In President Trump's cabinet of kakistocrats, it's the scoundrels and fools who often get the attention. There's Ben Carson and his magic dining set, the Blue Angels dropping hundreds of thousands in taxpayer cash on first class and private air travel, and Rick Perry suggesting we subsidize coal. There's also Ryan Zinke, a Blue Angel himself, who's looking at selling off around the edges of every national monument you can think of. But the serious ones—the Adults in the Room—don't feature as often.

Take, for instance, General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, whom Trump definitely didn't tap for Defense Secretary based on his nickname. Mattis is qualified and apparently tempers some of the president's worst instincts, but it is difficult to fully escape the gravitational pull of Trump's scatterbrained incompetence.

Reuters reported this week that after two days of speculation, China confirmed that North Korea's Kim Jong-un had traveled to the country to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Considering Mattis' boss has recently agreed to meet Kim to talk denuclearization on the Korean peninsula, and all that was a major focus of the Xi-Kim summit, you'd think the U.S. would be abreast of developments.

Here's how Reuters updated their story:

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UPDATE: Defense Secretary Mattis says he does not know if North Korea's Kim Jong Un went to China, says 'kind of looked like he did' https://t.co/VWyjTjl9np — Reuters Politics (@ReutersPolitics) March 27, 2018

I guess it looks like it! said someone with as much access to the most sensitive intelligence as pretty much any other American alive. Somehow, you'd expect Mattis to be a little more with it. Maybe he knows more than he's letting on. Maybe this is a way to deflect questions from Reuters, so that the Defense Secretary isn't forced to weigh in on what the meeting means, and thereby get out in front of his boss.

(Not that it matters: even if he follows Trump's lead, the Mad Dog could be up the creek if Fox & Friends says something different the next morning.)

Or maybe the Pentagon chief is a little distracted.

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After all, President Business Deals failed to secure adequate funding for The Big, Beautiful Wall in the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill he just signed. (Trump signaled he'd sign the bill, then tweeted that he might not after Fox & Friends criticized it, then agreed to sign it but said he'd never sign something like this again.) As an artful dealer, Trump knows you've just got to find the money elsewhere—like, say, the Pentagon budget, according to The Washington Post:

Trump has told advisers that he was spurned in a large spending bill last week when lawmakers appropriated only $1.6 billion for the border wall. He has suggested to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and congressional leaders that the Pentagon could fund the sprawling project, citing a “national security” risk...

In another interaction with senior aides last week, Trump noted that the Defense Department was getting so much ­money as part of the spending bill that the Pentagon could surely afford the border wall, two White House officials said. The Pentagon received about $700 billion in the spending package, which Trump repeatedly lauded as “historic.”...“Build WALL through M!” Trump recently wrote on Twitter. He retweeted those words Tuesday, noting that “our Military is again rich.” Two advisers said “M” stood for “military.”

And now, a statement from the President of the United States: "Build WALL through M!" Good Lord.

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As you may have guessed, this is not how any of this works:



But the military is not likely to fund the wall, according to White House and Defense Department officials. The Pentagon has plenty of money, but reprogramming it for a wall would require votes in Congress that the president does not seem to have. Taking money from the 2018 budget for the wall would require an act of Congress, a senior Pentagon official said. To find the money in the 2019 defense budget, Trump would have to submit a budget amendment that would require 60 votes in the Senate, the official said.

Democrats in Congress would probably chafe at military spending going to the construction of a border wall, and military officials may also blanch, White House advisers said. Defense hawks in the Republican ranks would balk at taking money now dedicated to the Pentagon for aircraft, weapons and improvements to the armed forces’ readiness and instead steering it toward construction of the wall.

It's almost like electing someone who has no idea how government works has its drawbacks. And here we might remind everyone that throughout the campaign, Trump said, over and over, that Mexico would pay for The Big, Beautiful Wall. His (completely fabricated) cost estimate ranged from $12 billion to significantly less. Now the tab is not just $25 billion or more in taxpayer money, but it's $25 billion in taxpayer money that Congress allocated for something else. And not just anything else, but the military, which Republicans genuinely believe can never be funded enough.

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The sad irony is that Trump has stumbled on a genuine revelation for a Republican president: Man, we're spending a lot on the military. Maybe we should use some of that elsewhere. Funneling $25 billion from the defense budget to another program would actually be great policy, if properly enacted by Congress.

The nation's highest legislative body added $61 billion to the Pentagon's budget in the latest spending bill that Trump so reluctantly signed, bringing the department's funding level to $700 billion a year. NPR spelled out what that really means:

That $61 billion increase matches or even surpasses Russia's entire military budget each year. It's more than the Trump administration originally requested. It rivals two big spending surges during President George W. Bush's administration, in 2003 and 2008, which went to fund the Iraq War.

Even before this latest hike, the U.S. was spending more on defense than the next seven countries combined—five of which are allies. This is nuts, especially considering the new money will in part go to buy more F-35 fighter jets, one of the great boondoggles in recent history. That $25 billion would go to much better use elsewhere in federal discretionary spending—like, say, education. It does not need to fund The Wall, which, despite the president's constant claims to the contrary, will not stop the flow of illegal drugs across our southern border.

All that's moot, however, since a Republican Congress will never reallocate money from defense to social programs that might benefit United States citizens who do not own stock in defense contractors. It's also moot because the president can't unilaterally move the money, even if he seems to think he can unilaterally do anything. He's the CEO of America Incorporated, after all. That's not how any of this works—just like the defense secretary wandering into knowledge of what the nuclear-armed North Korean strongman is up to isn't exactly how this is supposed to work. Everything, we can safely say, is fine.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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