“Under the previous administration, we looked like fools,” US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters at the White House over the weekend.  “Not anymore,” he said, before turning and standing on a discarded banana peel with such force that he slid across the room and out into the street, where he fell down an open manhole, mere seconds before a truck carrying several hundred kilos of manure crashed nearby and dumped its entire cargo down that same manhole. Politically speaking, we mean.

The second Trump administration is in many ways a different creature from the first, but recent hours remind us that it maintains one key feature — a bone-deep propensity for farce.

In the early hours of Australian morning, The Atlantic published a piece by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg revealing that Pete Hegseth had texted him (yes, the journalist) hours before a March 15 airstrike against Houthi targets in Yemen featuring “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing”. The subsequent story, written in the slightly dazed tone of someone not 100% sure they hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing, details the group chat Goldberg was accidentally added to, apparently featuring senior white house officials or their representatives, including, in addition to Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance.

“I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC [operations security],” Hegseth writes in, what I feel the need to remind you, is a group text to which the boss of one the country’s biggest media publications had been added — and then remained in for days without being detected. The White House has since confirmed the error, if the fact that everything discussed in the group chat came to pass hadn’t already done so.

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There is, of course, a sour beauty to all this — as compiled by The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell — practically every identifiable member of this group chat told a slavering Fox journalist at one point or another that Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of her emails required consequences and accountability. This is just the latest and most serious in a litany of examples of the Trump administration governing by accident.

Anthony Scaramucci

You simply gotta hand it to Anthony Scaramucci — while most members of the initial Trump administration were only able to wring a book deal out of their humiliating brush with history, the Mooch has parlayed it into a full-time job and everyone has just gone with it.

His tenure lasted 10 days before he quit — not out of disgust with what he’d seen but because he’d called The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza and, without uttering the words “off” or “record”, badgered him for details on who (get this) had been leaking embarrassing stuff about the Trump administration to the press:

‘Who leaked that to you?’ he asked. I said I couldn’t give him that information. He responded by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. ‘What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,’ he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source. He continued to press me and complain about the staff he’s inherited in his new job. ‘I ask these guys not to leak anything and they can’t help themselves,’ he said. ‘You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.’

Scaramucci, who now does several podcasts where he condemns Trump and defends democracy, then talked a bunch of shit about his colleagues.

“Reince Priebus — if you want to leak something — he’ll be asked to resign very shortly … Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.”

The piece continues:

Scaramucci also told me that, unlike other senior officials, he had no interest in media attention. ‘I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,’ he said, speaking of Trump’s chief strategist. ‘I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the president. I’m here to serve the country.’ 

“The swamp will not defeat him,” the “resistance” leader continued, breaking into the third person. “They’re trying to resist me, but it’s not going to work. I’ve done nothing wrong on my financial disclosures, so they’re going to have to go fuck themselves.”

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Rudy Giuliani

As we’ve noted before, had the reputation enjoyed by Rudy Giuliani prior to his time in Trumpworld been built on slightly sturdier foundations, his story would almost rise to the level of tragedy. As it is, the 80-year-old former New York mayor and inspiration to visibly melting men everywhere will spend the remainder of his time in history’s waiting room as an unrelenting punchline. He started early, getting locked out of his iPhone (“because he had forgotten the passcode and entered the wrong one at least 10 times”) within weeks of being named Trump’s cybersecurity advisor in 2017. Naturally, he went to an Apple store to fix it.

His attempts to help Trump overturn the result of the 2020 election were in part thwarted by him texting the wrong number, saying: “So I need you to pass a joint resolution from the legislature that states the election is in dispute, there’s an ongoing investigation by the legislature, and the electors sent by Governor Whitmer are not the official electors of the state of Michigan and do not fall within the safe harbor deadline under Michigan law.” 

In between, he accidentally left two separate voicemails for an NBC investigative reporter, complaining about money and slandering then presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Four Seasons (Total Landscaping)

We may never know for sure who googled “Four Seasons Philadelphia” and booked the first option that came up without making absolutely certain it was the upscale hotel chain and not, say, a landscaping business next to an adult bookshop and crematorium in an industrial area on the outskirts of town.

Regardless, it became what we thought would be the defining Trump moment; the whole shambolic vehicle spluttering to a halt in an expanse of oil-stained concrete and chainlink fences, sharing baseless allegations of voter fraud with a bewildered press. As it turns out, there was, and is, quite a way still to go.

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