“It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up” is a horrible cliché of Washington journalism, but nonetheless it fits the Signal scandal that engulfed the Trump administration this week.
The apparently unwitting inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, in high-level national security preparations for a strike against the Houthis, is both a great story and a grave embarrassment. But it’s not nearly as fundamentally damaging as the wall-to-wall coverage might suggest.
The Trump White House’s reflexive attempt to attack the messenger, on the other hand, is an illustration of the new administration’s biggest political problem: its difficulty in speaking to anyone who isn’t already invested in its cause.
The scandal itself belongs to the world of Trump’s first term, when an administration took power unprepared and stumbled through various chaotic episodes that yielded similarly stumblebum attempts to take the White House down. The artistic touchstone for these follies was the Coen brothers’ mordant comedy “Burn After Reading,” a Washington movie about hapless people blundering their way through an imagined world of international skulduggery.
But Trump and his allies survived these spates of folly because the surface chaos didn’t yield real disasters. For the first three years, the economy kept growing, the stock market stayed high, and American foreign policy avoided new wars and major debacles — and then the pandemic’s arrival felt more like an act of God than an act of Trump.
This created a certain public tolerance for Trumpian follies — and a certain nostalgia, when the Biden era proved war-torn and inflationary, for an era when D.C. meltdowns coexisted with greater general peace.
The Signal scandal fits that first-term pattern. It was a total failure of operational security that did not derail the operation itself, an official-Washington debacle but not a geopolitical defeat. And for many Americans, the Washingtonian disappointment that Trump has not yet demanded the heads of Michael Waltz or Pete Hegseth probably seems a little absurd when you consider how many recent geopolitical failures did not yield resignations.
No leading officials were fired over the Iraq/W.M.D. debacle. There were no notable resignations when Barack Obama’s Libya intervention turned that country into a war-torn terrorist haven. No heads rolled when the Afghanistan papers revealed official dishonesty, and Biden’s foreign policy team did not quit after the Afghanistan withdrawal became a bloody rout.
Given that record, you can argue that Hegseth or Waltz should resign over operational security failures even if those failures didn’t have tragic consequences — but it’s silly to act shocked when they do not.
But then along with the scandal there’s the reaction, the decision by Trump officialdom to immediately go to war with Goldberg and The Atlantic, to rally the president’s base by trying to make the story about the liberal media and its anti-Trump vendettas.
First, this didn’t work, insofar as even 60 percent of Republicans polled said the scandal was a serious one. Second, even if it had worked, it would have worked only on the part of the country that the Trump G.O.P. can already count on. Few persuadable Americans, confronted with the basic facts of Signalgate, would be induced to discount the scandal by attacks on a journalist who got the story just because of an absurd administration blunder and handled it with appropriate caution. A Trump administration interested in reaching such voters should have just apologized and then clammed up.
Is the Trump administration interested in reaching those voters? That is unclear. The White House knows that its political position is weakening; it’s sufficiently worried about looming special elections that it withdrew Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be U.N. ambassador so she can keep her House seat instead.
But much of what the administration does and says day by day seems targeted to voters who are sure to stick with Trump — from the Canadian trade war to the Greenland gambit to the ongoing drumbeat of cuts in federal agencies to the very online, bad-cop communications strategy.
There are controversial things the president is doing, a harsher immigration policy especially, that the public clearly voted for. But how many swing voters picked Trump because they were excited to cut, say, funding for substance-abuse treatment? I think the answer is not many, and it’s not clear that anyone in the White House is charged with asking, at any given pass: What would a non-MAGA voter think of this?
With that said, the end of the week brought the very un-Republican news that the administration is considering a higher upper-bracket tax rate to pay for Trump’s no-tax-on-tips promise. I do not expect that to happen, but the mere consideration of the move suggests an awareness of voting blocs besides the base. The administration’s political position, weakened but not yet collapsing, will depend on whether that awareness can increase.
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