Dan Pfeiffer/The Message Box:
The Stunning Trump Leak Should be a Major Scandal
Texting war plans to a reporter by accident is a historic breach borne of idiocy
Accidentally sharing war plans with a reporter should be a massive scandal. It’s one of the biggest (and dumbest) national security leaks in recent history. The Trump National Security Advisor invited a reporter to listen in on some of the most intimate and secretive conversations among the team. This is no different than inviting someone without security clearance to hide under the White House Situation Room table.
The circumstances of this leak show a stunning disregard for operational security among Trump’s top aides. These conversations should not be happening on Signal. These sorts of discussions usually happen in person or on the classified email system, not on an app that you can download for free from the Internet.
Natalie Korach/Vanity Fair:
Trump Administration Attacks Journalist for Its Own National Security Screw-Up
The White House and its MAGA media allies went into full spin mode over Cabinet members accidentally texting war plans to The Atlantic’s top editor, tarring him as a “hoax” artist.
“So you are talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes,” [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth said of [The Atlantic’s Jeffrey] Goldberg. “This is a guy that peddles in garbage,” he continued. The Defense Secretary also argued that “nobody was texting war plans” in the Signal group—a narrative that runs completely counter to Goldberg’s reporting.
“That’s a lie,” Goldberg bluntly responded while appearing Monday night on Kaitlan Collins’ The Source. “He was texting war plans. He was texting attack plans.” The information revealed in the group text included “When targets were going to be targeted, how they were going to be targeted, who was at the targets, when the next sequence of attacks were happening,” Goldberg explained. He added that The Atlantic opted not to publish the information “because it felt like it was too confidential.”
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I get what the op sec concerns are and the hypocrisy and all that, but this is obviously for me on the low end of scandal and pathetically atrocious action coming out of this horror show of an administration; it IS however a wonderfully vivid illustration about how we are ruled by the absolute…
— Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24.bsky.social) 2025-03-25T22:24:48.591Z
New York Times:
The Atlantic’s editor says the Signal chat contained classified material, contradicting White House denials.
Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor who wrote about being included in a Signal chat before a recent American missile strike in Yemen, rejected assertions by the Trump administration on Tuesday that details shared in the chat didn’t include classified information, saying simply: “They are wrong.”
Chris Brennan/USA Today:
Leaks, and the leaking leakers who leak them: A Trump saga – on Signal
Even for a Trump administration, this level of ineptitude is enormous. Trump, asked about the fiasco Monday, played dumb – convincingly – while instinctively attacking the news media for telling the truth.
David Rothkopf/Daily Beast:
Why Signal Leak Shambles Isn’t Even Trump’s F***wits’ Worst Foreign Policy Move So Far
Don’t be distracted by the fact that some of those involved are clearly a few sandwiches shy of a picnic.
The stupidity and recklessness that had to be behind coordinating highest-level policy on a platform like Signal (which is not approved for sensitive or classified government communications) and, apparently, on personal cellphones, reaches world record levels.
It is easy to make fun of, but is, of course, no laughing matter. As one former high-ranking top military official said to me: “Hire clowns, expect a circus. And frankly, I’ve never seen a screwup on this level before. In normal times, they all should go.”
This incident is appalling in its own right—but it hardly is the administration’s biggest foreign policy blunder. Rather, it is emblematic of a dangerous pattern. Indeed, if doing damage to America’s national security interests is not the primary goal of the Trump team (and I’m not sure it’s not), it is certainly a clear consequence of many of their actions.
The Bulwark:
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.
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.
Jose Vasquez/USA TODAY:
I'm an Army veteran. Trump's attempts to erase our history at Arlington sicken me.
The erasure of Medgar Evers – a World War II veteran and civil rights hero – from the Arlington National Cemetery website is not just an affront to his legacy but a blatant attempt to rewrite history.
They are either retreating from these purges because of backlash or because multiple and major mistakes were made, which raises troubling questions about senior administration officials' competence and error-correction oversight.
JV Last/The Bulwark:
How to Think (and Act) Like a Dissident Movement
AOC, solidarity, and people power.
I was wrong about one big thing in 2024: I did not realize that most American institutions—the media, the legal world, big business, universities, the tech sector—would immediately capitulate to Trump.
In 2016 I believed the Republican party’s submission was the result of the GOP’s particular failings. That was incorrect. The Republican party was merely the first institution to accept authoritarianism because it was the first institution Trump targeted.
We now see that most institutions are weak in the face of authoritarianism.
JVL’s Law is: Any institution not explicitly anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump. I originally thought this would apply only to media orgs. Turns out that it applies to everyone and everything. From Ross Douthat to John Fetterman, from Paul Weiss to Facebook. All of our institutions are the Republican party now.
These are Democrats fighting back.
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
I fear for the 2026 World Cup under Trump
Plus, Dems needs to act like GOP on Yemen chat scandal
I don’t normally get as worked up as some people do about security breaches, because the journalist in me believes the U.S. government keeps far too many secrets, not too few. But this one is different, because of the legitimate risks to our rank-and-file troops and intel assets posed by this careless conversation and the chance this information could fall into the wrong hands. Politically, the gross incompetence here could, and should, resonate with some voters who’ve been stubbornly oblivious to Trump’s assaults on democracy during his first two-plus months in the Oval Office.
If this had happened under Joe Biden or some other Democratic president, we know the Republicans on Capitol Hill would be howling loudly, and 24 hours a day, on the Senate floor or Fox News and everywhere else, for the heads of every person involved in this disaster. In this case, I think it’s a moment for top Democrats — who are rightfully under fire for their milquetoast response to Trump so far — to finally act like their aggressive GOP counterparts. The minority leaders — Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries — and others need to go before the cameras today and demand that Waltz, Hegseth, and perhaps other key officials resign. Who knows? Maybe the massive stupidity of the Yemen group chat is the tiny air vent that can cause their Death Star to finally blow up.
David Schuster on Trump and the Easter Bunny:
