The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 27 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We’re now in day three of the fallout from the shocking news that President Trump’s top advisors accidentally admitted a journalist for The Atlantic onto a highly sensitive discussion of an upcoming military operation. But today we’re going to try to dig into the deeper aspects of the story: what it says about the failures of right-wing populist and MAGA governance, and what it reveals about deeper schisms inside MAGA ideology.
There are some big new developments here. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered an incredibly weak defense of this travesty. The Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg revealed most of the text chain he’d been admitted to, and it contained a ton of operational detail. And importantly, Trump is reportedly frustrated over this story, and his top allies are deeply exasperated by his team’s handling of it. Today, we’re talking about all this with Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, who has a new piece digging into the underlying meanings of this whole scandal. Good to have you back on, Zack.
Zack Beauchamp: Hey Greg, I’m very happy to be here, though I suppose this scandal isn’t really a cause for excitement. It’s a pretty dark moment in American national security.
Sargent: Sure is. Well, let’s start with some of the dark factual stuff. Goldberg released most of the text chain, and it contained a whole lot of incredibly specific stuff about the coming operation against Yemen’s Houthis. Yet here’s what Hegseth had to say about all this on Wednesday afternoon.
Pete Hegseth (audio voiceover): Nobody’s texting war plans. Well, I noticed this morning out came something that doesn’t look like war plans. And as a matter of fact, they even changed the title to attack plans because they know it’s not war plans. There’s no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information.
Sargent: Zack, Trump’s propagandists are now insisting on this weird distinction between war plans and attack plans. Hegseth is saying there that The Atlantic used the term “attack plans”—not “war plans”—on its new story revealing the text chain, and this is supposed to show that the info wasn’t all that sensitive. But it was sensitive and it was shared in an unsecured setting. Now, I don’t claim expertise on this matters, but Hegseth is clearly leading the core point here. What do you think?
Beauchamp: Yeah, this is crazy. No one has ever heard of a distinction between attack plans and war plans until literally this morning. The administration wasn’t even using it yesterday from what I recall, right? This is a direct response to the word choice in the Atlantic headline. Had The Atlantic said “war plans,” they would have run with something else or argued it’s not a war plan because of some reason. And the arguments are frankly ludicrous if you look at DOD regulations on classification, on what qualifies as classified. The things that are in that chat include the specific time at which the strike will be taking place, the types of munitions that will be used and the types of aircraft that will be delivering the payloads, and knowledge that they attacked a civilian building—which, by the way, is troubling in and of itself, something that people aren’t really talking about. That would have raised a lot of flags in previous administrations. Or at least they claimed that they attacked an apartment building.
All of these things—nature of the target, timing of the target—are necessarily classified, the kind of thing that you cannot discuss on an unsecured private app like Signal. [The app] is secure for private use but not for government use, for top-level officials talking about really sensitive details. It’s just not good enough to be viewed as safe for actors likely to be targeted by foreign intelligence. So nothing in what Hegseth just said makes the slightest amount of sense as a defense of what he had done. And he’s the one who shared all that information, by the way. Of the two people who deserve the most blame on the chat, it’s Mike Waltz for creating and inviting Jeffrey Goldberg, and Pete Hegseth for sharing all of these details that would never be anywhere near something like this.
Sargent: Right. Mike Waltz is the national security adviser. I want to point out before we move on, Goldberg notes in his story that, as you say, this information ordinarily would be classified. But Trump and his minions are now saying it wasn’t without even saying why it shouldn’t have been. It clearly should have been—and honestly, it probably was. That’s the thing. It was classified.
Beauchamp: Recall that Trump said at one point during the various controversies surrounding his legal cases before he was president again that information being released by Trump or just decided even privately by Trump to be declassified was necessarily declassified. This is a novel legal theory, one that I do not think would have held up very well in court if it had been tested. But it’s possible they’ve come up with some weird justification like that for why it is no longer classified. Bottom line, to say that this was not classified at the time that Hegseth shared it is just crazy.
