The Church of Merit

For nearly a decade Americans have been treated to the same sermon. The country, we were assured, had become hopelessly corrupted by Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Promotions supposedly went to the undeserving. Excellence had been sacrificed on the altar of identity politics. Government no longer rewarded competence, only ideology.

The cure, naturally, was Donald Trump.

He and his disciples promised something bordering on divine intervention. The adults would return. The best people would take over. Every office in government would be occupied by brilliant professionals chosen solely because they were the most capable individuals available. They even found the perfect word to sanctify the movement: meritocracy.

It was a magnificent slogan. Unfortunately, slogans have an irritating tendency to collide with reality.

Reality noticed that cabinet appointments increasingly resembled the casting call for a cable news panel. Reality noticed career experts being escorted out the door while television personalities, political loyalists, influencers, and ideological celebrities wandered in carrying resumes that looked suspiciously like fan mail. Reality noticed entire federal agencies being hollowed out in the name of efficiency, only to discover that eliminating the people who know how things work is a curious way to improve how things work.

Then reality became downright impolite.

Food safety failures multiplied. Disease surveillance stumbled. Weather forecasting suffered. Cybersecurity was weakened. Manufacturing failed to produce the renaissance that had been promised. Energy costs refused to read the campaign literature explaining that they were supposed to be dramatically lower by now. Even the deficit, supposedly destined for extinction under the stewardship of financial geniuses, continued to swell with all the enthusiasm of a government that had misplaced its calculator.

Yet through every disappointment the sermon never changed.

Meritocracy.

Meritocracy.

Meritocracy.

One begins to suspect the word functions less as an explanation than as an incantation. If repeated often enough, perhaps reality itself will become embarrassed and quietly alter the facts.

Meanwhile, the President remains wonderfully consistent in demonstrating what has become the central operating principle of this administration: every public event, no matter how solemn or celebratory, is ultimately about Donald Trump.

The World Cup trophy presentation became another cameo appearance. Military announcements become opportunities to revisit the 2020 election. A speech about national security somehow detours into conspiracies involving foreign governments, voting machines, and whatever theory happened to survive the previous news cycle. Even international crises cannot resist being transformed into supporting actors in the endless production titled The Persecution of Donald Trump.

At this point the only thing more reliable than inflation is the certainty that every conversation eventually arrives back in November of 2020.

There is something strangely revealing about that obsession. Truly confident leaders spend their time persuading people about the future. Insecure leaders prosecute the past because they cannot tolerate the verdict history already delivered. Every grievance becomes permanent. Every defeat becomes evidence of conspiracy. Every contradiction becomes somebody else's fault.

The irony is difficult to ignore. The movement that declared competence would replace ideology has become almost entirely ideological. Loyalty has eclipsed expertise. Television charisma outranks technical knowledge. Personal devotion has become the primary qualification for public office, while genuine professionals are regarded with suspicion because they possess the dangerous habit of disagreeing with political mythology.

Apparently the shortest path to promotion is no longer mastering your profession. It is mastering the phrase, "Yes, Mr. President."

That is not meritocracy. It is court politics dressed in business casual.

History has seen this performance before. Kings surrounded themselves with courtiers who assured them every decision was brilliant. Emperors preferred flattering fools to uncomfortable experts. The results were almost always entertaining for historians and catastrophic for everyone else.

America was promised a government run by the nation's finest minds. Instead it often resembles a reality television reunion moderated by algorithmic outrage, where expertise is treated as elitism, loyalty masquerades as competence, and every failure is explained by the people who were fired six months earlier.

Perhaps that is the greatest joke of all.

The administration declared war on DEI because it supposedly rewarded characteristics unrelated to ability. Yet what replaced it rewards something even less connected to competence: personal fealty to a single man whose greatest qualification, in his own estimation, is never having been wrong.

That is not a meritocracy.

It is a monarchy without the honesty to call itself one.