Obviously, the big story this week is the revelation that top officials in the Trump administration — among them Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, Stephen Miller, a deputy chief of staff in the White House, and Mike Waltz, the national security adviser — had discussed state secrets and coordinated military action in a Signal group chat.
The reason we know about this is that Waltz accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, to the chat. Goldberg left the chat after events — an airstrike on the Houthi group in Yemen on March 15 — confirmed its authenticity. He later published a story on the security breach.
When, after the story dropped, the administration publicly challenged Goldberg’s reporting, with Hegseth denying that he was “texting war plans” and the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accusing him of fabricating a hoax, The Atlantic published nearly the full chat logs, confirming Goldberg’s version of events.
So far, the press has been treating this, rightfully, as an enormous scandal — an unprecedented security breach that raises questions about the overall integrity of communications and record keeping in the administration. If these were junior officials, they would almost certainly face prosecution and potential prison time. If this were any other administration, there is little doubt that multiple people involved would have already resigned.
What I want to say, here, is that in addition to the main scandal, there are several other, overlapping scandals that may be even more serious than the one we’ve been focused on so far.
At the top is the strong likelihood that the use of Signal — an app that can be set to delete messages after a certain amount of time, determined by the user — was meant to circumvent both the Presidential Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act and to allow officials to plan (or scheme) outside normal channels. It is not for nothing that the specific name of the chat in question, “Houthi PC Small Group,” suggests that this use of the app is a frequent occurrence.
There is also the question of the president’s knowledge and involvement. If you read the entire conversation, you get the strong sense that not only was the president not involved in any of these deliberations, but that the participants aren’t following orders as much as they are trying to divine his intentions. It is telling that when there is uncertainty and disagreement as to whether to proceed with the airstrike, Miller weighs in to close the debate. Even Miller, however, has to play a guessing game. Donald Trump was not an attentive executive in his first term, and this group chat suggests that he may be even more checked out and disconnected from the business of his new administration. Or, to put this in the form of a question: Who, exactly, is the president right now?
The airstrike itself should be a scandal as well. The participants on the chat attest to — and openly brag about — the fact that U.S. forces bombed an apartment building — very likely killing civilians — in order to eliminate a single target. Was this a war crime? And even if it was not, the American people should probably know that their government has fully embraced a strategy of total indifference to the lives of innocent people.
The final scandal in the mix, as far as I can tell, relates to the rule of law. We all know the low likelihood that anyone involved will be held accountable for his or her actions. Attorney General Pam Bondi has already said that she isn’t planning to open an investigation. It is clear that if you work for Trump, if you show loyalty to him, then you are immune to the law and under his protection. It is a particularly egregious instance of the total degradation of the rule of law under Trump, and a reminder that the highest MAGA value is absolute impunity.
I want to make one last point. As I’ve noted in the past, the Trump administration has embraced the unitary executive as its theory of presidential power. Part of the argument for unitary executive theory is that it enhances democratic accountability. A president who can fire officials and shape executive agencies at will is a president who can be more responsive to the public. He can do the work of the people and remove anyone in the executive branch who refuses to get with the program.
Of course, as the legal scholar Patrick Sobkowski pointed out this week in a piece for Liberal Currents, our unitary president is everything but interested in democratic accountability. And in the face of a major scandal in which key officials have undermined American national security, the president has all but ruled out the chance that anyone involved will face consequences. Here’s Sobkowski:
The UET prescribes a democratically responsive president who must take care that the laws are faithfully executed. This, of course, includes holding accountable those government officials and employees who endanger Americans or violate the law. Instead, we find the very people who already serve at the pleasure of the president breaking those laws and putting American lives at risk. Yet no accountability for these violations of the public trust appears to be forthcoming.
If anything, our supposedly more accountable executive branch is poised to become even more unaccountable — and despotic — than anything we’ve seen from the supposedly out-of-touch administrative state.
Funny how that works out, isn’t it?
What I Wrote
My column this week was on how Trump, Elon Musk and the MAGA right are in denial about the reality of the political opposition arrayed against them.
One upshot of the idea that there is no such thing as genuine popular political opposition to Trump and the MAGA right — and that most, if not all, of it is the product of secret machinations by elusive billionaires and shadowy government agencies — is that the people are inherently on your side and that your opponents are illegitimate. The other is that to defeat your opposition, all you have to do is strike at the individuals and institutions that fuel it. Remove them, and you’ll have no one in your way.
