Who You Gonna Believe, Hegseth or Your Lyin’ Eyes?
Team Trump team’s dishonest damage control made the Signal scandal worse for themselves.
A bit of—God help us—2028 watch, per Politico:
Pete Buttigieg is expected to announce Thursday he will not run for Michigan’s open Senate seat, according to a person briefed on his decision, clearing a path for a potential presidential campaign instead.
His decision was framed by several allies and people in his inner circle as putting him in the strongest possible position to seek the presidency, and based on a belief it would be exceedingly difficult to run successive campaigns in 2026 and 2028.
Happy Thursday.
The Only Strategy They Know
by Andrew Egger
When the Signalgate story broke, we thought to ourselves: Okay, that’s the most politically self-destructive thing the White House will do for a while. But we were wrong. Somehow, the White House’s political response to the story has been even dumber.
Yesterday, JVL took stock of the administration’s clown car of flailing responses: the inexplicable attempt to paint the release of authentic internal screenshots as a “hoax,” the bizarre assertions that the information in the chat wouldn’t have been classified, the attempts to turn the whole thing into a “Jeffrey Goldberg sucks and can’t be trusted” media story.
Since then, things have gotten sillier still. On Wednesday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt scolded the White House press corps for prioritizing the story over news of U.S. business investment or Trump’s latest “election integrity” executive order. JD Vance jeered at Goldberg for declining to publish the name of a CIA officer involved—an action Goldberg took at the request of Trump’s CIA. Donald Trump himself complained that the story was a “witch hunt” and suggested that “I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you.” (All the more reason not to share attack plans on it, then!)
The administration’s shambolic responses have only served to energize the story and help it break through into the mainstream. When the White House loses Barstool Sports’s Dave Portnoy, it’s time to rethink the messaging strategy.
Arguably, the story could have been tamped down sooner. The White House, Hegseth, and the intelligence chiefs could have kept their heads down and stuck to a simple script: This was an error, for national security reasons we refuse to answer questions about it, but we’re learning from it and it won’t happen again. They could have trusted the task of flooding the zone with shit to their outside media propagandists. The Benny Johnsons of the world, who have spent this week hollering that the deep state might have used “a backdoor splinter cell group inside the CIA” to sneak Goldberg onto the chat, could have handled the job just fine.
Goldberg’s straitlaced natsec reporter background compelled him to be circumspect with the mammoth scoop, and still on Tuesday he was conflicted over whether to release texts that he judged had contained classified information.
But the White House and Hegseth forced Goldberg’s hand. On Monday and Tuesday, they accused him of lying about the contents of the chat—and, crucially, insisted that nothing in the chat had been classified. In other words, they both created a major additional incentive for Goldberg to release the full transcripts and removed the scruple that had convinced him to hold them back in the first place. So on Wednesday morning, he published the transcripts. What on earth did they think would happen?
Of course, it’s an open question how much “thinking” went into it at all. The Trump administration runs on pure id; its default media strategy is an exercise in raw narrative domination. It’s all there in the three rules Trump learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn: always attack, always deny everything, always declare victory. This isn’t just a strategy; it’s a habit of mind. After a decade of the party teaching itself to react to all stimuli like this, it’s unclear they know how to proceed in any other way.
Delete Pete
by William Kristol
“Keep mum, she’s not so dumb” is a justly famous World War II British propaganda poster. As you can see, it depicts an attractive woman in a slinky evening gown, reclining on a chair surrounded by three entranced officers who represent the Army, Navy, and the Royal Air Force:
Created in 1941 by Harold Forster, known for his illustrations on pre-war Black Magic chocolate boxes, the poster was part of the government’s “Careless Talk Costs Lives” campaign, designed to encourage the British to avoid sharing sensitive information that could endanger the war effort. The government had decided that a lighter, more humorous touch might be more effective than the forbidding images of spies and saboteurs used in previous efforts.
If you like the poster (and really how could you not?), you can order a replica for your own office or boudoir here.
(I should add that The Bulwark’s HR policy requires me to warn you, as the Imperial War Museum puts it, that “Today, of course, this particular slogan appears rather chauvinistic.”)
You know who else should purchase one of these posters? Pete Hegseth’s forthcoming replacement as secretary of defense. It would be a useful prompt to the next occupant of that office not to do what our current secretary of defense has done. And, given the normally solemn and dull decor of the secretary of defense’s office on the Pentagon third floor E ring, “Keep mum, she’s not so dumb” would liven things up.
But, you ask, will Pete Hegseth be replaced? He should be—and, based on a few conversations with members of Congress, I think he will be.
Check out the passage below, from the transcript that Jeffrey Goldberg published on Wednesday. At 11:44 am EDT on March 15, Hegseth posted on the insecure Signal text chain the following notice of an imminent military strike in Yemen, including its timing and weapon systems:
It’s wildly irresponsible to post such information on an unsecured Signal chain two and a half hours before the first bombs are to drop.
Even the Trump administration must know that. And their defense of Hegseth seems pretty half-hearted.
Yesterday, when a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Katherine Leavitt, “Why aren’t launch times on a mission strike classified?” Leavitt responded, “I would defer you [sic] to the secretary of defense’s statement.” But the secretary of defense’s statement doesn’t in fact explain why that information wouldn’t be classified, because obviously it would be.
So Leavitt continued, “Do you trust the secretary of defense, who was nominated for this role, voted by the United States Senate into this role, who has served in combat, honorably served our nation in uniform? Or do you trust Jeffrey Goldberg, who is a registered Democrat and an anti-Trump sensationalist reporter?”
Who are you going to believe: Pete Hegseth or your lying eyes?
