“It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up” is a horrible cliché of Washington journalism, but nonetheless it fits the Signal scandal that engulfed the Trump administration this week.

The apparently unwitting inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, in high-level national security preparations for a strike against the Houthis, is both a great story and a grave embarrassment. But it’s not nearly as fundamentally damaging as the wall-to-wall coverage might suggest.

The Trump White House’s reflexive attempt to attack the messenger, on the other hand, is an illustration of the new administration’s biggest political problem: its difficulty in speaking to anyone who isn’t already invested in its cause.

The scandal itself belongs to the world of Trump’s first term, when an administration took power unprepared and stumbled through various chaotic episodes that yielded similarly stumblebum attempts to take the White House down. The artistic touchstone for these follies was the Coen brothers’ mordant comedy “Burn After Reading,” a Washington movie about hapless people blundering their way through an imagined world of international skulduggery.

But Trump and his allies survived these spates of folly because the surface chaos didn’t yield real disasters. For the first three years, the economy kept growing, the stock market stayed high, and American foreign policy avoided new wars and major debacles — and then the pandemic’s arrival felt more like an act of God than an act of Trump.

This created a certain public tolerance for Trumpian follies — and a certain nostalgia, when the Biden era proved war-torn and inflationary, for an era when D.C. meltdowns coexisted with greater general peace.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.