I joined my editor Aaron Retica for a conversation about “anti-constitutionalism” and the Trump administration. And I participated in a round table with a few of my colleagues on liberal anger and the Democratic Party.
Now Reading
Alan Elrod on misogyny and authoritarian politics, for Liberal Currents.
The Trump administration is a test of every value we have come to say we hold dear as Americans. But it is also a frontal assault, an embodiment of violent machismo and rape as politics that is about subordinating both liberal women and a supposedly feminized country.
Fintan O’Toole on the great Irish famine, for The New Yorker.
The British did not cause the potatoes to rot in the ground. They did launch, by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century, very large-scale efforts to keep people alive, importing grain from America, setting up soup kitchens, and establishing programs of public works to employ those who were starving. But they were blinded by prejudice, ignorance, and a fanatical devotion to two orthodoxies that are very much alive in our own time: their belief that poverty arises from the moral failings of the poor and their faith in the so-called free market. The famine was so devastating because, while the mold was rotting the potatoes, mainstream British opinion was infected with a cognitive blight.
Aziz Rana on constitutional collapse in the United States, for New Left Review.
While centrist Democrats try in vain to uphold the old constitutional order, and the far right fails to replace it with anything beyond predation and xenophobia, the role of democratic-socialist forces could be to advance a viable alternative. Such an effort must take many forms. It requires defending those especially vulnerable to Trumpist assault — noncitizens, transpersons and activists on behalf of Palestinian rights, among others. Centrist politicians and commentators have been notably willing to cast aside all these groups — in part out of genuine ideological suspicion, in part out of sheer electoral opportunism. But a longstanding lesson of political opposition under authoritarian conditions — whether in the segregation-era American South or outside the United States — is that a critical means for building cross-group trust and solidarity, including for election season, is a willingness to stand on principle. This means taking risks even when it is not in your immediate self-interest.
Greg Sargent on Marco Rubio as Trump’s most dangerous enabler, for The New Republic.
Trump’s efforts to dismantle the rule of law, his deliberate betrayal of our alliances, his destruction of American soft power, and his seeming attempt to realign the United States with Russia by helping it paper over its potential war crimes — as of right now, Rubio has an active hand in all of it.
An open letter from a group of constitutional scholars on the Trump administration’s attacks on Columbia University, for The New York Review of Books.
Photo of the Week
Taken during a (relatively) recent trip to Memphis.
Now Eating: Chana Masala
Chana masala is an old staple for me, and I think this recipe, from New York Times Cooking, is a good one. The dish comes together pretty quickly and it is best served with steamed rice and a raita.
Ingredients
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2 tablespoons ghee or neutral oil
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1 tablespoon garlic paste or freshly grated garlic
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1 tablespoon ginger paste or freshly grated ginger (from a peeled 2-inch piece), plus more fresh ginger, peeled and sliced into matchsticks, for serving
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1 medium red onion, peeled and finely chopped
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2 Thai green or bird’s eye chiles, chopped
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1 teaspoon cumin seeds
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¼ teaspoon ground turmeric
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½ teaspoon ground coriander
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1 teaspoon Kashmiri or other hot red chile powder
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4 Roma tomatoes, finely chopped
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¾ teaspoon fine sea salt
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2 (15-ounce) cans of chickpeas, drained, or 3 cups of cooked chickpeas
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2 cups unsalted chicken or vegetable stock, or water
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¾ teaspoon garam masala
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2 tablespoons chopped cilantro leaves and tender stems
Directions
In a medium pot, melt ghee on medium heat. Once melted, stir in the garlic, ginger and onion. Continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until the onion softens, 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the green chiles, cumin, turmeric, coriander and chile powder. Continue stirring for 30 seconds so the spices don’t burn. Add the tomatoes and their juices and salt. Increase the heat to high and cook, stirring often, until the mixture is jammy, 5 to 7 minutes.
Stir in the chickpeas and stock. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until the mixture has thickened slightly, 5 to 7 minutes. With the back of a spoon, smash some of the chickpeas against the inside of the pot to thicken the mixture; continue smashing until it reaches the desired thickness.
Sprinkle with garam masala and top with cilantro and ginger. If desired, serve rice or roti and lemon wedges alongside.
The post The Many Overlapping Scandals of the Pete Hegseth Group Chat appeared first on New York Times.
