Signalgate and the Trumpian Reflex to Lie

Dishonesty and gaslighting undermine self-government.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe during a Senate Committee on Intelligence hearing on March 25, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

“OH FOR GOD’S SAKE, the administration has already confirmed the authenticity of the message.” That was Fox News mandarin Brit Hume on Monday evening, fed up with the absurd denials Trump administration officials were offering to explain away Signalgate, the epic national security fuckup exposed in the Atlantic by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

One of the tired old truisms of post-Watergate Washington is “It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.” In fact, usually it’s both—but this coverup reflects the cult-like insistence on unreality as a sign of tribal loyalty that flows down from President Donald Trump. Tone always comes from the top.

Lies are the instinctive official defense from this administration. As Andrew Egger noted this week, “It’s all there in the three rules Trump learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn: always attack, always deny everything, always declare victory.” At this point, those tactics have just become “a habit of mind”—they’re second nature for Team Trump.

So, when caught red-handed sharing classified information on a public messaging app, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did what Trump would have done: lie loudly.

Hegseth was hardly alone. On Tuesday we saw Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence and the director of the CIA, claim under oath during a Senate hearing that they could not “recall” whether war plans, details about specific weapons systems, or other classified information had been shared as part of the Signal conversation—even though they themselves had been part of the Signal conversation.

These denials compelled Goldberg to publish most of the Signal chat on Wednesday, conclusively proving that yes, in fact, war plans had been shared.

The White House press secretary then joined in the pile-on by offering a Baghdad Bob-esque declaration of victory, tweeting that “the Atlantic has conceded: these were not war plans” when, in fact, they had done the exact opposite and proven the Trump team’s lies.

The sloppy operational security among top administration officials is a serious issue. But Signalgate reveals another deeper problem likely to have even longer-term consequences: Lying has metastasized into official policy for this administration. It shows contempt for the ability to reason together at the highest levels of our government.

This is what happens when lies become litmus tests for party loyalty—beginning with backing Trump’s 2020 election denialism. And the louder the lie, the more it is seen as a signal that someone is truly a team player, dedicated to defending President Trump, as opposed to a stalwart defender of the truth or of the Constitution they swore an oath to uphold.

This reflexive dissembling and dishonesty, the hallmark of cowardice and careerism among Trump’s supporters, undermines our ability to reason together over a common set of facts and makes a mockery of our democracy.

To their credit, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and ranking member Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) requested the acting inspector general of the Department of Defense conduct an expedited inquiry into Signalgate. This is how a system of checks and balances between coequal branches of government is supposed to function with bipartisan support. The fact that they had to make the request of the acting inspector general because Trump illegally fired the DOD inspector general back in January indicates how dangerous the administration’s assault on accountability really is.

Signalgate is an egregious act of incompetence that risked national security and flouted laws that try to ensure government accountability. But it’s the corrosiveness of the coverup—the insistence on lying rather than admitting obvious facts—that is perhaps the most sinister aspect of this scandal. We cannot let these kinds of lies be normalized or it will doom our ability to reason together as a democratic republic.