Juxtaposed with the brutality and nascent authoritarianism and rank corruption of the Trump administration, there is a surreal slapstick quality to it all—democratic backsliding, as the Coen Brothers might script it. But officials leaking sensitive war plans to the editor of the Atlantic in a group chat takes the absurdity to a dangerous new level, underscoring the recklessness and cynicism of this regime. Donald Trump has surrounded himself with clowns, crooks, and creeps. The text thread debacle Jeffrey Goldberg detailed in his bombshell story Monday laid bare what it looks like when such figures are elevated to the highest levels of government.
“Our national security,” wrote Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, of the Armed Services committee, “is in the hands of complete amateurs.”
In what may be a defining story of the opening weeks of the Trump administration, Goldberg reported Monday that he had been added to a Signal chat by Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser. The group included top members of Trump’s administration and defense apparatus: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were among them. Goldberg, understandably, questioned whether the chat was real, especially when the officials began discussing plans to carry out airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen. Hegseth, Goldberg reported, even texted “operational details” of the strikes the United States would execute March 15—two hours later.
Such secret, high-level discussions are normally conducted in sensitive compartmented information facilities or through other secure means—not over an encrypted civilian messaging app. But the chat was “authentic,” as a spokesman for the National Security Council confirmed to Goldberg, even as Hegseth tried to dismiss the Atlantic editor as a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called ‘journalist’” later in the day. “Nobody was texting war plans,” Hegseth insisted to reporters who asked him about the story.
That’s about the best effort at damage control Trump and his officials have been able to come up with amid the fallout over the breach. On Monday, the president trashed the Atlantic, but claimed ignorance over the accidental leak: “I know nothing about it,” he told reporters. As Democrats called for resignations and firings over the national security failure, Trump on Tuesday expressed support for Waltz: The national security adviser “has learned a lesson,” Trump told NBC News, “and he’s a good man.”
That’s a notably different tone than the one Trump struck as he railed against Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server at times when she served as secretary of state under Barack Obama, which he described as “worse than Watergate”: “We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified,” Trump said in one of many attacks on his 2016 rival. He wasn’t alone. Waltz, Rubio, Miller, and Hegseth all railed against Clinton’s “reckless” handling of sensitive material: “People have gone to jail for 1/100th of what—even 1/1,000th of what Hillary Clinton did,” Hegseth said on Fox News in 2016. (When I reached out to Clinton seeking comment, a representative pointed me to her exasperated X post on the subject Monday.)
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The issue goes beyond hypocrisy, of course. It’s the carelessness and ineptitude that was always going to follow the instatement of such direly unqualified officials, from the game show grifter president to the checkered Fox News haircut he put in charge of the Pentagon. “Hegseth and Trump are making our country less safe,” Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, a veteran and member of the Armed Services committee, said Monday. Republicans—when they aren’t trying to keep their distance from the debacle—have tried to downplay the whole thing: “Now we are griping about who is on a text message and who is not,” Republican Josh Hawley lamented to Laura Ingraham. Some, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, even tried to put a positive spin on it: “What you did see…was top level officials doing their job, doing it well, and executing on a plan with precision,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju.
Except the substance of the discussion is itself rather wanting—concerned mostly with the “message” of the military operation and with gripes about “European free-loading.” This wasn’t a window into the more measured deliberations these publicly belligerent figures engage in behind the scenes; it suggested that they are as superficial and antagonistic privately as they appear to be when the cameras are rolling.
This is all extraordinarily dangerous, as Democrats have been quick to point out, with leaders demanding investigations into the matter and lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee grilling CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard over the breach in a hearing on Tuesday. (Both officials appeared on the text thread, and twisted themselves into pretzels Tuesday trying to explain themselves to their Democratic questioners.) Whether any real political consequences come out of it all remains to be seen. Trump so far has publicly stood by Waltz. But he is reportedly “frustrated” with the national security adviser, and it’s possible he could become the first fall guy of the president’s second term: “Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing,” as a source close to the administration put it to Politico. “Mike Waltz is a fucking idiot.”
