Just look at these idiots
The latest Trump administration scandal would be unbelievable, but it comes with screenshots. PLUS: Election coverage! And sports!
If you have made it through the week without learning the details of the latest scandal in Trumpland, here is the gist:
Mike Waltz, the National Security Adviser, made a group chat on the Signal messaging app that included a bunch of senior members of the Trump administration — the head of the CIA, the Vice-President, the director of National Intelligence, and many others — for the purposes of discussing a pending military strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
This is bad. Extremely bad. Signal is encrypted, which is why it is popular with journalists for source protection, but cellphones can be hacked, which is why senior government officials should never, ever discuss sensitive matters on their personal devices. (All government communications are also supposed to take place on government devices for legal and record-keeping reasons, but in this story that’s like the amuse bouche of the many linked scandals.)
Waltz also managed to include Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic magazine, on this chat. Purely by accident. Maybe he was looking for a different Jeff in his contacts, maybe Goldberg is listed next to someone else, maybe he just accidentally thumbed his name while scrolling down. It happens. It is also why you should not discuss military plans on a chat app.
Goldberg, understandably, did not think this was real:
I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.
(His whole tale can be read here.)
But, it was real. Within days Goldberg was seeing these officials debate the merits of the military attack, including Vance questioning whether Donald Trump even knew what was happening, the attack’s eventual approval, and even live details of the particulars of the military strike and its results, including a fist-bump emoji.
Goldberg could only be certain that this whole thing was accurate, and not some elaborate ruse, when news reports confirmed that targets in Yemen had, in fact, been attacked.
All of this is, obviously, insane. And so his original piece was published. It also contained this notable part, in which he discusses attack plans:
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.
This was a perfectly clear indication that there was more in the chat than Goldberg had published. But the Trump people, once the story broke, of course all acted like it was no big deal at all, because nothing too sensitive was in the messages — and ignoring the fact that the simple existence of this kind of discussion on personal cellphones was a scandal in itself.
Their denials led Goldberg to publish more from the chat, including what are obviously extremely sensitive 🚨🚨military details🚨🚨. Scheduled times, planes involved, number of strikes, etc. The Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth even closed this part of the chat with “We are currently clean on OPSEC”. Operational security, he meant. While a journalist was sitting there on the chat, along with any number of potential adversaries who are adept at hacking phones. Chef’s kiss.
This story is absolutely bonkers for a host of reasons, not least of which is that indicates that Trump’s people are doing this stuff all the time. What, you think the first and only time they decided to communicate on Signal about sensitive government business was also the time they happened to inadvertently include a journalist — one with a lot of national-security expertise! — in the group chat?
But the part I enjoy the most is that, as they scrambled to deny and pretend none of it mattered, they walked into the most obvious of traps: that Goldberg could simply publish the parts of the chat that he literally said he had refrained from publishing.
One minute the Trump people are saying that there was nothing of value in the transcript, and the next:
These people are fools.
Please disregard the elephant over there
The Canadian election campaign kicked off on Sunday, and I went to Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s big launch in North York. It was the first campaign rally I’ve covered since the Ontario election of 2014, and it was all pretty familiar. A crowd of supporters, lots of people waving signs, a rousing speech during which plants in the room make sure that people cheer at the right moments. There have not been great advances in political-rally theatre in the past decade, is what I’m saying.
For me, the big question of this election is whether Poilievre will make it more about Trump and less about the Liberals. On the evidence of that first rally, he does not seem so inclined. Here’s my report, for the Toronto Star:
The sports section
My latest column for theScore considers a goalie-interference controversy, and lands on the thing that is most annoying about replay review: if you are going to have it, just make the best call!
I also wrote about the Tampa Bay Rays and their would-be stadium for theScore. It is a bizarre story, in which the owner spent two decades trying to get funding for a new building and then backed out of the deal at the last minute, but I think it is also worth remembering that these are the same people who once pretended that a team split between Tampa and Montreal was actually a sensible idea. That part cannot be mentioned enough.