. So let me say quite clearly, what they texted about was most definitely war plans and was most definitely classified, in spite of the feeble assertions nothing “classified” was in the text chain.

Utter nonsense, and can you imagine if, say, then-President Barack Obama’s team, or then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s people did this exact same thing? Do you really think the Republicans would just sit back calmly and say, “mistakes happen, no big deal?” No, they’d be trying to impeach any Democrat involved. I just hate that type of hypocrisy. I think my Opus does too, but he’s being tight lipped.

Another CoPo article that caught my eye on this topic carries the headline, “Trump wins third consecutive golf championship following Yemen strikes.” For some reason, an unfit, obese elderly man keeps “winning” the tournaments held at the golf course he owns. Such “victories” are about as legitimate as the annual “all-star” hockey game Vladimir Putin plays in every year in Moscow. He usually scores between eight and 11 goals. Right…

But I digress…

I suspect my Opus was also offended by another President Trump action, the imposition of tariffs on a wide range of products and countries. Quite a few CoPo stories have noted this action, an economic policy that had been largely (and properly) tossed in the dustbin of history because such tariffs just don’t work. Our own Great Depression was extended, in the view of most economists, by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. When you put up tariff barriers to free trade, the rest of the world does the same back to you.

And it is increasingly apparent the Trump economic team (see earlier comment on his “teams”) doesn’t really understand what they are doing either. Included in the list of tariff targets is an atoll in the Indian Ocean which houses a vital U.S. military base, Diego Garcia. It’s not clear if the Trump folks expect the U.S. military personnel stationed there to kick in tariff payments.

And the one that really has Opus hot under the collar are the tariffs placed on Heard Island and the McDonald Islands, which are an external territory of Australia. Here’s the thing though: they are among the remotest places on Earth, reachable only by a two-week boat voyage and completely uninhabited. Well, that last part is not quite correct, as Opus would want me to remind you there is a population on those islands: a population of penguins. Yup, those distant islands host populations of various penguins. These birds tend to be a feisty group, but as no human has been there in roughly 10 years, it’s not at all clear what’s going on there. Perhaps they will be allowed to pay their tariffs in mackerel?

From the stunning hypocrisy of the classified text debacle to the placing tariffs on U.S. troops and penguins, it has not been a good couple of weeks for the Trump administration. We are beginning to see the effect of hiring based only on personal loyalty to a cult leader, rather than on the basis of expertise and experience. I’m guessing the likely 20-something kid who came across the spending on a small atoll in the Indian Ocean didn’t realize, in his youth and inexperience, the strategic importance to overall U.S. military strategy of Diego Garcia. But I bet he is loyal to President Trump.

We are now down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, or whatever other metaphor you would like to employ. We are seeing the effects of incompetent leadership with cult-like faithfulness to a dear leader. But though other golfers at Mar-a-Lago may be deliberately missing their putts so a wannabe king can “win,” and though incompetent but zealous DOGE “staffers” pillage their way through the federal government, the problems and fault lines are really starting to show.

With crashing markets and retirement 401K plans losing massive amounts of wealth, the question becomes how much damage will President Trump do before we hit bottom?

Stay tuned.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.