Sargent: Yeah. I think a key point here, though, is that Hegseth and many of these others like Waltz are actually trying to appeal to Trump by speaking to his desire for a fight-at-all-costs, never-surrender, never-admit-error posture, but it’s not working. Jonathan Lemire of The Atlantic reports that Trump is frustrated over the sloppiness of the whole mess and the bad coverage it has inspired. Politico reports that allies of Trump are exasperated by Waltz’s handling of this, in particular his strategy of doubling down; one senior official says, “People are mad that Waltz didn’t just admit a mistake and move on.” The thing is, Zack, they’re locked into this never-surrender posture and it’s clearly backfiring now, right?
Beauchamp: When they said yesterday that there weren’t going to be any war plans, they had to know that Goldberg was in the chat—that he had all the records of the chat and had these sensitive details and he could just publish them. So they’re relying on these dodgy distinctions and perversions of logic to get around the fact that their position was untenable to begin with and counting on the ability to insist that reality isn’t what it is to a significant portion of the American population to get away with it.
As you say, I’m sure [what] the smarter people in the Trump administration are thinking right now is if we had just said, We made a mistake, this was bad, we’re going to look into how it happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again, which is how previous administrations would have handled this, by the way. And [they would have] probably ended up firing at least one person who was involved in this at high level. There’s a reason that was the old playbook. Sometimes, the smart thing to do politically is to admit fault, but that received wisdom that used to be normal on a routine part of our politics got blown up during the Trump era—at least on one side of the aisle.
Sargent: Yes, and that gets me to where I really want to go with this. I want to go big picture. What we’re seeing here, in some ways, is a stark illustration of why right-wing populist governance and autocracy are undesirable. You’ve got the inability to admit error, the refusal to accept or internalize constructive criticism from the opposition, the ministering above all to the cult-like defense of the leader. This is the kind of thing you see among some partisans on both parties maybe, but they’re really hallmarks of authoritarian populism.
You wrote a very good book about this, Zack. It’s called The Reactionary Spirit. And so I want to back up a little more: The way liberal democracy is supposed to work theoretically is more people, including people with opposing views, have input into how to do things and how to achieve much needed course corrections. Trump rejects all of that. Your book talks about how the United States is flirting with autocracy. Can you talk about how what we’re seeing now typifies all the tendencies you wrote about?
Beauchamp: Greg, that’s a great point. Thank you for connecting this to what are the ultimate stakes here. One thing that is a tendency across authoritarian movements—and to differing degrees, but it’s generally consistent not just in authoritarian governments as your theme but also in political movements that are themselves dedicated to authoritarian ideas, that take on internal trappings of a general authoritarian system—is a tendency to select for loyalty over competence. And if you look at the people who are in that chat, a lot of them are not people who one would have trusted with sensitive information in the past. Waltz maybe as a former representative, but Hegseth here is the really clear example.
From his military service, I would say Pete Hegseth was certainly nobody’s idea of a high-ranking officer or the person that you would have expected to lead the Pentagon. He’s not a general or anything like that. And then after that, he was a Fox News commentator. Yeah, he talked about national security stuff, but no one saw him as a particularly thoughtful guy or someone who was a really detailed and intelligent policy wonk. He was an ideologue who wrote a book about how the crusades are a positive analogy for America to look back to—the kind of person who, in a sane polity, would never be anywhere close to what’s arguably the second most powerful position in the U.S. government. Arguably, I say, but there’s certainly a case that one can make from that. Yet, here he is, this guy who Trump liked the way that he looked on TV.
And Trump talks about people being from “central casting” a lot; he likes when people look the way that they’re supposed to in his mind for a particular job. And Hegseth had demonstrated, in addition to looking the part, that he was able to play the part Trump wants, which is someone who will defer to him at all costs and do whatever the president wants done, specifically what he wants done related to trying to bring the institution that he’s leading in line with political objectives. That’s what a lot of these people have been selected for: their willingness to try and clean house of elements of a political opposition or a nonpartisan civil service. And the kinds of people who will do that are very rarely the kinds of people who are the best people for the job.
