Each era produces its own emblematic selection of ankles and butterflies: Mack Sennetts Keystone Cops. The three Stoges. The Mets from 1962. Beavis and Butt-Head. Wayne and Garth. In Stanley Kubrick's classic “Dr. Strangelove”, which the fools apocalyptic weapons instead of pudding cake, the fools perform. Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, grows so feverishly and paranoid about a communist conspiracy, “to condemn all of our physical physical liquids that he becomes“ a little fun ”and arranges a thermonuclear strike against the Soviet Union. But the province is just so fantastic notion of the comic fantasy, isn't it?
In the first months of Donald Trump's second administration, the qualities of malice, retaliation and confusing speed have covered the inability of its principles somewhat. This came up with the latest reports in a stricter point of view The AtlanticIn which the publisher of the magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, tells how he was somehow recorded into a community chat about the commercially available messaging system signal with the name “Houthi PC Small Group”. Goldberg was sitting in his car on a Safeway car park and observed incredulously on his phone when the leaders of the National Security Establishment discussed the details of the bombing of Houthi strongholds in Yemen.
The comedy of Goldberg's reports at least partially lies in the discovery that the Vice President and the head of the leading defense and intelligence agencies use emojis with the same frequency as middle school students. Seriously, but not astonishing, as prominent members of the administration were confronted with their potentially deadly negligence, they did it how their president would do: they attacked the character and integrity of the reporter (which laid out as far more concerned about national security than the national security consultant, and then lay down to the congress and the sensitivity of the communication with straight answers to give the congress and the sensitivity of communication.
This spectacle of airy contempt with regard to process and political issues was certainly humiliating, but hardly astonishment. In chat, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Minister Pete Hegseth seem to compete with their disposal of the Europeans. (“I share their shooting down of European freeloading,” says Hegseth Vance. Vance has released himself publicly and repeatedly from his and the contempt of the president of Europe – at the most openly in a speech in Munich in February, when he held European leaders about their alleged failures in the areas of immigration and freedom of speech.
This is an administration that does not have to slide on a signal banana shell in order to reveal its deepest prejudices and painful inability. You have the feeling that we would learn little if we lined into a twenty-four-hour live stream of every private statement. Part of what was so horrific about Trump and Vance's most recent meetings with Volodymyr Zelensky was not only their preference to channel the worldview and negotiate points from Vladimir Putin, but their comfort to express them. barking You at the Ukrainian president in front of reporters in the Oval Office.
Similarly, it does not require months-long tedious investigative reporting or a middle-aged technician that does not find that another member of the group chat, Steven Witkoff, the leading shuttle negotiator of the President, is no more permeated in the granular details of diplomatic history and strategy than any other New York real-time developer from the eighties in the circle of Trump. In a long interview with Tucker Carlson, after the recent conversations in Moscow with Putin Witkoff, Russian discussion points were consistently arranged and passed on that the Russian dictator (“I don't consider Putin as evil”) “graciously” and gave him a “beautiful portrait” of Trump as a gift for the president. (Trump, on the other hand, was “clearly touched” by the painting, reported Witkoff.) During the entire understanding of Witkoff for the conflict, it was so shaky that Moscow influenced the laugh from Kremlin. In a moment of contemplation, Witkoff admitted: “I underestimated the complications in the job, that's sure. I think I was a bit quixotic in the way I thought about it.
Pete Hegseth is less susceptible to foggy self -reflection. But his incompetence could have been predictable. In December in December, after Trump Hegseth, a weekend moderator in Fox News, had nominated to lead the Pentagon, Jane Mayer wrote an meticulously reported piece in this magazine about his florid background: his fights of excessive drinking and deeply sexist behavior on behalf; His failures in the management of companies that are slightly larger than chemical cleaning, but infinitely smaller than the Pentagon. Doesn't matter. The Republicans of the Congress did not tend to deny Hegseth's appointment or to risk the president's anger. And they were similar for another participant in the unfortunate signal chat, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence.
And so the scandal of the week is the end of an O. Henry story, surprising and yet inevitable. If a journalist incorrectly admitted to a group text among the leaders of the American health bureaucracy, will we be fainted when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., refused to recommend proven vaccines?
It would be unclear to reject the importance of secrets in this or another administration, but the point is that Trump and his ideological and political planners have made no secret of their intentions. While Richard Nixon tended to save his darkest trust and prejudices for private meetings with AIDES like Henry Kissinger and HR Haldeman, Trump votes almost every day in the microphone or in the social media: the autocratic acts that are supposed to undermine the law, academies and the media, and the media; the disregard for democratic partners and the affection of all kinds of authoritarian; the enemy designs in Greenland, Canada, Panama, Mexico and Europe; the ongoing attempt to clean the Republican Party of the remaining dissidents; And the constant efforts, his critics and perceived enemies too shy.
The threat caused by autocracy every day under Donald Trump and it is a process that hides in sight. Some will decide to deny it, domesticate it, to treat abnormal as mere politics in order to wish everything in the spirit. But the threat is real and for everyone to see. No encryption can hide it. ♦