This is the first entry in Patrick Blanchfield’s new column about the second Trump term. What are we to make of the scandal that has so preoccupied American media? In any sober calculus, the group chat read around the world is hardly the most urgent, dramatic, or appalling story of the past week. A non-comprehensive list of more deserving candidates for our collective attention might include Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s photo-op in a Salvadoran concentration camp, Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk getting disappeared by masked ICE agents for the crime of writing an op-ed, Israel’s recommitment to genocide in Gaza after abandoning the thinnest possible commitment to a ceasefire, and whatever other atrocities will likely unfold in the hours between when this column is written and when it is published. But still it is this story that has broken through.…