There’s a basic rule of comedy writing that requires you to escalate your jokes to drive the humour of your story forward beyond a single gag. While one would hardly assume members of Donald Trump’s government have read a guide to comedy writing, it seems someone in the Trump 2.0 administration might have attended a comedy screenwriting class at some stage.
How else to explain the absurdism of this week’s Signal group chat scandal — the comedy gift that keeps on giving with increasingly unbelievable payoffs? What are real comedians supposed to do when real life provides such crazy material that you couldn’t make up a better version? Even prescient US political satire like Mike Judge’s 2006 Idiocracy, the Coen Brothers 2008 Burn After Reading or Armando Iannucci’s Veep couldn’t imagine the shocking stupidity of those given positions of power within the mad farce that is the second Trump presidency.
If you were to pitch this week’s debacle as a film, no-one would fund it because even in the Hollywood world of make-believe it stretches the credulity of what might be possible too far.
However, this is the truth, and here’s the elevator pitch: a respected journalist and editor of The Atlantic, let’s call him Jeffrey Goldberg, finds himself invited to join a group chat on the messaging app Signal by Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, in early March. At first Goldberg, who like all veteran journalists should be, was a little sceptical of such a strange request from a person he didn’t really know, though he accepted the invitation, “hoping that this was the actual national security adviser and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter”.
Instead, a few days later Goldberg found himself on a group that included senior members of the Trump administration, including former Fox News presenter turned defence secretary Pete Hegseth, state secretary Marco Rubio, vice-president JD Vance and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who began to discuss the details of an upcoming planned attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Goldberg remained sceptically hopeful that it was all an elaborate hoax, but when the news broke that an attack had been carried out in Yemen and the messages in the chat clearly showed — through the very adult use of emojis of fists, praying hands, fire and the American flag — that this was a chat group made up of some of the US’s most high-powered government officials. The Atlantic editor had no choice but to write a story about an experience that was so insane no-one would ever believe it, if it weren’t absolutely true.
And so this week Goldberg published a piece on The Atlantic website that told the story, even as he withheld specific details of the war plans from the piece. The response has been instant, global, furious and flabbergasted. Unsurprisingly, Trump, his administration and his raggedy crew of friendly media pundits have attacked Goldberg — a “guy nobody’s ever heard of” and “liberal media anti-Trump stooge” — and denied that anybody in the chat group discussed anything that could remotely be construed as “war plans”. The Democrats have called for an investigation and the firing of Hegseth as defence secretary.
That may have been the point at which the credits on this political satire would have rolled — each increasingly crazy joke escalated successfully by an even crazier one until everyone was left floundering in a morass of inanity. However, this is the second coming of the idiocracy of Trump, and the 47th president and his stooges are always willing to start punching the walls until they make a hole big enough to break out. What should have been the end of “The Houthis, the Blowfish and the Veteran Reporter’s Permanent Face Palm” has become only the end of its first act.
Hegseth and his bros in the frat house of Trumpa Delta Budweiser have doubled down on their claims that no war plans were discussed and that Goldberg is a liberal mole intent on besmirching the good name of their leader and the righteous God-sanctioned mission of his government. That’s forced Goldberg to throw cautions about revealing potentially harmful details of the chat to the winds and release a further report that shows screenshots of the actual messages and demonstrates that Hegseth and the rest of his gang were ... discussing details of war plans in a group chat on a messaging service that the government’s own intelligence experts had recently warned officials was potentially an unsafe forum for exchanging sensitive national security information because it was susceptible to attacks by Russian hackers. There are messages about specific military hardware used, targets, times and other details that even those responsible for writing them in the first place can’t mistake for anything other than war plans.
How the Trump administration will escalate these new jokes to newer heights of comic invention remains to be seen, but it looks like act three of this real-life real-time political satire could possibly be the greatest in comedy history. Turn off the lights, pass the popcorn, watch as the Empire implodes and laugh because otherwise you’ll cry yourself to death.
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