This is an underappreciated point about why democracy works so well. People wonder: How is it that a system in which political disagreement is aired publicly, people are fighting all the time, leadership changes all the time historically produced better outcomes than systems where one person can be in charge, set long-term plans, try to do everything in this consistent rational way over time? Why does that produce better outcome, better economic growth, higher levels of innovation, stronger militaries? A democracy has been consistently shown to be better. And a really important part of that story is that because democracy prizes loyalty to the political system as an abstract ideal rather than to particular cadres of leadership, it allows you to select for the people who are the best at any particular job.
It doesn’t succeed always in those—no political system always elevates the best people at all time—but it has a better track record in ensuring that people from all different political persuasions, all walks of life can access and participate in collective decision-making. And that has led to historically high qualities of governments in democratic systems. When authoritarian movements inside of democracies take power, they try to make them more autocratic. And that brings these features of authoritarian politics into a democratic system so it ends up resembling in its functioning something that has generally, even setting aside the morality and the desirability of democracy as a normative goal, a much worse track record at things like national security over time.
Sargent: In addition to what you’re saying there, though, I want to try to bear down on this point. As you mentioned earlier, in a sane polity, what we’d be seeing is them saying, You know, we really screwed this up. They’d be admitting error. They would be saying, We are going to try to fix this now. Instead, they just wall out any and all opposition because they think that what Trump wants above all—and rightly so, as he does want this—is a no-surrender posture that places his infallibility at the center of everything. That, I think, is a hallmark of the type of governments you’re talking about, and it gets at why we’re getting terrible outcomes. We’re in the middle of this crazy crisis where we’re fighting over the meaning of “war plans” versus “attack plans” instead of fixing the problem. Isn’t this all an outgrowth of the type of authoritarian populism you’re talking about?
Beauchamp: Yes. And we have seen it time and again. There’s a cost of living crisis in Hungary right now, brought on by incompetent economic management by the Orbán government for a long period of time. Look at an example from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, the disaster in Venezuela—the descent of what was a relatively successful, stable country into an autocratic hellhole—is primarily the result of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro’s mismanagement. And they’re not just that they adopted bad economic policies, but that those bad economic policies were unable to be course corrected because they were built in a charismatic authoritarian popular system.
You can say the same thing about Turkey recently, which is another really good example. And that’s just when it comes to economic mismanagement. Oftentimes, when people look back at history, they will lionize certain military leaders and the structure of militaries from authoritarian states, but as a point of fact democracies have a better record at winning wars. It’s an underappreciated political science finding, but there are a variety of reasons for that. It’s not just that they’re more competent administratively. Part of it is that they have better economic bases typically, but part of it also is that they can recruit a wider swath of citizens to participate. It’s funny, Pete Hegseth once said that the idea that diversity is our strength is one of the greatest lies about the U.S. military. It’s actually not true.
Diversity really is, in a very literal sense, the U.S. military strength. There’s a great book by Jason Lyall, who’s a professor at Dartmouth, who studies military effectiveness, arguing and showing quantitatively that ethnically diverse militaries that encourage people from different backgrounds inside a society to participate and do more to make people from minorities feel like they’re treated equally actually tend to perform better on the battlefield than ones with more ethnic stratification. And I don’t like to make the instrumental case for democracy, to say democracy is good because it produces better outcomes, because that seems like too much territory. We should be insisting as a matter of principle that it is good for people to choose who gets to vote for them, and it is bad that we have a government right now that wants to undermine the ability to engage in popular self-governance. That’s bad, as a matter of moral principle.
Sargent: Zack, I agree.
Beauchamp: I figured you would. But I think sometimes it’s important to remind ourselves that democracy is something that’s valuable because we care about it. It’s valuable because it makes all of our lives better in very concrete and tangible senses. And the ways, and you’re exactly right to frame it this way, in which an authoritarian populist movement is making American government more authoritarian is damaging its capacity to deliver on outcomes that we care about.
Sargent: And we’re seeing that very starkly with this particular incident. I want to bring in one last idea. Your piece in Vox dug into another underlying story here, which is that this whole thing shows how MAGA ideology is fundamentally conflicted. JD Vance’s texts showed an eagerness to not come to the aid of our allies. But at the same time, most of them were so gung-ho about how they were pulling off a military operation that they were basically doing teenage-style emojis with each other; they were very transfixed with how this was showing off our national prowess and our strength and our ability to act in the world. Can you talk about that fundamental contradiction?
