Explain Like I'm Five

The messaging coming out of the administration is largely done by agency heads. These are positions that are appointed by the president, and the single most important qualification is loyalty to Trump.

There's also a scramble for each agency head to grab as much power as possible, even to the detriment of other agencies because they know that Trump likes for them to find ways to push boundaries to consolidate gains. If it is at the cost of another agency head, so much the better: it just shows they were weak and raises the "go-getter" in Trump's esteem.

Aggravating the entire situation is that they've nearly isolated themselves from reality because the only voters they care about, the reactionary base, have been propagandized for decades to mistrust and despise every source outside of the far-right bubble. These sources, like Fox News, Breitbart, News Max, etc. have no incentive beyond telling their viewers what they want to hear because otherwise the audience will leave for a harder right source. To further compound the issue, Trump sees the world almost exclusively through a media lens and knows that the media can't effectively tell about a hundred scandals at once.

So we have rogue agencies all competing amongst themselves to make a big splash in the news so that they can please Trump, the head of the cult of personality, while doing what they can to consolidate power.