“Signal-gate” and the Zeitgeist of Trump 2.0
This week, we saw the first real scandal of President Trump’s second term. It came quickly – a mere two months in – but this conforms to the zeitgeist of Trump 2.0. This crowd is doing everything, good and bad, at a dizzying pace.
“Signal-gate” came to light from a seemingly innocent, if exceedingly embarrassing, goof-up: National Security Adviser Mike Waltz (or someone on his staff) added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, to a group chat of high-level Trump administration national security officials. The subject? A pending U.S. airstrike in Yemen.
Let’s acknowledge at the outset that we all make mistakes in life. That said, Atlantic writer Mark Leibovich had fun with this Inspector Clouseau-level blunder. “But really,” Leibovich wrote, “who among us hasn’t inadvertently shared secret plans about an imminent military strike on Yemen with the editor in chief of The Atlantic.”
Was it inadvertent? National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes conceded so publicly. (There is one other possibility, which is that a subversive NSC aide seeking to embarrass the administration included Goldberg on the chat deliberately. This is veteran political observer Mark Penn’s guess – he thinks it’s a 90% probability – and only 10% that it was carelessness.)
I’d reverse those odds myself. Either way, the most disturbing part of the story is how the Trump administration responded after the cat was out of the bag.
Americans tend to be a forgiving sort. But Trump and his people didn’t give anyone a chance to be gracious. Their reaction to this astonishing breach of national security was: First, to simply lie about what happened. Second, to insult the intelligence of the American people about whether these communications were classified. Third, to attack the messenger, repeatedly demeaning Jeffrey Goldberg and his publication.
This is apparently the second-term MAGA playbook. Although it may work in the short term, I suspect this strategy won’t be taught in future crisis management seminars. I could be wrong.
Mendacity
The initial response of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was simply to deny the plain facts. “Nobody was texting war plans,” Hegseth told reporters on a trip to the Asia Pacific, “and that’s all I have to say about that.”
He did have more to say, of course.
“So, let me get this straight,” he subsequently tweeted. “The Atlantic released the so-called ‘war plans’ and those ‘plans’ include: No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information. Those are some really shitty war plans.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who was not on the Signal chat, repeated this fiction, telling the media that “no war plans were discussed.”
What they were doing here was two things: For starters, they were playing semantic games over the phrase “war plans” (which The Atlantic used in its first story about the screw-up), while distinguishing it from “attack plans,” a phrase the magazine also used. Leavitt seized upon these word choices to say that the magazine had somehow backtracked from its original reporting. This was absurd.
“Attack plans” is more precise – the United States is not technically at war with Yemen – but it’s a distinction without a difference. If one contemplates this for even a minute, revealing “attack plans” is a much greater breach of national security.
Think about it this way. As the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt regularly spoke to the American people about the progress of the war effort. In a “fireside chat” five months after Pearl Harbor was attacked, FDR said this:
American warships are now in combat in the North and South Atlantic, in the Arctic, in the Mediterranean, in the Indian Ocean, and in the North and South Pacific. American troops have taken stations in South America, Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles, the Near East, the Middle East and the Far East, the Continent of Australia, and many islands of the Pacific. American war planes, manned by Americans, are flying in actual combat over all the continents and all the oceans.
Those are war plans. Attack plans? That would be “Operation Overlord” (known now as “D-Day”). The details of the Allies landing in France were a closely guarded secret. It would be as if Secretary of War Henry Stimson (Hegseth’s counterpart in 1944) inadvertently blabbed the exact timing and approximate location of the Normandy invasion.
Unclassified information
Inadvertently mishandling classified material is normally a fireable offense in government. Doing it deliberately is a crime. So you can see why the high-ranking officials on that Signal chat want to split hairs. But they are doing so in a singularly unconvincing way. This includes people with reputations for candor, such as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
“The conversation was candid and sensitive, but … no classified information was shared,” Gabbard told the House Intelligence Committee. “There were no sources, methods, locations, or war plans that were shared. This was a standard update to the national security cabinet that was provided alongside updates that were given to foreign partners in the region.”
Really?
To recap, the discussion involved a bombing mission meant to decapitate the leadership of the Houthis, an Iran-supplied militia that has taken control of most of Yemen, bombed Israel, attacked U.S. Navy ships, and unleashed devastating attacks on international shipping in the region. And just for a bit of background, the Houthi motto is, “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam.”
Despite Hegseth’s protestations, here’s what he revealed in that unsecured conversation to the “Houthi PC small group” over a publicly available commercial app: candid conversations that included Vice President J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio over the rationale for the attack, how the airstrike might impact negotiations in Gaza and Ukraine, its effect on global trade, and why European allies can’t do this themselves.
