Totally agree, the problem started when a certain leader decided to appoint "LOYAL" subjects. It turns out "loyalty" doesn't qualify as capable of doing the job correctly. I've been saying this for a while now. Just because someone would "kiss your feet" doesn't mean they are qualified to do a job as head of the militiary in this country. He had been in the military for only a short period of time and work for a right wing tv station after that. To me that doesn't qualify him to work as the head of the Defense Department in our government.
Hegseth is a moron. But then again, so is his boss and every Senator that voted to confirm him. And, why has no one asked Musk about the morons in this government he is funding.
Look, I love Pete Buttigieg but face it, this country is NOT going to elect a woman of any color or a gay person to the presidency. It doesn't matter that Pete is one of the smartest politicians out there, people will not see past his sexual orientation. The Dem Party must find a white, straight, smart, middle aged male to run if we want to stand a chance of winning the White House again. I hate it, but I'm a realist.
I wholeheartedly agree. Buttigieg is brilliantly smart and would probably make a fine president but he will not get elected. No way no how! This will all be a moot point if we have seen our last free and fair presidential election…
My favorite bitter-sweet morsel is a truism of ETTD - when the chips are down and trump and/or his henchmen/women want to use a msg platform when it matters to them, they don't use zuck's product(s). They went to Signal instead. All that sucking up and appeasement will get you *nothing*! Delicious.
Hegseth better have a few drinks, he's raging like he needs one to settle down! Bets on how long he keeps Thus job. In way over his head, spinning outta control!
Here's how I see this working. Trumplicants do indeed "flood the zone" with often contradictory and often laughably false stories. And here's why. If there are 20 different "excuses" out there, they know that their supporters will find one of them at least the tiniest bit plausible. That's the one that they'll latch onto to believe. And they'll simply ignore the other ones. So, in the end, all of the supporters can comfort themselves that Trump/GOP is right after all.
When I’d listen to right wing talk shows like Mark Levin to find out what BS they were saying they always sound mad and serious. I’ve been listening to the Bulwark and Dems on the leak of life threatening information and nobody seems mad. Maybe serious but not mad. Why can’t we get as amped up as Levin and Hannitty ? Why aren’t Dems in Congress behaving like Gaetz?
Trump is a bit of a boob, who appears to have appointed a cabinet of boobs. Nothing against boobs. Half the country is below average right? I just don't want them running wars.
My mind was all in a tizzy yesterday as thoughts kept swirling around my head about how this chat fiaso could have happened. I went for my long walk and then tried to fine-tune my argument so I'm posting it here again, hoping someone with investigation authority will give it some thought and maybe do something to at least disprove my idea:
What if Trump asked his people to come up with a way to communicate without government oversight and Signal was the best thing they could come up with?
What if Trump always participated, but went by an alias, say “John Gold,” with initials JG?
Since he doesn't like to leave any fingerprints on illegal stuff, what if other people ran the agenda and asked questions with Trump's silence being the nod of approval for decisions?
What if, as a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg (also JG) had, at some point in time, contacted Waltz or someone else in the group, with questions for an Atlantic story, or verification of a quote, therefore ending up as a contact on those phones?
Would it be easy to have mixed up the two on a Signal chat invite, both with JG initials? Especially at 1:30 in the morning when people could understandably be groggy? Even if Trump had used his old “John Barron” alias from the old days, would it be easy to mix up JB and JG, especially since B and G are so close on the keyboard?
If that error was made, could it be possible that all 18 of them thought Trump was on the chat with them at the time of the bombing decisions and it was just business as usual?
It may sound crazy, but stranger things have happened.
It explains why nobody objected or sensed that a stranger was on the line.
It explains the oddity and disbelief we all felt at the idea of them seemingly making high-level decisions without Trump's okay (because, unbeknownst to us, they were all mistakenly under the impression that he WAS on the line, giving his silent approval).
It also explains the terror they are all feeling under scrutiny from Congress and the press as the whole scheme starts to unravel – including the fact that this was probably not a one-off, but may have been their mode of communication for months as they avoid reporting conversations to the National Archives as required by law.
It also explains Trump's “I know nothing” attitude as he tries to distance himself as far away as possible.
It actually makes sense that such a monumental national security breach would have a fantastical story behind it –what other explanation could possibly make sense?
