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First, you just gotta read this [ [link removed] ]. It’s the only story like it ever told. But the tl;dr, if you haven’t already gathered, is that the Trump administration’s national security principals hold highly sensitive military planning discussions on Signal, the encrypted text-messaging app. And we know this because Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic, to a Signal group chat including JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Tulsi Gabbard, Susie Wiles, and others. Without realizing a very prominent journalist was mistakenly added to the group, the principals breezily planned strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. Hegseth even sent the group highly detailed attack plans that turned out to be perfectly accurate.
Here are my thoughts on the Goldberg bombshell and what Democrats can do with the revelations.
Surreal as this story is—as revelatory of GOP incompetence, malice, and bad faith—I suspect this story will vanish like a booming Trump fart under the rotor blades of Marine One.
I suspect that mostly because I also suspect Trump will order the Justice Department not to investigate the breach, or otherwise ensure, corruptly, that a thorough investigation never happens. Trump is likelier to order an investigation of Jeffrey Goldberg, or to raid his home, than to allow an investigation of his own national security principals.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has already blown the whole story off as a harmless oopsie [ [link removed] ], suggesting Republicans in Congress won’t be looking into this either (not that we should have expected them to).
This is, thus, yet another story that’s principally about Republican enablement and complicity. Nevertheless, Democrats in Congress could drag this story out in a way that gives it real staying power. As always, I hope they do. And there are some early signs that they might. But if past is prologue…
The understandable and perfectly valid reaction to Goldberg’s story in liberal online spaces was some version of, “BUT HER EMAILS.” Even the main character of BUT HER EMAILS got in on the game [ [link removed] ].
That reaction to all manner of Trump-related security breaches began many years ago as arch commentary on Republican bad faith, and news-media malpractice, but it has evolved over many years now into a kind of confession or acknowledgement of Democratic helplessness. Instead of getting genuinely mad about Republican scandals, and trying to turn them into liabilities for Trump and Republican leaders, the way Republicans did with Hillary Clinton’s emails, they say “BUT HER EMAILS,” and then move on.
In defense of today’s Democrats, they are the minority party in both the House and Senate, which means they have little agenda-setting power. They couldn’t mount a full-scale congressional investigation if they wanted.
But I’ve watched Democrats extremely closely over many years, including these past couple months, and I am quite confident in stipulating that if Dems had gavels, they would nevertheless do little with this development—what’s it got to do with the price of eggs, after all?
The lesson of the Clinton emails debacle is that the public can be made to care about many, many things more than they care about the price of eggs. At least for the purposes of determining how much they approve of or like or trust politicians. Pull them into a focus group, where they want to be perceived a certain way, or candid about their material circumstances, and they’ll tell pollsters all about their economic struggles and hopes for a more prosperous future. But then they’ll whip out their phones and get worked up about whatever bullshit gets served to them on whatever sources of information they choose.
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