Yesterday was my birthday. But that’s not why this week’s post is a day late. Like a lot of folks last night I threw out the original text, about something much less serious, to try to get my head around the simply jaw-dropping breaking story by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, which has the kind of headline you love as a journalist but never want to see as a citizen:
You’ve likely heard the details by now. Your friends have probably even renamed group chats you’re in or forwarded you some of the avalanche of memes. Sen Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence committee, called it “Holy Crap on steroids” and that’s a pretty fair summary.
In Goldberg’s initially cautious and meticulously constructed article, he writes:
“After reading this chain, I recognized that this conversation possessed a high degree of verisimilitude. The texts, in their word choice and arguments, sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them, or by a particularly adept AI text generator. I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.”
He goes on to contextualise the entire remarkable event – what his Atlantic colleague David A. Graham called an “extraordinary scoop” – thus:
“I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.”
Again, if you haven’t yet, please go and read the whole thing.
President Trump – who had escalated his rhetoric towards Iran in the wake of the US attacks on Yemen at issue in the piece – appeared blindsided by the story while other Republicans followed the predictable playbook to circle the wagons: deny (despite clear evidence to the contrary), attack the source, attack the media in general, undermine the individual journalist, try to diminish the importance of the “glitch” or even try to imply that the American people simply won’t care.
Sen John Kennedy (no relation) even brushed it off as just “inside baseball”. Keep the national pastime out of your mouth, sir.
Leaving aside the far-too easily demonstrable hypocrisy of the principals’ previous statements and the whole “But her emails…” narrative that helped propel the Trump team to office in 2016, the sloppiness of this administration’s top intelligence personnel probably falls into the category of genuinely shocking, but hardly surprising.
The dynamics within the Signal chat show a lot about how the members of the group interact, particularly the extent to which Vice-President JD Vance was prepared to second guess the President before being shut down presumably by Trump adviser Stephen Miller.
Nicholas Grossman writes at The Bulwark:
“As bad as Trump’s first term was for information security, the White House included some serious professionals that contained his worst impulses. The second Trump administration has been purging those sorts of people and replacing them with loyalists (or no one), further transforming the federal government from a competent, professional civil service into a tool of corrupt authoritarianism.
“Will Trump punish Waltz or anyone else responsible for this security lapse? Someone might get fired to contain the embarrassment, but it probably won’t improve anything, as Trump prizes loyalty more than competence.”
If there is any remaining rules-based order in a team that has so far shown it cares little about such things, there should be serious consequences. But with Trump already rolling in behind both Waltz and Hegseth, by the end of today’s previously scheduled Senate hearing on the intel community’s annual threat assessment report, the administration had probably missed its window to own up and accept some small element of responsibility for their own stupidity. Now they’re just going to have to bluster through.
As for the story itself, Jon Allsop writes at CJR that:
“In the Trump era, I’ve often complained that journalists seem to have internalized the Watergate-era cliché that explosive information is typically tightly guarded and must be pried from the gloved hands of secret sources in parking garages, when, in fact, Trump says the quiet part out loud all the time—but this was a step beyond even that, the equivalent of John Mitchell inadvertently mailing Bob Woodward a round-robin headed “DNC burglars small group.”
Meanwhile Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab looks at some of the “constellations of questions” raised by the episode.
The nation should at least be relieved that it fell to someone with the integrity of Jeffrey Goldberg to behave as responsibly as he did in surreal circumstances. And he has the receipts.
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Friends Like These
It was probably bad enough that the Vice-President and Defense Secretary used the Signal chat to complain about how they “loathed” European countries, but there’s still some confusion over whether Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff was actually in Russia during the potentially vulnerable online exchanges. CBS News reports:
“Goldberg has not recounted Witkoff making any comments in the group chat until Saturday, after he left Russia and returned to the U.S., with a stop on Friday in Baku, Azerbaijan. It is unclear whether a phone issued to Witkoff by the U.S. government or a personal device was included in the Signal chat, or whether he had the device with him in Russia, but U.S. officials have been discouraged from using the messaging app on government devices, including by the Department of Defense.”
In a good summary, Garrett Graff outlines the intelligence implications for countries that might still consider themselves allies of the US, with what Bloomberg calls “a Signal chat’s worth of red flags.”
After two days of talks in Saudi Arabia, Ukraine announced plans for a limited ceasefire but that position appears to be at odds with Russian expectations, especially after the US Intelligence Assessment today that Russia has “seized the upper hand” in its war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration last week terminated a program tracking possible Russian war crimes, including a database detailing the mass deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.
New Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called an election for April 28th, with the campaign looking set to be dominated largely by the behaviour of the leader of their neighbour to the south. Before Donald Trump ramped up his rhetoric targeting Canada, Carney’s Liberal Party had faced a tough fight against the Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre.
But as Calder McHugh writes at Politico, “With the Liberal Party wielding a surge in Canadian nationalism against their main opponents, what was once a lead of about 25 points in the polls in December has shrunk to less than zero, with Liberals now projected to win an outright majority in parliament.”
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Domestic Violence
The past week in domestic politics was dominated by continuing legal wrangling over the Trump administration’s deportation flights under the Alien Enemies Act.
Philip Bump at the Washington Post explains:
“There is a long-standing divergence in how Americans view criminal justice. While everyone agrees that those who commit crimes should be punished, there is disagreement on cases in which guilt is less certain. Is it preferable to cast a wide net, ensuring that criminals face sanction even if some innocent people do, as well? Or should we instead focus more narrowly, allowing some criminal actors to potentially escape accountability in order to limit the punishment of the innocent?”
But with the position of the courts and leading law firms at every level in flux – with Speaker Mike Johnson floating the possibility of Congress eliminating some federal courts and with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito appearing yesterday to suggest that obeying judges can be optional – it’s worth considering what Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times this week, about the President having moved from being unconstitutional to anti-constitutional.
“The new president has, in just the first two months of his second term, performed a number of illegal and unconstitutional acts. But the defining attribute of his administration thus far is its anti-constitutional orientation. Both of its most aggressive and far-reaching efforts — the impoundment of billions of dollars in congressionally authorized spending and the attempt to realize the president’s promise of mass deportation — rest on fundamentally anti-constitutional assertions of executive authority.”
And let’s not even touch Trump’s EO today that would allow Elon Musk’s DOGE to assist in reviewing publicly available voter rolls. Democracy Docket warned that the order could “vastly expand the executive branch’s power over federal elections and could potentially disenfranchise millions. The move is certain to be swiftly challenged in court.”
As is usual by now, events become increasingly unhinged as the week goes on, so Trump’s move on Thursday to formally shut down the Department of Education was quickly overshadowed by growing chaos and uncertainty around the Social Security Administration ahead of the Senate confirmation hearing today for Trump’s appointee to run the agency.
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Life Is Not A Spectator Sport
Finally, the other debacle at the Defense Department this past week, of course, was how the story of Jack Roosevelt Robinson and some other military heroes was erased then reinstated amid a “DEI purge” at the DoD website, together with quite the “official explanation” for the excision.
Terrence Moore at Forbes called out MLB’s spinelessness in a piece entitled ‘Don’t Be Shocked If MLB Strikes Out Jackie Robinson Day With DEI Fastball’. Moore writes:
“Weeks before the Department of Defense either directly or indirectly fired that warning shot toward MLB with the Robinson/website thing, [Commissioner Rob] Manfred told baseball owners during a meeting in Palm Beach, Florida that “our values, particularly our values on diversity, remain unchanged, but another value that is pretty important to us is we always try to comply with what the law is.”
“Then Manfred added, "There seems to be an evolution going on here. We're following that very carefully. Obviously, when things get a little more settled, we'll examine each of our programs and make sure that while the values remain the same that we're also consistent with what the law requires."
What most obviously ties these stories together is the apparent propensity of the Trump administration for saying the quiet parts out loud, disregarding norms, not caring who’s listening or who might be offended, and then failing dismally to take responsibility for their own actions.
If only there was someone to stand up to them…
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When I started this project I wrote:
“Like America itself, every baseball game can be compelling and frustrating in equal measure, but at least at the ball game everyone is playing from the same set of rules. That doesn’t seem to be the case in much of the rest of the country at the moment and it’s something I hope we’ll get to talk about.
“At a ball game, you almost always see something you’ve never seen before. In today’s America, honestly, God only knows what we might see next.”
I’d been planning to start separate – shorter – weekly posts once the season started; emphasising the increasing distinction between the rules-based relative order of the baseball world and the unpredictability of what now passes for our “real” world.
So I’ll aim to do the first baseball-specific post next Wednesday, April 2nd. The politics and society stuff will continue to be at weekends.
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As always, thanks for reading. You might also enjoy these previous posts:
What Is It Good For?, March 16.
‘Once In A Generation Moment’, February 23.
Loyalty Is The Only Currency, November 14.
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