Toll Games: How to Break Transit and Blame Everyone Else

The Four-Step Guide to Weaponized Incompetence: How to Fail Your Way to Absolute Power

Feb 22, 2025

📅 2025.02.20-21

A Cognitive Dissonance for Dumbies [sic for **ahem** trademark reasons] Field Manual from the Institute of Advanced Chaos Studies

Cognitive Dissonance Ain’t a Bug—It a Feature

🎉 Congratulations! You've discovered the ultimate political cheat code: Weaponized Incompetence™.

You’d think catastrophic failure would hurt your career. Heh.
You’d think breaking everything you touch would be a liability. Hee hehheh.
You’d think turning governance into a dumpster fire would have consequences. Hahaaahaa. Ha.

That’s so 2015.

Maybe here today, failure is the strategy. The more confused, exhausted, and distracted the public is, the easier it becomes to rewrite reality. The only thing you need? A plan for failing upward.

Luckily for you, we’ve obtained a step-by-step field manual from the world’s leading experts in strategic sabotage.

Behold.

(And YES—the faux Time cover (faux, for now…) was actually posted by an official White House account shortly after DFT’s little comment below. The chart on the other hand? Yeah, that one’s mine. That’s what I’m adding to the discussion.)1

📌

A satirical flowchart showing the cycle of weaponized incompetence, starting with a vague policy drop, leading to agency confusion, service breakdowns, media chaos, a partial retreat, and then total reality distortion. The graphic uses vintage instruction-manual aesthetics with glitch effects, warning signs, and red alerts symbolizing collapse. — *A leak from the Institute of Advanced Chaos Studies: The official government playbook for breaking things on purpose, blaming everyone else, and pretending you fixed it.*

How to Fail Your Way to Absolute Power

Step 1: The Policy Bomb

Drop something vague and terrifying into the bureaucratic pool. Watch the ripples of panic spread.
💣 Bonus points if nobody can tell whether you’re threatening democracy or just bad at writing memos.

📝 Example: The Great Federal Funding Freeze of 2025
What they said: "Temporary pause to review spending."
What it did: Froze everything from cancer research to school lunches.
What they meant: ¯\(ツ)/¯

Step 2: The Chaos Cascade

Let confusion reign. When people ask for clarification, give three different answers to the same question.
📺 Enjoy as the media scrambles to report on something that was never meant to be understood in the first place.

🎭 Fun Fact: This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

Step 3: The Strategic Retreat

Backpedal just enough to make it look like you’re listening. But keep the most damaging parts.
🎩 Pro Tip: The retreat isn’t actually a retreat. It’s just repositioning for the next attack.

Step 4: The Gaslighting Grand Finale

Now comes the real art: Convincing everyone that:

The policy was crystal clear from the start.
Any confusion was YOUR fault.
Actually, this is all perfectly legal.
In fact, it’s the most legal thing ever.

👀 Why are you still talking about this?

Weaponized Incompetence in Action: The Congestion Pricing Grift

So, why did Trump kill NYC’s congestion pricing? Was it about policy? Fairness? Common sense?

Lol. No.

(You!)

This was a masterclass in strategic sabotage.

Step 1 - The Policy Bomb: Drop vague threats about federal intervention, delivered via Truth Social at 3 AM naturally.

Step 2 - The Chaos Cascade: Multiple agencies scramble, lawyers lawyer, and everyone gets three different answers about whether this is even legal. (Spoiler: It probably isn't!)

Step 3 - The Strategic Retreat: Watch as various officials trip over themselves to 'clarify' while actually making everything murkier.

Step 4 - The Gaslighting Grand Finale: Declare victory, pretend this was always the plan, and watch as cable news treats 'LONG LIVE THE KING!' as normal political discourse.

But Why?

✅ The personal revenge angle. Trump has been beefing with NYC for decades. The city rejected him, prosecuted him, and refused to name a single block after him (the nerve!). Now, he gets to punish Democratic leadership and pretend he's still "the king of New York."

✅ Follow the money. Who actually wins here? Not commuters. Not workers. But real estate developers, parking garages, and the luxury class who want to keep Manhattan car-dependent and traffic-clogged. Somebody in that crowd wanted a favor. Trump sho delivered. He did.

✅ Turn it into a culture war. The modern right will fight for gas stoves, plastic straws, and incandescent light bulbs. Now, they’re fighting for the right to sit in hours of gridlock to own the libs. MAGA doesn’t care that most workers use public transit. The playbook is simple:
🚗 “Cars = freedom.”
🛑 “Tolls = woke tyranny.” [←- note to self: this would make a great YankoBoop]

✅ Break the system so people lose faith in governance. Kill congestion pricing AFTER it’s implemented. Let the courts and agencies fight it out. Turn something that was working into a political mess. Then declare victory.

🎩 Bonus round: New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy thanked Trump for this. Because nothing fuels blue-state dysfunction like making Democratic leaders sabotage each other.

The end result? Transit funding is wrecked. Public confidence is eroded. And Trump gets a viral moment, pretending to save "the people" from a policy that most actual commuters supported.

🧠 Weaponized Incompetence Level: Final Boss.

📌

A chaotic political cartoon showing a caricature of Trump in a suit juggling five chainsaws labeled “Medicaid,” “Empathy,” “Norms,” “Rule of Law,” and “Breathable Air.” The chainsaws are cutting through executive orders with “DFT” stamped on them. Smoke and fire rage in the background, symbolizing destruction. Elon Musk stands to the side, observing with a smirk. The overall vibe is frenetic, with an underlying message of political instability.A political satire image showing Trump juggling five chainsaws labeled “Medicaid,” “Empathy,” “Norms,” “Rule of Law,” and “Breathable Air.” The chainsaws are cutting through executive orders as fire and smoke rage in the background. Elon Musk stands to the side, watching with interest. The scene is chaotic, with a golden neural-network background symbolizing the breakdown of order. — Chainsaws of Chaos: A Trump Administration Production. Watch as basic governance is shredded in real-time while billionaires look on in amusement.

The Final Step: Make It Seem Normal

The real trick of weaponized incompetence is not that it creates crises—it’s that it makes them seem normal.

The timeline is always the same:
1️⃣ Step 1: Break the system.
2️⃣ Step 2: Watch the chaos.
3️⃣ Step 3: Blame someone else.
4️⃣ Step 4: Take credit for "fixing" the thing you destroyed.

[Note to self: another possible YankoBoop here - Think Eddie Rabbit - Step by Step - also check out Love a Rainy Night for other thing]

🔁 Repeat until democracy collapses.

The Only Way to Beat the Cycle? Call It Out.

Weaponized incompetence only works when people stop expecting things to function.

The goal is to exhaust you, to confuse you, to make you believe that nothing really matters.

The solution?
🔍 Keep the receipts.
📢 Call the shots before they happen.
🛑 Refuse to play along.

💥 If this post made you laugh (or cry), here’s what to do next:

✅ Subscribe (it’s free—until I weaponize my own incompetence into a paywall)
✅ Share with your favorite doom-scrolling group chat
✅ Comment—tell me which part of the cycle you’ve seen in action

Hashtags for the Algorithm Overlords

#TollGate2025 #TrafficJammed #WeaponizedIncompetence #GaslightingInTheLeftLane #HonkIfYouHateTransit #ParkingLotPolitics #GridlockAndLoad #ChaosTheory101 #TrumpingTraffic #MAGAMileage #WhoNeedsFunctionalCities #CarmageddonNow #ThisIsWhyWeCantHaveNiceThings