The Scandal Will Also Be in How They Brush It Aside
There should be consequences for top government officials convening on Signal to discuss war plans. We fear there won’t be.
We’re getting over a case of the Mondays here at The Bulwark. But not the kind from Office Space. A former colleague worried yesterday afternoon that we “might OD on schadenfreude today.” Alas, we did not! Two months into Trump II, the writers gave us an amazingly comical scandal from the “but her emails” crew. And now, the clean up. Happy Tuesday.
👊🇺🇸🔥
by Bill Kristol
If a scandal comes to light and no one does anything about it—is it a real scandal?
I suppose we’ll find out.
Don’t get me wrong: The fact that the most senior national security officials in the United States government hopped on to a commercially available messaging app to discuss details of a forthcoming U.S. military operation is a scandal.
Indeed, their behavior suggests that these officials have been doing this routinely to discuss all manner of issues, including the most highly classified ones. A failure to observe government rules and laws has probably been business as usual for the Trump administration. In other words, a further and more widespread scandal very likely lurks beneath the surface.
A basic investigation would uncover this. But the shockingly irresponsible, cavalierly reckless, and likely illegal conduct of top government officials should lead to more than that. It should be grounds for resignation and perhaps prosecution. It should lead to widespread outrage. It should result in real demands for accountability, not just from the opposition but from the president’s own party. There should be consequences.
I suspect there won’t be.
I hope I’m wrong in saying that. I hope I’m wrong in sensing, as I write this morning, that the outrage is already fading. I hope I’m wrong in believing it’s unlikely there will be serious consequences, and that the memory of this scandal will soon fade away. Our old friend Marc Caputo reports this morning that barely anyone inside the Trump orbit believes National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who invited the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat, will be forced out.
“We don’t care what the media says,” a Trump adviser told Marc. “We can easily handle what would kill any other administration. This will blow over.”
Of course, we’ll make fun for a while of the fact that the “Houthi PC small group” mistakenly invited a reporter to join its text chain, and of the secretary of defense for boasting that the administration was “currently clean on OPSEC,” or operational security. We’ll mock the sophomoric exchanges and the clenched fist and flexed biceps emojis on the text chain. We’ll ridicule yesterday’s White House statement claiming that “this thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”
Perhaps we’ll even remember this paragraph from Goldberg’s piece:
I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.
Whatever the comical absurdity of some of the surrounding circumstances, this is truly shocking.
And yet, in the era of Trump, will it matter?
In another era, we would expect announcements today that the Justice Department and the FBI and the intelligence community will be investigating the conduct of the officials and the possibility of foreign adversaries obtaining sensitive information.
In another era, the White House would be assuring the media of its cooperation in that investigation. Indeed, in another era, to ensure that the investigation wouldn’t be politically compromised, a special counsel would soon be appointed.
Does anyone expect that from Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump?
In fact, this prospect seems so unrealistic that it’s barely been raised by commentators in the last 24 hours—even though it’s been the historical norm.
In another era, Congress would be planning extensive and probing hearings. All it would take would be a handful of Republican senators and House members breaking from the administration and their party to support Congress doing its duty. This prospect isn’t quite as unrealistic as the Trump administration launching a serious internal investigation into what happened. But for now at least, it seems pretty unrealistic.
So I fear this scandalous demonstration by senior Trump officials of irresponsibility and illegality will be a scandal without real consequences.
After all, irresponsibility and illegality is what we (writ large) voted for. As we learned in some detail yesterday, it’s what we’ve got. If we don’t change course, it’s what we’ll have for another nearly four years—at least.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The high cost of voting for this… Bulwark readers knew what Trump was really about, but after news of the Signal leak, NICHOLAS GROSSMAN highlights the long record of security failures in Trump’s first term. If you were surprised, you weren’t paying attention.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Race a Test of Musk’s Reach… Conservative Brad Schimel wants to keep the courts from reining in executive power. Trump’s co-president wants to help, writes BILL LUEDERS.
How to Think (and Act) Like a Dissident Movement… Yesterday’s can’t-miss Triad by JVL is unlocked. Read it. Share it. (One prominent Democrat texted us about the piece last night: “This is exactly right.”)
Quick Hits
VIBE CHECK: Our soul brothers over at Defending Democracy Together have a new poll out this morning checking the public temperature on Elon Musk and DOGE’s war on the federal government. A key finding: Musk is significantly less popular than the government workers he’s putting through the wood chipper.
“Fifty-five percent of American voters hold favorable views of federal government employees, compared to 23 percent with unfavorable views. Four times as many Americans hold very favorable views (27 percent) than very unfavorable views (7 percent) of those employees,” wrote pollster Whit Ayres, who conducted the survey. On the other side of the equation, “More Americans view Elon Musk unfavorably than favorably, and people are split on DOGE.”
As in other recent surveys, Musk trails Trump himself in favorability as well. While Trump has a 47 percent approval to 49 percent disapproval split, Musk comes in at 40 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval. Meanwhile, 46 percent of respondents said they wanted Musk out of government, with only 33 percent approving of his work in the Trump administration. An additional 16 percent broadly agree with his goals but fear he might go too far.
PHONING IT IN: What does living under a post-truth administration look like? Consider the official responses to the Houthi attack group chat story.
At first, they grudgingly admitted it: “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes told the Atlantic.
Then, the internal earthquake became great enough to inspire plenty of wrathful internal leaking about the opsec-breach culprit, national security adviser Mike Waltz: “Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a fucking idiot,” one person close to the White House told Politico.
And then, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decided to take a different tack. “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called ‘journalist’ who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again,” Hegseth told reporters Monday. “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”
To recap. Various administration officials were absolutely “texting war plans.” The administration has publicly copped to “texting war plans.” And yet here is the defense secretary, accusing the journalist who reported on the texted war plans of perpetrating a hoax.
QANON’S BACK: We are simply humble newsletter writers, so you’ll have to tell us: Does Elon Musk resharing this post seem like a good thing?
Cheap Shots
“We don’t care what the media says,” a Trump adviser told Marc. “We can easily handle what would kill any other administration. This will blow over.”
Can we still recognize the depravity of this boast?
I wonder how the top brass in the military is thinking about this domestic threat to the Constitution?