Beauchamp: The emojis—I am hung up on those. Because some of them, like the fist and stuff…. If one of my editors had messaged me to say, Hey, look how well the story is doing, and that I get a lot of readers, I might respond with an explosion and a fist. But I feel like that would be appropriate because it’s not anyone’s lives at stake. There’s a fundamental unseriousness there that’s beneath people who should be making these decisions about life and death. By one report, I saw 53 people died in this airstrike, and who knows what percentage of them are civilians. That’s not something you just fist-bump about and treat as this semi-serious or “burp-privately” successful matter. It’s much graver than that.
And I bring that up not just as a tangent because it struck me, but because it speaks to the nature of the question you’re asking, which is about this ideological tension. There is this inability to decide on what America First means among the America First types. At times, it means we want to withdraw from the world, prioritize domestic affairs, the culture war against liberals—and all this stuff of providing security for Europe just gets in the way; we should be focusing more at home, paring down our role in the Middle East, etc.
But it also sometimes means America should be number one. When you listen to Trump talk about the U.S. military, he’s never the restrainer or “retrencher” who says, I want to shrink the defense budget and scale down America’s military might. What he says is we need to have the greatest military in the world, we always should, and I will make sure that we have the capacity to do that, and no country will come close to us best and most beautiful warships. Those are at odds with the other version of America First that’s embodied by Trump’s trade policies, approach to allies. You can’t have both of those things at once. You can’t be both the country that dominates the world and be the country that is pulling back from the world.
This inability to think through those tensions, which often gets defined as the JD Vance camp of the restrainers versus the Rubio camp of those who are more assertive about the rest of the world…. And that’s part of it. I’ve done that myself. It’s a shorthand that’s easy, but I think it’s actually more fundamental than that. I think within those people, there is an unreflectedness, an inability to think about the nature of those contradictions. They engage in both of those versions of America First at once. And that’s why I led this comment with the stuff about the flippant emojis, because that’s the level of thought that we’re getting. It’s celebrating a win in the simplest sense because they don’t think about it in a deeper way. There’s not a lot of profound reflection going on here. These are not, to quote Succession, “serious people.” They’re not.
Sargent: I think you can loop this all back to why right-wing populism and autocracy are undesirable. These things turn heavily on a combination of very poorly thought-through ideas about what’s actually in the national interest, like Vance not wanting to “bail out Europe,” as he says. They also thrive on symbolic and empty displays of national strength. Everything is spectacle. It’s all unmoored from any effort to elaborate a deeper vision. I think we see this with Hegseth. Am I right?
Beauchamp: Oh, definitely. Definitely. He’s a lightweight, right? He’s never displayed any deeper thought about the nature of military power beyond it’s good to have strong people who are men and white in powerful positions. And I wish I was being flip here. I wish I wasn’t accurately describing what the man believes. He posts videos of I went and did a morning workout with some people in the military, as if that is where strength comes from: from a weight room as opposed to from having a large industrial base, from having robust intelligence sharing with partners, from having cutting-edge technologies produced by government grants that Elon Musk is slashing—the holistic way in which people who think about grand strategy and defense policy talk about the fundamentals of American military strength.
We were just starting to have this really serious conversation after the Ukraine War broke out about how America’s defense industrial base was weakened and not producing enough weapons because [we were using a lot of it]. It was hard for us to produce enough weapons to supply ourselves and the Ukrainians at the same time after a certain point, so there’s a real rethinking going on in serious military corners about how to do that. But can you imagine Pete Hegseth saying the words “defense industrial base” and really knowing what they mean? He is the embodiment of this. He is spectacle. He’s a Fox News host. I’ve seen a picture of the man hovered in champagne. And setting aside his alcoholism, is this the level of seriousness that we’re bringing here to this really important topic?
Sargent: I think that says it all. It turns out that there’s a whole lot to say about 30 seconds of Hegseth’s buffoonery. Zack, listen, man, it’s really great to talk to you as always. Thanks for coming on.
Beauchamp: Hey, I love your show, Greg. Love being on. Thanks.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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