By now, you’ve heard the story: several of President Trump’s top national security officials used a publicly available nongovernmental messaging app to make plans to bombard Yemen, accidentally added the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine to the group chat and proceeded to share information that seems, to put it mildly, highly sensitive.
Some of the chat’s messages were set to auto-delete in what seems to be a violation of federal records-keeping laws. Watching the saga unfold has been an exercise in shock compounding shock. By the end, it’s hard to figure out what to be most disgusted by: The recklessness? The incompetence? The danger? The use of prayer emojis before weapons were launched?
Add to the list: The mother lode of hypocrisy. After the Trump administration denied that any classified material was shared in the group chat, The Atlantic published the conversation nearly in full, redacting only the name of a C.I.A. employee. If the story was bad before, it’s now worse. And one thing is clear: In Trumpworld, the rules often — maddeningly — seem to apply only to other people.
The obvious comparison here, already made on repeat, is the Great Hillary Clinton Email Scandal of 2016 (“but her emails!”). As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton ran some of her emails through a personal server, a violation of protocol and a security risk, although one that the State Department later said was minimal. (“There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information,” was the ultimate conclusion from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security after a three-year investigation.)
Still, the Clinton email story stretched on for well over a year, dominating prime-time cable news segments and newspaper front pages across the nation, including this one. Just days before the 2016 election, the F.B.I. director at the time, James Comey, announced that his agency was reopening an investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails — and that story again ran on front pages nationwide. The email scandal may have been why Mrs. Clinton lost.
Republicans chanted “Lock Her Up!” and carried signs saying so at their party’s 2016 convention. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general of Florida and now the attorney general of the United States, took the convention stage and said that Mrs. Clinton “believes the laws don’t apply to her” and “deserves no security clearance.” As the crowd broke into their favorite chant, Ms. Bondi joined in. “Lock her up,” she said. “I love that.”
“Everyone knows what ‘top secret’ means,” Pete Hegseth said on Fox News about Mrs. Clinton and her emails. The comment now seems both terrifying and hilarious, given that Mr. Hegseth sent details of attack times to the group chat that included The Atlantic editor.
One problem with Mrs. Clinton’s email server, Stephen Miller tweeted in 2022, is that “foreign adversaries could easily hack classified ops & intel in real time from other side of the globe.” Mr. Miller is right on that: Foreign adversaries certainly are looking to hack into the communications of America’s leaders. Adding a journalist to a private war-planning group chat is a spectacular error. The problem is less the journalist, however, and more the mere existence of a war-planning group chat.
Generally, a screw-up of this magnitude comes with consequences. When the Securities and Exchange Commission found that several bank employees used Signal and other messaging apps that didn’t preserve their communications, as legally required, it fined those banks more than $2.5 billion collectively. Banks are required to “maintain and preserve” communications by their employees. The office of the president is encouraged to do the same.
Mr. Trump and the mostly men he has appointed to office often behave as if rules do not apply to them. That has been part of his appeal. Mr. Trump absconded with boxes of classified documents after his first term. He faced accusations of sexual harassment and some of abuse and was even found liable in civil court for one of the abuse allegations — only to be elected to a second term, thanks in part to male voters. After running on a platform of getting tough on crime, he spent his first days in office pardoning various supporters and lackeys for a host of crimes they committed, including violent ones.
The Trump administration is a group for which hypocrisy is well honed and projection practically an art form. The president’s opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts has been a cornerstone of his second term, because, he says, it results in unqualified people being hired and promoted simply on the basis of their identities. His current cabinet is among the whitest and most male of the past several decades; it is also the collectively least qualified in the modern era. Elon Musk, the unelected mega-billionaire Mr. Trump charged with weeding out government inefficiency, has fired thousands of government workers despite having no experience in government himself; he has virtually no relevant qualifications for his job, even as he tells federal workers they’re unfit for theirs.
There is a “heads I win, tails you lose” quality to all of this. When Mr. Trump ran against Mrs. Clinton, he promised to drain the swamp and take on the “deep state” he said protected her and targeted him. Once in office, he behaved abhorrently, flouting ethics rules, blurting out classified information and recently pausing the enforcement of a law that had barred American companies from bribing foreign officials. The supposedly unclassified messages in the Signal chat, now published in The Atlantic, include internal deliberations over whether to strike in Yemen or wait, as well as specific times of what were meant to be surprise attacks — the kinds of things that, if leaked in advance, could put American forces in serious jeopardy and, one imagines, possibly land the leaker in prison.
And yet even after this dramatic breach, the Trump team’s story is that no wrongdoing occurred, and that the creatures of the swamp are again conspiring against Mr. Trump and the people he represents. The common theme here is that someone else is always at fault: Either that someone else is committing a crime or, in arguing that others may have done so, is using lawfare and fake news to undermine the real good guys. Innocence isn’t based on the facts, but on who is being accused. The one unbreakable rule seems to be that Mr. Trump is always innocent.
Pointing to the umpteenth hypocrisy seems vanishingly unlikely to finally break Mr. Trump’s spell over the Republican Party or make his most loyal supporters question their devotion. But most regular Americans really don’t like hypocrisy, especially when the stakes are as high as they are here. Even if it changes nothing, it is always worth countering duplicity with truth. And it is always worth demanding integrity from our leaders — even, and perhaps especially, from the serial hypocrites.
The post The Group Chat Saga Exposes a Stunning Hypocrisy appeared first on New York Times.
