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In the West, our governments have generally been so good at so many things for so long that we’ve come to assume that’s the natural way. It isn’t. It’s hard work to keep the world going, even in its flawed fashion.

We’ve come to take competence for granted. When they promise things, we’ve come to assume they know what they’re talking about, because why else would they be saying these things? Even if this guy’s not so great, at least he’s a change. The electricity works, our passports are accepted, the stock market does its thing. How bad can he be?

Pretty bad, as it turns out.

One of Donald Trump’s first acts as president was to sign an executive order banning travellers from a handful of Muslim-majority countries from the United States. It was meant to be hurtful; it wasn’t meant to be struck down as unconstitutional by every judge who looked at it. Trump had to try three times before his administration produced an order that survived a Supreme Court ruling, and that was on a 5-4 vote.

Photo by Evan Vucci/AP

Trump has separated families at the border as a deliberate method of discouraging would-be immigrants and refugee claimants from coming to America. Beyond that, he’s done it in such a half-assed way that the U.S. government might not be able to put some of the children back together with their parents — ever. It’s not to downplay the sheer raw evil of the underlying policy to point out that its application has also been profoundly incompetent.

Britain’s Conservatives are tearing themselves apart over Brexit, a tectonic change in the U.K.’s place in the world for which they seem unable to construct a plan. The Labour party is just as divided but at least doesn’t have to govern.