The answer to that is easy. I’ve known both Hegseth and Goldberg a bit over the years. I trust Goldberg far, far more than I trust Hegseth.
But which one I trust isn’t the point, of course.
Goldberg is the editor of the Atlantic. If I didn’t trust his judgment, I could stop reading that estimable publication.
But Hegseth is—for now—the United States secretary of defense, by law the second in the chain of command of the United States armed forces after the president. If anyone further down that chain of command had behaved as Hegseth has, that person would be disciplined, and his career would likely be finished.
The fact is that Hegseth has forfeited his claim to rightfully occupy such a position of trust in the United States government. He should be let go. His replacement could be someone who will at least keep mum, and not be quite so dumb.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump ‘Cards’: Foreign Policy Without Principle… The president’s rhetoric of gambling reveals how he understands power and weakness, writes WILL SALETAN.
Trump Is Still Obsessed With the Hunter Biden Laptop Letter… One of the signatories, JOHN SIPHER, argues: “it doesn’t seem like he or his supporters actually know what we said.”
The NIH Moves to Stop Studying Vaccine Skepticism… New reporting from JONATHAN COHN: An internal memo says that the agency will not prioritize research on why people are reluctant to take vaccines. The RFK Advantage!
Quick Hits
HERE COME THE TARIFFS: We hope you’ve already got all the cars you’re going to need for a while. Donald Trump announced a 25 percent tariff yesterday on most cars and auto parts imported into the United States, beginning April 3. Things are going great, per NBC News:
Shares of the top U.S. automakers fell sharply in after-hours trading on the announcement, with General Motors down more than 7%, Ford off 4.6%, and Stellantis lower by 4%.
Shares of Asian automakers also fell during trading on Thursday, Reuters reported, with Japanese automakers Nissan, Toyota and Honda closing down 2.2%, 2.7%, and 3%, respectively. In South Korea, Hyundai Motor and Kia both fell about 4%. . . .
Foreign governments and automakers also criticized the tariffs. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said his government was “putting all options on the table” in terms of its response, while the German Association of the Automotive Industry said the tariffs sent “a disastrous signal for free, rules-based trade.”
The Republican party was a little more cheerful: “Estimates say President Trump’s tariffs will result in more than $100 billion in new annual revenue to the United States!” It’s remarkable how the single stupidest form of taxation is the one the GOP has decided it can safely embrace.
BUT HAVE THEY TRIED IVERMECTIN?: RFK Jr.’s posture toward the ongoing measles outbreak has been consistent for months: Yeah, vaccines are good and all, but they also have lots of problems, and anyway haven’t you heard that the best way to treat or even prevent measles is vitamin A?
CNN updates us on how that messaging is landing:
Doctors treating people hospitalized as part of a measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico have also found themselves facing another problem: vitamin A toxicity.
At Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, near the outbreak’s epicenter, several patients have been found to have abnormal liver function on routine lab tests, a probable sign that they’ve taken too much of the vitamin, according to Dr. Lara Johnson, pediatric hospitalist and chief medical officer for Covenant Health-Lubbock Service Area.
The hospitalized children with the toxicity were all unvaccinated.
WE DON’T WANT YOUR MONEY: When Trump tapped Russell Vought to oversee the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last month, Vought moved quickly to end a plethora of enforcement actions against banks and lenders. Now, the agency is going even further, seeking in court to return a settlement payment already collected by the Biden-era CFPB. The New York Times has the details:
In an especially strange twist, the case—against Townstone Financial, a small Chicago-based lender—was brought during Mr. Trump’s first term by Kathleen Kraninger, the director he appointed to run the consumer bureau.
Russell Vought, who became the agency’s acting director last month, said it had “used radical ‘equity’ arguments to tag Townstone as racist with zero evidence, and spent years persecuting and extorting them.”
Cheap Shots
Everyone wants to focus on the strategy. The messaging failures. The tactical faceplants. None of it matters. Not really. Because the problem isn’t the strategy.
The problem is the audience.
You can mock the White House’s response, call it a clown car, call it a panic spiral, call it what it is: A panicked, unraveling cover-up from a regime so convinced of its own impunity it can’t even lie coherently anymore. But the deeper rot? The thing no one in the Beltway wants to say out loud?
It’s working.
Because half the country isn’t looking for the truth. They’re looking for confirmation. They don’t want facts, they want fiction with footnotes. That’s what Trumpism gives the Red Hats, an endless, looping narrative of grievance, persecution, and imagined greatness where reality is not just denied but hunted. You’re shocked they’re calling verified leaks a hoax? I’m closer to being shocked it even made the news cycle than I am them calling it a hoax. This country hasn’t been tethered to reality in nearly a decade.
The felon in the Oval? His cabinet of looters and flunkies? Not the main threat. The problem, the terminal, metastatic problem is the American people. Not all of them, but enough. Enough to break the spine of democracy. Enough to reelect a man who tried to end it. Enough to laugh when children are caged, cheer when protesters are beaten, shrug when allies are betrayed, and vote to do it all over again.
Sarah Longwell likes to say the people are the problem, but they’re also the solution. She’s right, in theory. But that theory assumes a shared baseline of reality. What do you do with a population that no longer believes in gravity? That watches a man shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and decides the blood was CGI?
You don’t re-message your way out of that. You don’t clarify your position. You don’t win them back with better soundbites.
This isn’t about persuasion anymore.
This is about containment.
Because a country that rejects reality will not be saved by truth.
It will have to be rebuilt in the ruins of its own delusion.
The part of this story that came out yesterday was how little Trump knew and how much Trump still doesn't understand about what happened here. It's increasingly clear the our government is being run by a cohort of unelected men. The two principals (or principles as some might spell it) are Elon Musk and Stephen Miller.