At this point, all their phones, governmental and private, should be confiscated but we all know the Trump Justice Dept. will do nothing to investigate this fiasco. Congress must subpoena these chat participants, as well as their staff. Get them one-on-one into a SCIF and ask them pointed questions, framed by a good lawyer, and someone is bound to crack.
The least they should ask: Why were you using personal cell phones? Are you reporting all conversations to NARA? Do you ever contact Trump through a non-government issued alias? How often have you used Signal, or any other non-government secured app for communications?
Something fishy is going on here and there is far more to this story than meets the eye. Do not let them get away with an apology and admission of guilt for this particular goof-up, as some have suggested.
There is one thing that has been lost on the effects on the tariff issue.
In the mind of most people tariffs will raise the price of imported goods and therefore consumers will seek out less expensive domestic goods.
What really happens is that it allows domestic manufacturers and distributors to raise their prices. If the foreign good goes from $100.00 to $120.00 the domestic source can now raise their price from $100.00 to $120.00 also.
And you know they will.
Anyone else betting that Mike Waltz is already been selected as the sacrificial lamb. That Hegseth will get a scolding from Republicans but for Trump to remove him would be too close to admission of his own (and the Republican Senate's) incompetence that he won't ask for his resignation let alone fire him. Susan Collins will register "concerns" but that's about as far as it goes.
Another line of defense on Signalgate has been declaring the bombing campaign a total success claiming they have eliminated (as usual without proof) several top leaders and no mention of how much was spent.
Final thought. Trump has withdrawn his nomination of Elie Stefanik to be UN Ambassador because the House balance is so close. Is this an admission that he believes this, and other special elections, might actually shift the majority balance--- well because voters don't like what they are getting? Hmmm.
Two things that have not been adequately addressed in the coverage of the Signal scandal:
1) Trump seems not to have been involved in the decision to go ahead with military strikes. It was all left to Stephen Miller, JD Vance and Hegseth. In response to questions from the press, Trump did not even seem to know any of the details or actual planning. Also, there were no military officers in the group, a truly stunning, frightening and reckless-beyond-all-meaning failure of Hegseth, Waltz, Vance, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, et al. Stephen Miller is now directing US military strikes? WTAbsoluteF? I encourage the Bulwark to cover this in future posts.
2) Vance's open animosity toward and extortion of Europe and his cavalier attitude towards military strikes as policy/monetary gamesmanship - Vance, unlike Trump, is supposed to be smart and well-educated yet he seems completely unaware of the sacrifices that our European and global allies made in the name of protecting the US through NATO and other alliances. The only time that Article 5 has ever been invoked was after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on the US. In Afghanistan, our coalition partners suffered the following numbers of military deaths: UK - 457, Canada - 159, France - 90, Germany - 62, Italy - 53, Poland - 44, Denmark - 43, Australia - 41, Spain - 35, Georgia - 32, Romania - 27, Netherlands - 25, Turkey - 15, Czech Republic - 14, New Zealand - 10, Norway - 10, plus 15 other countries in single digits.* The US had 7.96 deaths per million population, the UK 7.25, Canada (the target of tariffs and annexation threats) 4.68, and Denmark (one of the targets of threats to Greenland) 7.82. The UK also had 179 deaths in Iraq fighting on behalf of the US, Poland had 30 and Denmark had 7.** Yet JD Vance (and Stephen Miller) seem to think this is only about money and (supposed) power. One suspects that every one of our allies worldwide, who used to freely and confidently share their intelligence with the US, is now reviewing their policies and almost certainly avoiding sharing anything that they fear might be transmitted over insecure channels on personal cell phones. First in mind for Vance was not the pilots risking their lives or the likely innocent civilians killed by bombing an apartment block in Yemen, no, it was the message sent by helping European shipping and how much Europe was going to have to pay the US back for the strikes. He seems not to understand that the power and influence of the US comes from having confident, trustworthy allies across the globe. Now, more and more, the US will be on its own.
66 days. That's how long it has taken Musk/Trump/Vance to destroy nearly 250 years of work on our democratic republic and 80 years of work on NATO. And Congressional Republicans either sit by and watch, or throw gasoline onto the fire.
