Why Is Trump's Administration So Packed With Losers? They Will Be Loyal

A great many of Trump's picks for government positions are obvious losers. Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Marco Rubio, and so on have all tried and failed dismally to make any kind of impact in their political careers. Many others on Trump's list are such nobodies that no one had heard of them until this moment. Why?

The explanation is quite simple: Trump prefers hiring losers because they have no better option than loyalty.

There Is No Such Thing As Countries

As any map will show you, the world is divided by political borders into spaces called countries. People and things can live in, come from, or go to these places.

But countries are not any more than that.

Firstly and most obviously, countries are merely a social construction. They are collectively produced fictions (like money, or religions) rather than mind-independent objects (like stones). Being fictional does not mean that countries do not matter, but it does mean that they only exist so long as enough people agree to act as if they do.

Secondly and more significantly, countries are places not agents. Places on a map cannot have interests or goals or take actions to achieve them. To think otherwise is to confuse the properties of one kind of thing with another. This category error infects not only general talk, but also much otherwise careful journalism and even academic analysis. For example, the influential Realist school of international relations is founded on the axiom that countries do (or ought to) act only in their national interest. This trades on two category errors: that countries (rather than governments) can act and that they have interests. The result is confusing and unfalsifiable nonsense about buffer zones, access to resources and so forth that is about as helpful for understanding, predicting, and managing conflicts as an astrological map.