Trump is already Making America Gape Again. His administration is going to be just as incompetent as it was last time — maybe more so.

I had hoped to spend the week writing about a topic other than politics. But suddenly, it was 2017 all over again.

My phone lit up with alerts that sounded like headlines from the Onion.

For director of national intelligence, Donald Trump had tapped Tulsi Gabbard, whose parroting of Russian propaganda was so reckless that Mitt Romney called it “treasonous.”

To run the Pentagon, Trump had tapped Pete Hegseth, a Fox News weekend host with no major managerial experience who just five days earlier said “we should not have women in combat roles” because men are “more capable.”

For secretary of health and human services, he selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has claimed antidepressants cause school shootings, chemicals cause people to become transgender and vaccines cause autism.

And to be attorney general he chose Matt Gaetz, just two days before the House Ethics Committee was set to release its findings on what The Post has called “his dealings with a then-17-year-old girl.” Trump named his personal defense lawyer to be the No. 2 Justice Department official.

President Joe Biden, meeting with Trump on Wednesday, said he was “looking forward to having a smooth transition.”

But Trump doesn’t do smooth. He is going to Make America Gape Again — and, after just one week as president-elect, he has already begun producing one car wreck after another.

His ambassador to Israel is going to be former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who is on record saying: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There is no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities. They’re neighborhoods. They’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”

His choice to be secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio (Florida), is relatively conventional — but this set off a campaign to get Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, appointed to Rubio’s Senate seat. Beating this drum has been, among others, Elon Musk and, bizarrely, Musk’s mother.

Musk, after his super-PAC spent some $200 million getting Trump elected, is now requiring payback: He has been Trump’s sidekick: sitting in on a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, joining Trump on a visit to the House Republican caucus, hanging around at Mar-a-Lago and entertaining Trump’s granddaughter. Trump appointed Musk to run the “Department of Government Efficiency,” which is a nonexistent government department apparently created to form the acronym “DOGE,” which is also the name of Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency.

Musk has already announced a goal that would, if implemented, cut all government functions except defense, Social Security and Medicare by about 75 percent. His DOGE co-director, Vivek Ramaswamy, has floated a plan that would eliminate veterans’ health care.

Those who were wondering what the second Trump term would look like didn’t have long to wait. We’re already back to the chaos, caprice and overreach. Any hope that he might moderate — in truth, this was never more than a fantasy — has already been dashed.

But there is some good news in the way Trump has produced mayhem and confusion right from the start. One of the greatest concerns about Trump’s second term was that he would be more competent this time around. But we can already see that there is no learning curve for Trump. His administration is going to be just as incompetent as it was last time — maybe more so.

Trump is making his decisions from “a makeshift situation room at Mar-a-Lago, surrounded by TV monitors,” Axios reports. One Trump associate told the Associated Press the chaotic process is like “Game of Thrones.”

But if his personnel process looks like “Game of Thrones,” his presidency will more likely resemble Fox News: constant vitriol, cultural warfare and perpetual sense of crisis.

Gabbard, Huckabee and “border czar” Tom Homan — in addition to Hegseth — have all been on Fox’s payroll. As Media Matters’s Matt Gertz reported, many of the others are also Fox fixtures. Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Florida), Trump’s choice for national security adviser, has made at least 569 weekday Fox News appearances over the past seven years. Stephen Miller, incoming deputy chief of staff, appeared at least 374 times; Gaetz at least 347; Environmental Protection Agency administrator-designate Lee Zeldin at least 307; Rubio at least 263. There were at least 180 weekday appearances by John Ratcliffe, tapped to run the CIA; 135 appearances by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to be homeland security secretary; and 108 by Rep. Elise Stefanik (New York), chosen to be U.N. ambassador.

The new Trump is looking a lot like the old Trump, whose administration had at least 20 former Fox News employees. “I’ve lost, like, four guests,” Fox host Greg Gutfeld lamented on air. “I think the Gutfeld show is going to be staffing the entire White House.”

“They are assembling a constellation of stars, which I happen to know intimately, and I’ve never been this excited before,” said Jesse Watters, another Fox News host who hasn’t (yet) joined the incoming administration.

It is exciting, in the sense that absolutely anything could happen at any moment, depending on the last guy who spoke to Trump.