Mark, thank you for including all those coalition casualty numbers (with per capita analysis) in your comments. The negative attitude of the Trump administration towards our NATO allies, who sacrificed blood and treasure in support our country after 9/11, just enrages me. Of course, everything this administration does enrages me, but this is more personal to me because of my own military and government service background. I just came back from a military history tour run by a UK tour company which included some retired military officers from the UK (including our historian). I was ready to apologize to everyone, but they treated me just great, understanding that there are still internationalist Americans who fully support our involvement in NATO.
Why all the smears against Jeffrey Goldberg? In the opinion of the current Director of National Intelligence, the actions of the hackers Edward Snowden (now resident in Russia) and Julian Assange were just fine and dandy. (It appears that for the Musk/trump regime and Fox News, anti-Semitism is only bad on college campuses.)
Will Saletan's piece should be required reading for everyone at all concerned about trump's destruction of rules-based international order America fought for in WW II.
Nate Silver, if you're listening: Please post your thoughts about the "cards-based" foreign policy game trump is playing. How's he doing?
Jim Swift: How about getting Saletan and Silver together on a Bulwark pod? I mean, seriously. It would probably be a very interesting conversation.
For all his talk about cards, Trump is a remarkably bad player. Not that he'd improve if anyone dared to try giving him tips.
Where I see him and his appointees is not at a poker table. Instead, they're incarnated as Harry Lime in the Ferris wheel sequence from _The Third Man_, looking down at the people below, calling them "dots," and wondering how much money there'll be for each dot that stops moving. No one in the administration has Orson Welles's flair, and that's a lonely stroke of luck.
It's got nothing to do with Goldberg himself and everything to do with the fact he exposed their incompetence and criminality. The biggest enemy of an authoritarian regime is the truth.
I'm amazed that so far the Trump Administration hasn't blamed Signal-gate on George Soros.
I assume that we will learn that a lot more classified conversations were conducted on Signal, probably because Hesgeth could set a time when what the major players said was automatically deleted. The Russians and the Chinese must be rejoicing at their good fortune--easily able to get a treasure trove of classified info. But Russia is our ally now--right? So it doesn't matter what they know.
Totally agree, the problem started when a certain leader decided to appoint "LOYAL" subjects. It turns out "loyalty" doesn't qualify as capable of doing the job correctly. I've been saying this for a while now. Just because someone would "kiss your feet" doesn't mean they are qualified to do a job as head of the militiary in this country. He had been in the military for only a short period of time and work for a right wing tv station after that. To me that doesn't qualify him to work as the head of the Defense Department in our government.
Hegseth is a moron. But then again, so is his boss and every Senator that voted to confirm him. And, why has no one asked Musk about the morons in this government he is funding.
Look, I love Pete Buttigieg but face it, this country is NOT going to elect a woman of any color or a gay person to the presidency. It doesn't matter that Pete is one of the smartest politicians out there, people will not see past his sexual orientation. The Dem Party must find a white, straight, smart, middle aged male to run if we want to stand a chance of winning the White House again. I hate it, but I'm a realist.
I wholeheartedly agree. Buttigieg is brilliantly smart and would probably make a fine president but he will not get elected. No way no how! This will all be a moot point if we have seen our last free and fair presidential election…
You are sooooo right!
My favorite bitter-sweet morsel is a truism of ETTD - when the chips are down and trump and/or his henchmen/women want to use a msg platform when it matters to them, they don't use zuck's product(s). They went to Signal instead. All that sucking up and appeasement will get you *nothing*! Delicious.
Hegseth better have a few drinks, he's raging like he needs one to settle down! Bets on how long he keeps Thus job. In way over his head, spinning outta control!
Can we order several copies of the Keep Mum poster and have them shipped to several people at the White House and Pentagon?
Here's how I see this working. Trumplicants do indeed "flood the zone" with often contradictory and often laughably false stories. And here's why. If there are 20 different "excuses" out there, they know that their supporters will find one of them at least the tiniest bit plausible. That's the one that they'll latch onto to believe. And they'll simply ignore the other ones. So, in the end, all of the supporters can comfort themselves that Trump/GOP is right after all.
When I’d listen to right wing talk shows like Mark Levin to find out what BS they were saying they always sound mad and serious. I’ve been listening to the Bulwark and Dems on the leak of life threatening information and nobody seems mad. Maybe serious but not mad. Why can’t we get as amped up as Levin and Hannitty ? Why aren’t Dems in Congress behaving like Gaetz?
