Trump Downgrades Massive Data Breach To Small Potatoes

President Donald Trump announced Friday that a federal data breach exposing 18 million Americans’ personal records and costing taxpayers $37.5 billion may be officially classified as “small potatoes,” provided the phrase is delivered near at least one tractor. The doctrine supports Vice President JD Vance’s effort to assign the privacy scandal a designation better suited to campaign speeches, donor emails and conversations with voters who still insist that numbers describe quantities. Administration officials called the breakthrough “semantic security,” under which a government failure loses 80% of its seriousness once the White House compares it to produce.

Trump described the breach as barely visible beside the administration’s larger achievements in renaming unpleasant events. “It’s potatoes, very small potatoes, maybe the smallest potatoes anybody has ever seen,” Trump said. “You look at the billions, you look at the Social Security numbers, and frankly that’s not a crisis. A crisis is when Mar-a-Lago runs out of ketchup, and everybody knows it.” White House aides clarified that the president was not minimizing identity theft or federal waste, but merely converting both into a more manageable vegetable. Under the new Trump Produce Scale, losses below $10 billion qualify as a radish, a nationwide computer outage is “a little coleslaw,” and the public disclosure of every taxpayer’s medical history becomes “one of those salads nobody ordered.”

Vance praised the framework as a major advance for Americans worried about frozen bank accounts, fraudulent loans or the possibility that words retain definitions. “The important thing is that families no longer have to experience consequences as consequences,” Vance said. “Once the president selects a smaller noun, the underlying reality must become correspondingly smaller out of respect for executive authority.” Critics noted that changing terminology would not restore stolen identities, recover public funds or teach federal employees how passwords work. Officials dismissed those objections as outdated pre-potato thinking and advised affected citizens to monitor their credit until the administration invents a smaller food. The breach, its cost and its 18 million victims are now small potatoes.

* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.