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For a good belly-laugh, there’s nothing better than pulling up clips of that bumbling, incompetent band of policemen created for the silent screen by Mack Sennett who became known as the “Keystone Cops.”

I promise you that you’ll laugh yourself silly – until, about halfway through, you’ll stop in your tracks like I did. OMG, you’ll say, this isn’t funn y a nymore. Because the Keystone Cops are back – in real life this time, not on celluloid – and now they’re running the country!

Indeed, so far the Trump administration resembles nothing so much as a rerun of the Keystone Cops, or that’50s classic television series, “The Original Amateur Hour.” And that’s nowhere more evident than in the scandal now called “Signalgate.” Let’s start with the facts.

Fact. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gathered top administration officials together to reveal plans for an American military strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen. In addition to Hegseth, on that call were the National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Also in the chat, mistakenly invited to join by Waltz, was journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Fact. Hegseth called his meeting, not in a secure room, or “SCIF” – many of which are located in the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House and the Capitol – but on a commercial app called “Signal,” which, while it does have some encryption, is not a secure government communications system. It’s one step up from scheduling a Zoom meeting to unveil detailed plans for going to war.

Fact. No question. This is an unprecedented, shocking and inexcusable breach of national security which put the lives of American soldiers at risk. If any military officer revealed such plans on a public app, he’d be summarily court-martialed. And any civilian leader who took part in such an exercise should be fired. Didn’t any one of those so-called “geniuses” in the chat think to ask: “Why are we discussing military secrets online?” Or “Why’s this reporter in the room?”

As is always the case with Donald Trump, once the story broke, the denial and cover-up was as bad as the scandal. First, because that’s what he always does, Trump attacked Greenberg personally, calling him a “sleazebag,” and dismissing The Atlantic as a “failing magazine.” Which is not true, and which has nothing to do with the substance of the Hegseth chat. And, remember, Goldberg did not sneak his way into the chatroom. He was invited to join by Trump’s national security adviser.

Then, unbelievably, Trump, Hegseth and the other Cabinet members insisted there was “no classified information” discussed on the call. An assertion totally destroyed the next day when Goldberg published the timeline provided in Hegseth’s chatroom, which – hours before the military operation began – included such crucial details as the targets of the attacks, the fighter planes and weapons to be used, the way they would be delivered and the precise timing of each missile launch. The only thing missing were the names of the pilots.

If that’s not classified information, what is? As retired four-star general Barry McCaffrey told MSNBC: “This was an egregious breach of security that put Navy combat flyers at risk.” The Wall Street Journal called it “security malpractice.”

Equally disgusting is the reaction of cowardly Republican members of Congress. Just a few years ago, they demanded that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton be “locked up” for using her personal computer to email friends. Yet Donald Trump’s team uses an unsecured online chatroom to discuss details of a military strike and their response is: Crickets! No outrage. No demands that anybody be fired. No calls for congressional hearings. Crickets! Cowards!

This may be the worst screw-up by the Trump gang, but it’s hardly the first. The last two months have seen a string of embarrassing moves: ordering a freeze on all federal grants, only to rescind it the next day; firing scores of Department of Energy employees, but forced to rehire them when learning they were responsible for overseeing nuclear weapons; also forced to rehire fired Agriculture employees leading the fight against bird flu; and taking many actions blocked by courts as clearly illegal.

No surprise, I guess. When you elect an incompetent president who surrounds himself with incompetent people, this is what you get. But, after two months of the Keystone Cops, the big question for 77 million Americans remains: Are you still glad you voted for this clown?

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(Bill Press is host of The BillPressPod, and author of 10 books, including: “From the Left: My Life in the Crossfire.” His email address is: bill@billpress.com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter @billpresspod and on BlueSky @BillPress.bsky.social.)

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