Trump is a bit of a boob, who appears to have appointed a cabinet of boobs. Nothing against boobs. Half the country is below average right? I just don't want them running wars.
My mind was all in a tizzy yesterday as thoughts kept swirling around my head about how this chat fiaso could have happened. I went for my long walk and then tried to fine-tune my argument so I'm posting it here again, hoping someone with investigation authority will give it some thought and maybe do something to at least disprove my idea:
What if Trump asked his people to come up with a way to communicate without government oversight and Signal was the best thing they could come up with?
What if Trump always participated, but went by an alias, say “John Gold,” with initials JG?
Since he doesn't like to leave any fingerprints on illegal stuff, what if other people ran the agenda and asked questions with Trump's silence being the nod of approval for decisions?
What if, as a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg (also JG) had, at some point in time, contacted Waltz or someone else in the group, with questions for an Atlantic story, or verification of a quote, therefore ending up as a contact on those phones?
Would it be easy to have mixed up the two on a Signal chat invite, both with JG initials? Especially at 1:30 in the morning when people could understandably be groggy? Even if Trump had used his old “John Barron” alias from the old days, would it be easy to mix up JB and JG, especially since B and G are so close on the keyboard?
If that error was made, could it be possible that all 18 of them thought Trump was on the chat with them at the time of the bombing decisions and it was just business as usual?
It may sound crazy, but stranger things have happened.
It explains why nobody objected or sensed that a stranger was on the line.
It explains the oddity and disbelief we all felt at the idea of them seemingly making high-level decisions without Trump's okay (because, unbeknownst to us, they were all mistakenly under the impression that he WAS on the line, giving his silent approval).
It also explains the terror they are all feeling under scrutiny from Congress and the press as the whole scheme starts to unravel – including the fact that this was probably not a one-off, but may have been their mode of communication for months as they avoid reporting conversations to the National Archives as required by law.
It also explains Trump's “I know nothing” attitude as he tries to distance himself as far away as possible.
It actually makes sense that such a monumental national security breach would have a fantastical story behind it –what other explanation could possibly make sense?
At this point, all their phones, governmental and private, should be confiscated but we all know the Trump Justice Dept. will do nothing to investigate this fiasco. Congress must subpoena these chat participants, as well as their staff. Get them one-on-one into a SCIF and ask them pointed questions, framed by a good lawyer, and someone is bound to crack.
The least they should ask: Why were you using personal cell phones? Are you reporting all conversations to NARA? Do you ever contact Trump through a non-government issued alias? How often have you used Signal, or any other non-government secured app for communications?
Something fishy is going on here and there is far more to this story than meets the eye. Do not let them get away with an apology and admission of guilt for this particular goof-up, as some have suggested.
There is one thing that has been lost on the effects on the tariff issue.
In the mind of most people tariffs will raise the price of imported goods and therefore consumers will seek out less expensive domestic goods.
What really happens is that it allows domestic manufacturers and distributors to raise their prices. If the foreign good goes from $100.00 to $120.00 the domestic source can now raise their price from $100.00 to $120.00 also.
And you know they will.
Anyone else betting that Mike Waltz is already been selected as the sacrificial lamb. That Hegseth will get a scolding from Republicans but for Trump to remove him would be too close to admission of his own (and the Republican Senate's) incompetence that he won't ask for his resignation let alone fire him. Susan Collins will register "concerns" but that's about as far as it goes.
Another line of defense on Signalgate has been declaring the bombing campaign a total success claiming they have eliminated (as usual without proof) several top leaders and no mention of how much was spent.
Final thought. Trump has withdrawn his nomination of Elie Stefanik to be UN Ambassador because the House balance is so close. Is this an admission that he believes this, and other special elections, might actually shift the majority balance--- well because voters don't like what they are getting? Hmmm.
OP[sic]: National Insecurity in the Age of Trump
Presented by The Bulwark Press
The 'Trump Administration' lies so much they could all be Russians! The two go together like oceans and saltwater.
Two things that have not been adequately addressed in the coverage of the Signal scandal:
1) Trump seems not to have been involved in the decision to go ahead with military strikes. It was all left to Stephen Miller, JD Vance and Hegseth. In response to questions from the press, Trump did not even seem to know any of the details or actual planning. Also, there were no military officers in the group, a truly stunning, frightening and reckless-beyond-all-meaning failure of Hegseth, Waltz, Vance, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, et al. Stephen Miller is now directing US military strikes? WTAbsoluteF? I encourage the Bulwark to cover this in future posts.
