Trump administration responds to Signal chat scandal with menace, further incompetence
The inclusion of a journalist in a national security chat is the first scandal of the Trump administration to receive sustained media attention, and shows the viability of fierce political opposition
The inadvertent and incompetent sharing of a high-level national security discussion with The Atlantic magazine’s editor-in-chief has rightly received broad press and Democratic attention, and it’s vital that this focus continue for the sake of political accountability. But before we jump into the open lines of inquiry and the critical question of how Democrats should approach this scandal, I want to first look at why it has received such sustained attention, when even worse acts by the Trump administration have failed to get a fraction of its coverage. Is there a lesson here for making it likelier that future Trump scandals get similar treatment?
In some ways, a special alchemy was present due to how the underlying incident involved a well-known and well-networked journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg. Goldberg, in the first instance, had the presence of mind and the experience to treat his extraordinary invitation to a high-level national security discussion thread with the appropriate mix of skepticism, caution, and journalistic curiosity. He did what he could to establish that the Signal chat he had joined was legitimate, and not a cleverly-designed scam; and he left the discussion after he was able to verify that it was real and that he therefore should not be privvy to the rest of it. In particular, Goldberg (and The Atlantic’s) caution in redacting particularly confidential information (such as that related to the identity of intelligence personnel and assets) contrasted markedly with the carelessness of the discussion itself, including the fact it was held on Signal and that Goldberg had somehow been allowed into it.
But beyond these particulars, the fact that the story involved national security — a vague, often obfuscatory term that nonetheless is appropriate enough here — seemed to give news outlets and Democrats a green light to aggressively report on the story. Rather than everyday, partisan politics, it partook of the supposedly apolitical realm of foreign affairs and U.S. military might, and opened a space for harsh criticism since such criticism was arguably based on technical, objective grounds. You had a group of the highest-level Trump national security officials conducting classified business not only via an insecure method, but via a method whose insecurity was thoroughly revealed by Goldberg’s very reporting. It’s almost as if these amounted to so explosive a set of facts that it cut through all the self-censorship and pulling of punches that many in the media regularly exercise around Donald Trump, and returned them to a pre-Trump mindset where such events would have undeniably constituted a scandal universally recognized as such across the media universe.
Something similar happened with Democrats, who have apparently seen themselves on safe ground as they base their criticisms on national security concerns and a vague underlying sense that they are acting patriotically and righteously in doing so. This contrasts, in the first place, with a Democratic response to Trump II that has been largely disorganized and even at cross purposes, as some in Congress have counseled that the Democrats find common ground with the president even as he trashes the federal government in pursuit of authoritarian rule. It also contrasts specifically with the Democratic leadership’s obsession with making a narrow economic critique of the president (i.e., the now-classic “Has Trump lowered the price of eggs?” line of attack). In the blink of an eye, there was a cross-party consensus that of course Trump is vulnerable on fronts other than the economy. And to some degree, this aggression was encouraged by the way major media outlets were likewise acting assertively in reporting out the story, so that the Democrats could levy their attacks in a media environment that supported the substance of their critiques.
For those of us who have been begging the Democrats to start hitting Trump harder on his attacks on our democracy, our free society, and our collective economic well-being, it’s hard not to be pleased by the high dudgeon many in the party have displayed in recent days around the Signal scandal. After all, Democrats needed to be on offense weeks ago to blunt and cast public attention on Trump’s state-smashing juggernaut and widespread illegal acts. In this particular instance, their instincts are not wrong that there is little downside in attacking such clear incompetence by the Trump administration — particularly as their initial salvoes (alongside blood-in-the water reporting by multiple news outlets) led to all manner of lies, defensiveness, and attempts at misdirection by the administration and the Signal chat participants: among other things, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was caught out in bald-faced lies, while JD Vance found himself compelled to make up for apparent critiques of Trump that he’d expressed on the group chat.
Indeed, the administration’s response quickly became more consequentially self-incriminating than the initial batch of instinctive, easily disprovable lies about the security of the Signal chat and Goldberg’s supposedly malevolent actions (i.e., the absurd idea that the journalist had somehow hacked into the conversation or had made up the whole story). Struggling to extricate themselves from such a clear demonstration of mass incompetence, the administration lurched into its authoritarian happy place where disinformation, blatant lawlessness, and menace converge: the president declared that the Signal chat contained no classified materials (leading the Atlantic to call his bluff and publish the entire chat that Goldberg had been party to) and that questioning the official White House line constituted a meritless “witch hunt.”
Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi made clear that there would be no investigations of the matter, even though the lack of adherence to security protocols would have resulted in the firing, and even the possibility of imprisonment, had service members engaged in the same carelessness. In other words, the administration’s approach has been to treat good faith (if cutting) criticism as baseless, and to retreat into a cocoon of authoritarian defensiveness where the role of high officials is to protect the president, not the nation.
This is a scandal that even members of the public not well-versed in national security matters can quickly grasp. High-ranking members of the Trump administration held unsecured conversations about military operations that could have led to the deaths of American service members (many in the military understood this point immediately, and some expressed their outrage to reporters; as one former Air Force pilot put it, “When you disclose operational security, people can get killed [. . .] these things are not taken lightly. I have never met anybody in the military who does not know this”). When challenged, the administration has told blatant lies that ordinary citizens can recognize as lies, and promises to keep conducting itself as before even if that means deadly or catastrophic consequences for the U.S. military in the future. For these reasons alone, the Democrats have tremendous incentive to keep this scandal on the public radar — not only for the sake of accountability for past errors and probable crimes, but in the interest of protecting the lives of American service members in the future. The short and easy version for Democrats: you can’t rely on Trump to respect the military, but you can trust us to do so. And this is to say nothing of the overriding necessity of attacking the Trump administration more generally and focusing public attention on its incompetence and danger to the nation.
But more than this — the Trump administration’s propagandistic and lawless response to the scandal means that if the Democrats back off now, they will essentially validate the effectiveness of the administration’s defensive strategy, while making a mockery of their own professed concerns about national security and administration incompetence. Whether it is their preference or not, they need to put Trump’s authoritarianism front and center of their critique, if only because no coherent, sustained critique of his administration is possible without it.
So far, we’ve covered the broader outlines of the scandal — the reckless use of unsecured communications and the administration’s basic instinct to gaslight the public, endanger the armed forces, and corrupt the justice system to protect its errors. But there are whole other dimensions in the substance of the conversations that Goldberg witnessed. At the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie describes four in particular: how the Signal chat raises the possibility that such discussions outside record-keeping protocols are being used to plan illegal acts in other areas of the administration without leaving incriminating evidence behind; how much President Trump is actually involved in critical decision-making in the White House; the possibility that war crimes and/or indiscriminate slaughter were committed in the attack (which claimed dozens of civilian lives in pursuit of a small number of targeted militants); and the disregard for the rule of law as reflected in the administration’s refusal to investigate likely illegalities, so that the “executive branch is poised to become even more unaccountable — and despotic — than anything we’ve seen from the supposedly out-of-touch administrative state.”
All of these threads deserve pulling by press and political opposition alike, and I’d add one more: the particular incompetence of Defense Secretary Hegseth, whose involvement in the Signal scandal was only the latest example of his unfitness for a position of grave responsibility. Politico reports on rumblings of opposition to his ineptness within the Trump White House, and that his sharing of classified information on the chat “follows other prominent stumbles, including a walk back of his February remarks about Ukraine war negotiations in Brussels and an ill-fated effort to send thousands of detained migrants to Guantanamo Bay.” We should take these internal political critiques with a grain of salt, given that it was national security adviser Mike Waltz who actually invited Goldberg to the chat, while all the participants should have known that using Signal was both insecure and likely illegal for record-keeping purposes.
However, the truth of the matter is that it was obvious even before Hegseth took his position as defense secretary that he was an unfit choice, given his record of boozing on his previous job, his misogyny (including an accusation of sexual assault and his opposition to women in combat roles), his lack of management experience, and his apparent sympathy for white nationalism (evidence of which is quite literally written on his body, as a tattoo embraced by white nationalists led his superiors in the Army to label him a potential “insider threat”). Hegseth has been assiduously validating his critics’ warnings, and his incompetence and bad faith in the Signalgate episode would obviously merit his removal from office in any previous administration.
His demonstrable failures — which at this point rise to endangering the lives of American troops — show how essential it is for Democrats to maintain a posture of aggressive confrontation towards Hegseth and other unacceptable Trump appointees (such as anti-vax freakazoid RFK, Jr. and the Russophilic Tulsi Gabbard). It was all but guaranteed that Hegseth would fail sooner rather than later in a highly public way, and Democrats can advance the public good by staying on his case and reminding Americans that they’ve considered him a menace to the military all along. Should Hegseth resign or be fired by Trump, Democrats can rightly claim his Christian nationalist-tattooed scalp as at least partly their doing, and convey a sense of momentum against a Trump White House revealed to be vulnerable to sustained, public critique. Alternately, should Hegseth remain in place, Democrats have every incentive to watch his every move like a hawk, and work to inflict maximum pain on the administration when he inevitably fails again.