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President Donald Trump’s military and intelligence leaders irresponsibly texting in an unsecured group chat about upcoming air strikes in Yemen. Dangerous, yes, and likely illegal. But more than anything, it was plain stupid in the vein of dark farce. The evolving saga, including predictable defenses of the breach from administration loyalists, rivals the hallmarks of that well-established Hollywood trope: the idiot plot.
Historians, psychologists, sociologists and economists have sought to explain the present U.S. situation. Yet it’s the satirists who, as ever, may understand it best. Their specialization’s output, at least, is the most entertaining.
The idiot plot requires every character involved to be too foolish to stop it. Signature elements include shortsightedness, conceitedness and ineptness. Think of the Farrelly brothers’ Dumb and Dumberor Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. The subgenre limning the heights and depths of American power runs from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove to the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading.
Note that not a single member involved in the texting fiasco, including at least one top official who appears to have participated while traveling in Russiawas sensible enough to question their collective lack of operational security. Of course, the only reason we’re even aware of this is because — in a hat-on-a-hat that arguably wouldn’t survive a script revision — a prominent journalist was added to the group by accident. Fellow Americans with measurable cerebral activity no doubt wonder about the sheer volume of high-level brainlessness that goes unreported.
Armando Iannucci’s Veepwhich ran through most of Trump’s first term, became frequent shorthand for his regime’s dysfunction, its end credits and closing theme spliced into news footage of the facepalm of the week. After Rudy Giuliani’s infamous Four Seasons Total Landscaping appearance, showrunner David Mandel shared that his first thought was that he needed to send the Trump administration the writing staff’s awards. “They had just kind of outdone us, and kudos to them,” he said. “You just have to salute your betters.”
However, it’s Iannucci’s The Death of Stalinin its unsparing portrait of the hapless machinations of high-powered lackeys, that’s the purer exemplar of the idiot plot. Barack Obama seemed to appreciate it, pointedly listing the film as one of his favorites of 2018.
It’s often been observed that Trump, a failed Hollywood mogul long before his political ascent, is producing his presidency. Such takes ascribe an idiot savant quality to his governance style, furthered by what appears to be the presence of the Dunning-Kruger effectin which confidence is conflated with competence. This, too, is abetted by supporters — critics would deride them as useful idiots — who downplay or else rationalize questionable decision-making as five-dimensional chess.
Trump’s first-term idiot plot was both comic as well as tragic. There was his boasting of having a “bigger and more powerful” nuclear button than North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The so-called “Sharpie-gate” when he altered an official weather map to defend his own false claim about Hurricane Dorian’s trajectory. The suggestionearly in the pandemic, to inject bleach as a remedy for Covid-19. Then there was the idiot plot as horror show in the family separations at the Mexican border due to inadequate government tracking systems.
To be sure, Trump and his allies viewed Joe Biden’s own presidency as a series of everyone’s-a-moron process follies, from the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal to the political malpractice (or worse) of propping up an octogenarian candidate experiencing what appeared to be obvious decline to vie in a supposedly crucial reelection contest that would determine the fate of democracy. To them, liberals are to be derided as “libtards” and “NPCs,” the automatonlike unthinking non-player characters in video games.
Only days before the group text debacle, one of its key figures, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, extolled the Trump team’s professionalism on live television while standing next to the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. “Under the previous administration, we looked like fools,” he said. “Not anymore.”
After Biden left office, his own national security advisor, Jake Sullivan — who bears responsibility for the Afghanistan pullout — announced he was joining Harvard Kennedy School as its inaugural Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order. (Many believe that Henry Kissinger inspired Peter Sellers’ eponymous Dr. Strangelove.) In 2013, he reflected candidly of his reaction when he first entered the White House’s Situation Room.
“There must be another room, somewhere down the hall, where the real meeting is happening, where the real experts are, making the real decisions,” he said. “Because it can’t just be us. It can’t just be this. You know what? Turns out that it is.”
By then already a significant player in the proverbial room where it happens, he was kindhearted about the flaws of American officials like himself who wield powers of life and death. “Public policy is a study in imperfection,” he went on. “It involves imperfect people, with imperfect information, facing deeply imperfect choices — so it’s not surprising that they’re getting imperfect results.”
This sentiment could be considered magnanimous. Or maybe generous to a fault. A less gracious if more honest way of saying it is that they’re all, to a one, quite simply idiots.