2) Vance's open animosity toward and extortion of Europe and his cavalier attitude towards military strikes as policy/monetary gamesmanship - Vance, unlike Trump, is supposed to be smart and well-educated yet he seems completely unaware of the sacrifices that our European and global allies made in the name of protecting the US through NATO and other alliances. The only time that Article 5 has ever been invoked was after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on the US. In Afghanistan, our coalition partners suffered the following numbers of military deaths: UK - 457, Canada - 159, France - 90, Germany - 62, Italy - 53, Poland - 44, Denmark - 43, Australia - 41, Spain - 35, Georgia - 32, Romania - 27, Netherlands - 25, Turkey - 15, Czech Republic - 14, New Zealand - 10, Norway - 10, plus 15 other countries in single digits.* The US had 7.96 deaths per million population, the UK 7.25, Canada (the target of tariffs and annexation threats) 4.68, and Denmark (one of the targets of threats to Greenland) 7.82. The UK also had 179 deaths in Iraq fighting on behalf of the US, Poland had 30 and Denmark had 7.** Yet JD Vance (and Stephen Miller) seem to think this is only about money and (supposed) power. One suspects that every one of our allies worldwide, who used to freely and confidently share their intelligence with the US, is now reviewing their policies and almost certainly avoiding sharing anything that they fear might be transmitted over insecure channels on personal cell phones. First in mind for Vance was not the pilots risking their lives or the likely innocent civilians killed by bombing an apartment block in Yemen, no, it was the message sent by helping European shipping and how much Europe was going to have to pay the US back for the strikes. He seems not to understand that the power and influence of the US comes from having confident, trustworthy allies across the globe. Now, more and more, the US will be on its own.
66 days. That's how long it has taken Musk/Trump/Vance to destroy nearly 250 years of work on our democratic republic and 80 years of work on NATO. And Congressional Republicans either sit by and watch, or throw gasoline onto the fire.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_casualties_in_Afghanistan
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Mark, thank you for including all those coalition casualty numbers (with per capita analysis) in your comments. The negative attitude of the Trump administration towards our NATO allies, who sacrificed blood and treasure in support our country after 9/11, just enrages me. Of course, everything this administration does enrages me, but this is more personal to me because of my own military and government service background. I just came back from a military history tour run by a UK tour company which included some retired military officers from the UK (including our historian). I was ready to apologize to everyone, but they treated me just great, understanding that there are still internationalist Americans who fully support our involvement in NATO.
Why all the smears against Jeffrey Goldberg? In the opinion of the current Director of National Intelligence, the actions of the hackers Edward Snowden (now resident in Russia) and Julian Assange were just fine and dandy. (It appears that for the Musk/trump regime and Fox News, anti-Semitism is only bad on college campuses.)
Will Saletan's piece should be required reading for everyone at all concerned about trump's destruction of rules-based international order America fought for in WW II.
Nate Silver, if you're listening: Please post your thoughts about the "cards-based" foreign policy game trump is playing. How's he doing?
Jim Swift: How about getting Saletan and Silver together on a Bulwark pod? I mean, seriously. It would probably be a very interesting conversation.
For all his talk about cards, Trump is a remarkably bad player. Not that he'd improve if anyone dared to try giving him tips.
Where I see him and his appointees is not at a poker table. Instead, they're incarnated as Harry Lime in the Ferris wheel sequence from _The Third Man_, looking down at the people below, calling them "dots," and wondering how much money there'll be for each dot that stops moving. No one in the administration has Orson Welles's flair, and that's a lonely stroke of luck.
It's got nothing to do with Goldberg himself and everything to do with the fact he exposed their incompetence and criminality. The biggest enemy of an authoritarian regime is the truth.
I'm amazed that so far the Trump Administration hasn't blamed Signal-gate on George Soros.
I assume that we will learn that a lot more classified conversations were conducted on Signal, probably because Hesgeth could set a time when what the major players said was automatically deleted. The Russians and the Chinese must be rejoicing at their good fortune--easily able to get a treasure trove of classified info. But Russia is our ally now--right? So it doesn't matter what they know.
hasn't blamed Signal-gate on George Soros . . . yet.