Hanlon's razor. I also tend to impute malice to things I don't like, but I think it's hard to go past stupidity.

Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

(Leaving aside that there's plenty of evidence of malice here.)

Stupidity rarely has a consistent destructive track record. You score occasional wins. Only malice allows every decision to do damage. (The other razor, essentially - Occam)

I love Hanlon's razor. Super-helpful in certain contexts: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

But, having known about it for a dozen years now, I also find it inadequate alone as a razor without the following caveats/corollaries:

Hubbard's corollary to Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system". ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor#Exceptions )

Or (HN) Nerdponx's punchier simplification: "When money is at stake, never attribute to incompetence what could be attributed to greed." ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41066724 )

Hanlon's Razor is susceptible to pathological inputs, causing unbounded runtime.

A large amount of things related to Trump fall into that category, and it's important to recognize when you need to instead treat it as a superposition: It is both malice and incompetence, unless the perpetrators decide to plead just one or the other.

Hanlon's razor is utter trash. In most contexts that people bring it up, sufficient stupidity IS malice, because at a certain level of resources and responsibility, you do not have an excuse to be that stupid

You can only get into such a position if you've ignored smart people telling you "No". That's malice.

> someone could be making a profit on this

Yes, there are apparently various ways of profiting from vulnerabilities. The interesting question would be whether any of the regime insiders have a way to profit.

I think it's more of a principle: if it looks like someone could charge money for it, they think that would make the country stronger, because all they understand is first-order profit. Trump's ethics is "get away with whatever you can".

For instance, most people find healthcare middlemen (pharmacy benefit managers, etc) to be grotesque parasites. But to a laissez-faire fundamentalist, they're smart for finding a way to liberate some profit, even laudable.