Hillary Clinton on Friday called the Trump administration’s approach to governing both dumb and dangerous in an essay excoriating the Signal chat scandal and the Elon Musk-led mission to slash the federal workforce, and concluding that Trump would make the US “feeble and friendless”.

The former secretary of state and Democratic presidential candidate wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that has been given the headline: “How much dumber will this get?” and opens: “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity.”

Clinton starts with the Signal chat group scandal, when Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, mistakenly added a top US journalist to a small group of government leaders on the encrypted but unclassified app and then the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, proceeded to discuss intricate details of a forthcoming airstrike on Houthi militants in Yemen and report back to the group on the deadly results.