If Trump makes you laugh, D.C.’ll make you cry

Before you lose your breath guffawing at Donald Trump’s announcement that he’s running for president, consider a summary of recent news about the organization he wants to lead, d.b.a. the executive branch of the federal government:

• The Office of Personnel Management admitted foreign-based hackers may have gleaned sensitive information about more than 4 million current and former federal workers, from their Social Security numbers to their drug problems and extramarital affairs (which they disclosed to gain security clearances).

• The Defense Department increased its estimate of the places to which one of its labs shipped live anthrax samples: The count is now at more than 70 facilities in 19 states, the District of Columbia and five countries.

• The inspector general for the Health and Human Services Department said the agency can't account for almost $3 billion in payments to insurance companies on behalf of Obamacare recipients.

• The Food and Drug Administration, not long after acknowledging its 40-year public-health campaign to have Americans reduce the cholesterol in their diets was off-base, decided to show newfound humility by — wait for it — enacting an outright ban on one of the substances it now blames for heart disease.

That list doesn’t even include a report by a legislative agency, the Congressional Budget Office, that the nation’s debt remains on an unsustainable path that could hit economy-wrecking levels within many of our lifetimes.

And that's just in the past week.

So let’s dispense with the self-righteousness about how this person or that one is a clown who couldn’t possibly run the oh-so finely tuned machine that is Washington, D.C. Are we really so sure that The Donald would be any worse at the job than the man who once proclaimed himself the “LeBron” of politics? Or, should you be of a different political persuasion, George W. “Heckuva Job Brownie” Bush?

Just to be clear, I really don’t want to find out. The odds that Trump could persuade me to vote for him are almost infinitely long.

But if you’re going to mock Trump’s announcement, don’t forget that our government is way ahead of him in becoming a punch line.

While Hillary Clinton can’t make up her mind if she’s running to be president of the United States or of the AFL-CIO — she’ll negotiate your wages! your benefits! your retirement! — someone on the GOP side better figure how to convince Americans of a few key things:

That a government too incompetent to protect its employees’ personal information online probably shouldn’t try to build its own, worse, more expensive version of ehealthinsurance.com.