Six Short Thoughts on the Most Insane Trump Story of All Time

This afternoon, just before 1 pm ET, The Atlantic posted what is, hands down, the wildest and most insane story I have ever read about US national security: The White House National Security Advisor added the editor of The Atlantic to a group chat with nation’s most senior leaders — including the vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, director of national intelligence, and CIA director — to discuss classified war plans and a weekend military operation targeting the Houthis in Yemen.

Read the article yourself.

No, really — if you haven’t — please stop here and just go read the article. I promise you the headline and whatever summary you’ve heard is way less weird, way less troubling, and way less eye-popping than the reality.

Please go read it and then come back here.

Now that you’ve read the whole piece (you did, right?), I wanted to share six quick reactions worth thinking about:

1) Imagine the other foot. I know it’s exhausting to think about the “but her emails!” comparisons, but I’d like you to imagine for a minute what would have happened if Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had accidentally added Tucker Carlson to a group chat about classified war plans? It’s impossible to imagine Sullivan lasting a single hour in office before resigning — this would be the biggest scandal of the Biden administration full stop. There would be Republican congressional hearings, the ole flurry of subpoenas, and calls across Capitol Hill for multiple officials to resign. And here’s the thing: They would all be right. Here’s a whole thread that Matthew Gertz pulled together of all the same officials from the group chat previously damning the mishandling of classified intel. And yet it seems all but impossible to imagine any of the Trump officials facing any punishment for this egregious violation of multiple federal laws. There is no shame in this administration — and that, in and of itself, should deeply deeply concern us as citizens. A functioning democracy requires public officials capable of shame and embarrassment and accountability.

2) Our allies are watching. It’s worth also considering how our allies will read this story too. The first Trump administration had plenty of its own problems protecting valuable national security information — remember Trump telling the Russian foreign minister about a classified Israeli operation? — and Trump out of office famously kept all manner of classified intel in the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. Now add to that troubled record the worrisome appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Now add to that the recent Trump rhetoric raising concerns about US reliability as an ally or defense partner. Now add to all of that two new stories from just the last 100 hours: The idea that Elon Musk was going to be briefed on secret China war plans and now, the very next business day, a stunning example of the Trump principals mishandling sensitive operational war plans. Put all of that together and ask yourself: Is this a government and group of people you’d want to share your own sensitive intelligence with? Is this a government and group of people you’d be willing to share intelligence that put lives of your operatives or agents at risk? The CIA director posted an active undercover intelligence officer’s name in the group chat for pete’s sake. There are already moves to isolate the US from international intelligence sharing — and surely this story will only accelerate those conversations, to our detriment and our allies’ detriment.

3) The White House just doesn’t believe the rules apply to it (Part 1). 18 U.S.C. § 793(f) makes it a federal crime for people entrusted with information related to the national defense to, “through gross negligence permit [classified intelligence] to be … delivered to anyone in violation of [that] trust.”

If the test for a criminal investigation is “gross negligence,” I guess it would be slightly more grossly negligent to add Dmitry Peskov or Vladimir Putin himself to a principals’ committee Signal chat about classified war plans, but only barely. In fact, there are two separate but important parts of this mishandling that would be worthy of follow-up investigation: Waltz’s original action adding Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat, but then, after Goldberg left the chat, no one bothered to see who “JG” was in the chat group in the first place. It doesn’t appear that the Trump administration even realized Goldberg had been in the chat until he went to the National Security Council for comment. Did anyone realize that Goldberg was in the chat? If so, that’s a separate violation of 18 U.S.C. § 793(f), which requires anyone “having knowledge that [classified intelligence] has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust … fails to make prompt report of such loss.” If no one is monitoring who is leaving these group chats nor paying attention to who is added and who is in one conversation vs. another, that’s a recipe for even more counterintelligence failures going forward.

4) The White House just doesn’t believe the rules apply to it (Part 2). All sorts of corners of the US government use encrypted Signal chats in ways both it should and shouldn’t. But the fact that Mike Waltz “set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four” should raise all sorts of alarms for us as citizens and particularly for us journalists and historians. This is clearly not a Signal thread that anyone had any intention of preserving — as they are legally required to do! — under federal records law. So: How many other Signal group chats are underway right now where people in the Trump White House are ignoring federal law? What decisions are being made right now with no records or future accountability? To be clear, this is itself a violation of federal law — and not only did no one on the group chat object (“Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be having policy discussions on a group chat!”) but they all participated casually and deeply enough to make clear that this is routine SOP in the Trump administration today.

5) This is not a smoothly functioning government (Part 543,651,690). Lost amid the headline-grabbing insanity of the classified details is what the principals were discussing on the group chat. It doesn’t take reading too deeply between the lines to see that the principals weren’t entirely clear on what Trump had ordered — someone, apparently Stephen Miller, says, “as I heard it, the president was clear: green light” — which raises some troubling questions about how much White House staff and Cabinet leaders are interpreting or reading the tea leaves on vague presidential directives or desires. When the president of the United States commits US military forces to operations overseas there shouldn’t be any “as I heard it” ambiguity. Moreover, the principals here were having notably pointed policy discussions in the group chat — which, under a normal functioning government, would be handled at the interagency level by staff and sorted out long before it got a point where the vice president and defense secretary are texting back and forth. The idea that the highest-ranking officials of the US government are just texting each other in the same group chat you use with your college roommates from a decade ago should raise dizzying questions about how policy is being thoughtfully decided and road-tested inside the federal government right now. This is what happens when you fill a government with all of the most unqualified people ever to hold their roles — the most unqualified vice president, the most unqualified secretary of defense, the most unqualified director of national intelligence, the most unqualified FBI director, and on and on and on. This will surely not be the last time we see Trump’s “Team of Amateurs” stumble into messes.

6) Democrats are still not up for this moment. Criticizing the Trump administration for this spectacular foul-up should be one of the easiest calls for Dems on Capitol Hill. And while there were plenty of snide social media comments from Democratic members of Congress, notably missing was, you know, the actual outrage. Senators went with memes:

Where were the calls for a special prosecutor? Where were the calls for resignations? Where were the calls for impeachments? If Democrats can’t muster the energy to be outraged about this — the world’s easiest outrage! — how are they possible up to this political moment? Every Dem should be hanging this albatross about the Trump administration and forcing every GOP member of Congress to defend or condemn this clown show of amateurs.

Really, if you’ve made it this far and not read the underlying article, I beg you: Go read it.

As I said to a friend this afternoon — here’s the crazy part: This would be an epochal career-ending scandal in any other modern presidential administration. It broke at 1 pm on a Monday, though, and so I’m not even sure it’ll be the biggest Trump scandal of today or this week….

GMG