To run the Justice Department, Trump’s transition team had been vetting possible candidates since well before the election — but Trump apparently offered the job to Gaetz on a whim after talking with him aboard Trump’s airplane earlier in the day. It’s not clear whether Trump even knew (as Gaetz surely did) that the Ethics Committee was about to issue a “highly damaging” report about Gaetz, Punchbowl News reported not long after Trump announced Gaetz as his choice. Gaetz then resigned from Congress in what seemed to be an attempt to keep the report from coming out. The move caught just about everybody by surprise — not least House Speaker Mike Johnson, who told reporters he “begged and pleaded” with Trump not to take anybody else from his thin House majority to serve in the administration.

Installing a Fox News host atop the world’s most powerful military was likewise done with little apparent forethought. The Post reported that the Trump transition hadn’t even vetted Hegseth until days before the announcement. That snap vetting might have missed the detail that Hegseth cheated on his second wife with a Fox News producer to whom he is now married.

News of the Gabbard pick came out in an appropriately bizarre fashion. Trump leaked word that he had chosen the avid conspiracy theorist to Roger Stone, also an avid conspiracy theorist, who just happened at that moment to be doing an interview with Alex Jones, the granddaddy of all conspiracy theorists. Stone read the announcement live on Jones’s Infowars — and it turned out to be a last triumph for Jones. The next day, the aforementioned Onion won an auction for control of Infowars, which Jones had to sell to pay some $1.5 billion in damages for his claims that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax.

Several of Gabbard’s conspiracy theorist ideas have been worthy of Jones. She sided with Syria and Russia against the U.S. government’s finding that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched chemical weapons attacks. She amplified the false Russian claim that the United States funded bioweapons labs in Ukraine. She also defended Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” in Ukraine. Hillary Clinton had suggested that the Russians were “grooming” Gabbard.

And now Gabbard will be atop the U.S. intelligence community. Knowing that, what ally would share sensitive information with us? Even before the Gabbard appointment, former British prime minister Boris Johnson, a Trump ally, warned that some Trump advisers have a “weird homoerotic fascination” with Putin.

In fairness, some of the more qualified people have said they don’t want to be considered for Trump administration jobs. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) reportedly declined to be considered for CIA director and defense secretary, for example, while Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) didn’t want to be considered for attorney general.

Trump’s win was not exactly a landslide: The Post’s Philip Bump and Lenny Bronner project that he will have beaten Vice President Kamala Harris by about one percentage point — the closest popular vote margin since 2000.

Yet Trump is already signaling wild power grabs. His team has reportedly drafted an executive order creating a “warrior board” to recommend a mass purge of top military officers and is preparing to fire all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing them with more malleable generals. Kennedy has proposed that 600 people at the National Institutes of Health be fired on the first day of the Trump administration.

Trump himself is already making noises about serving beyond the constitutionally allowed two terms, telling House Republicans: “I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say he’s so good we got to figure something else out.” Trump also demanded that senators shelve their constitutional advise-and-consent powers and instead “agree to Recess Appointments” for his nominees.

Trump allies in Congress are pledging full compliance. “His mission, and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it. Every single word,” Rep. Troy E. Nehls (R-Texas) told reporters. “If Donald Trump says jump three feet high and scratch your head, we all jump three feet and scratch our heads.”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) said the next Senate majority leader, John Thune (R-South Dakota), has “no choice” but to push Trump’s agenda because “President Trump and JD Vance are going to be running the Senate.”

And the man sowing all this chaos? He is as erratic as he has ever been. On social media this week, Trump has attacked former aide Anthony Scaramucci (“a major loser”) and “Crazy Liz Chaney” (sic), while continuing his personal enrichment schemes (“Get a copy of my newest book, SAVE AMERICA today!”), reposting a demonic image of Harris along with a claim that he won a “historic landslide,” and expressing whatever else pops into his disordered mind (“The NFL should get rid of the ridiculous new Kickoff Rule!”).

It’s all deeply unsettling, yet at the same time it offers a kernel of hope: The man is just too unstable to be competent.

Opinion by Dana Milbank

Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His latest book, "Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theories and Dunces who Burned Down the House" (Little, Brown) is out September 24.