After Hegseth and the others essentially accused Goldberg of making it all up, The Atlantic released screenshots of the defense secretary’s texts.
Whether you call them “war plans” or “attack plans,” the details – shown below courtesy of The Atlantic – included the types of aircraft and missiles dropping the bombs, obvious clues to the identity of the target, and the precise timing of the sorties:
- “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
- “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”
- “1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
- “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”
- “1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”
While it’s true that no names or addresses were included, the danger was that if the information fell into the wrong hands, the Houthi leaders could take mitigating steps ranging from remaining safely in their bunkers to scrambling their sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons, putting American pilots at risk. In other words, the Signal chat contained information that is always supposed to be kept confidential and is invariably classified as top secret – as it should be.
Character assassination
In his initial response, Hegseth called Goldberg “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again … So this guy is garbage.”
This became the default tactic of the administration. Reading prepared remarks from the podium in the White House briefing room, Karoline Leavitt launched into personal attacks on Goldberg as a “discredited anti-Trump reporter” who “infamously lied about weapons of mass destruction to get us into the Iraq War …”
There was more of this. Leavitt attacked Goldberg’s wife, who worked in the State Department when Hillary Clinton ran the department, assailed Goldberg’s previous reporting on Donald Trump’s interactions with the military, and dismissed the entire scandal as “the Signal hoax.” She tossed a stink bomb at Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner for good measure.
“Democrat Senator Mark Warner is hysterical over the use of Signal, which is an approved decrypted app, in the killing of Houthi terrorists,” she said. “But Sen. Warner himself used Signal to work with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch to connect [with the operative] who started the Russia hoax.”
Asked about this in a television interview, Warner shrugged and said that the fact that these old communications had come to light proved his very point – that the commercial app wasn’t secure and that U.S. national security officials had no business using it to plan a surprise attack against another country.
The most disingenuous smear came from the national security adviser – the government official who actually committed the baffling original screw-up by bringing Goldberg into the chat.
“I can tell you for 100 percent I don’t know this guy,” Mike Waltz told Laura Ingraham of Fox News. “I know him by his horrible reputation, and he really is the bottom scum of journalists.”
Taking his cue, Fox News host Jesse Watters called Goldberg “the lowest of the low” and “a scumbag” while floating the theory – which ran contrary to what the administration already admitted – that Goldberg had “sneaked his way in.”
Watters would have been better served by watching his own network, specifically when Bret Baier asked Fox éminence grise Brit Hume for his take. “They attacked the journalist!” Hume said with amazement. “Look, I’m not a particular fan of Goldberg or his magazine but he didn’t do anything wrong here.”
I’ll make several points of order myself.
The first is that under Jeff Goldberg, The Atlantic has positioned itself against Donald Trump. I’ve found much of the magazine’s coverage on Trump over-the-top, and said so to Goldberg personally. I particularly loathe the Hitler comparisons. Yet, that point cuts two ways. On the one hand, it shows the perils of oppositional journalism: You make it too easy for those on the other side to dismiss your work. On the other hand, as my colleague Peder Zane noted in his Wednesday column, The Atlantic’s fiercely anti-Trump stance doesn’t mitigate the Signal chat blunder – it makes it worse. How do you invite that guy, of all people, into the chat?
Another point of order: Mike Waltz says he doesn’t know Jeff Goldberg, but I do – and have for a long time. In an acquaintance that goes back more than two decades, I’ve never known Jeff to lie about anything. I think he’s a dogged and honest reporter and a thoroughly decent person.
Finally, I’d note that attacking the messenger has become a bipartisan practice. This is not solely the fault of politicians. The media itself has become polarized and partisan, and we live in an age of ad hominem argumentation. To show how unhealthy this is, I’d mention that in his word choices slurring Jeff Goldberg, Pete Hegseth was channeling two infamous examples of Democratic Party demagoguery.
“Garbage” was the same word used by President Biden to describe Trump voters. The former president was widely castigated for this, as he should have been. Likewise, the “so-called reporter” dig was nearly identical to the ugly little term-of-art employed by Rep. Stacey Plaskett and other Democrats on the House committee delving into the Twitter Files revelations by Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. She and others called them “so-called journalists.”
Leaving aside the clueless nature of the snark (as a non-voting member of the House from the Virgin Islands, Plaskett could be labeled a “so-called congresswoman”), the Democrats were engaged in character assassination in the service of government censorship. It’s a cause I find so abhorrent that it put me in mind of Ulysses Grant’s description of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.
“I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause,” Grant wrote, “though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”