No one is immune from a groupchat blunder

On Monday, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic, told the entertaining story of being added, alongside Pete Hegseth and J. D. Vance, to America’s group-chat plans to bomb Yemen.

Not the most obvious stuff of comedy, perhaps. Yet the affairs of men turn farcical precisely when they’re trying to be most serious. The cast here included the US National Security Advisor, the Secretary of Defence, the Vice President, the White House Chief of Staff, the Director of the CIA, and a handful of others holding Importantly Capitalised roles.

Much is already being made of the fact that those involved have previously frothed at the mouth about their opponents’ sloppiness with classified information, but the greater point is not about Republican hypocrisy. What we have instead, and what makes it comic, is the sort of human frailty as common to Wernham Hogg (the Slough branch of Dunder Mifflin) as it is to the Oval Office.