Moira Donegan
The Guardian / March 26, 2025
Thanks to the Signal leaks, we can see how the administration acts when they think they are in private. It’s not a pretty sight
Perhaps one of the greatest lessons of the Donald Trump era, for me, has been in learning the difference between being shocked and being surprised. And indeed it was a bit shocking to learn, via an essay published by The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, that a high-profile journalist had been included on a chat on the commercial messaging app in which a military strike on the Houthi rebels in Yemen was coordinated – including discussions of the timing of the attack, debates about political messaging, personnel coordination and weapons to be used – seemingly without anyone noticing that he was there.
It was shocking that their incompetence was so fortuitous – that the person they included, seemingly accidentally, in their unsecured group chat about war plans was someone so uniquely equipped to broadcast their idiocy to a large audience. But it was in no way surprising that members of the Trump administration are behaving with such recklessness, shortsightedness, indifference to responsibility or peevish sadism. Of course they’re planning overseas bombings in a group chat, I thought when I first read Goldberg’s account. Because we live in an age where the people with the superlative power are those who are least temperamentally suited for it; because the stupidity of this White House outpaces any attempt at parody; and because these guys are exactly as dumb in real life as they look on television.
The story goes like this: as part of its backing of Israel’s wars in the Middle East, the Trump administration sought to strike against Houthi rebels, a coalition of Yemeni militants and pirates who have been attacking commercial vessels in the Red Sea in an attempt to pressure the west to stop supporting Israel’s war on Palestinians. Trump authorized a military strike on a scale more lethal and less precise than those that had previously been launched by the Biden administration; according to a Signal user identified as JD Vance, the president wanted to “send a message” and convey strength on the world stage. In the chat, no other strategic rationale for the strike was offered.
Such operations are supposed to be planned in secret, so that neither the targets, nor foreign governments, nor members of the media are aware of them ahead of time; the secrecy is what keeps the military personnel who carry out these strikes safe from some threats to their lives, and what allows the US to carry out its objectives unprompted. But the planning is also supposed to be documented, as much federal action is, to comply with records-keeping requirements.
The resulting measures can be intense: often, to discuss classified matters, high-ranking federal officials enter safe rooms equipped with anti-surveillance technology, in which they are not allowed to take their phones; at other times, they are only permitted to discuss such matters on specially secured government-issued devices. (Signal, according to Goldberg, is not downloadable on these government devices, meaning that the administration officials in the chat were using their personal phones.) These are measures that have been put in place in order to protect interests that are worth protecting: to guard against foreign intelligence agencies (or, for that matter, magazine editors) learning of America’s plans, to keep Americans safe, to comply with records-keeping laws. Abiding by them is a sign of respect – both for the power of the executive, and for the law.
And so that’s not what the Trump administration did. Instead, in order to coordinate the military strike, which was apparently greenlit by Trump in an in-person meeting in the White House situation room, the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, created an enormous national security threat by convening a planning group on a commercial messaging app.
The group chat speaks to the essence of the second Trump administration: its cavalier incompetence, its contempt for human life
Why did the Trump officials use Signal for this, of all things? The reality is that they’re probably using it for a lot; the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has become something of a handbook for the Trump regime, recommends using private apps to conduct official business, so as to evade records-keeping laws. Signal is an app that is marketed for its privacy and message-disappearing features: a single member of a chat can mark messages to be deleted, permanently, for all members. (In another seemingly illegal move, Waltz reportedly set the messages in the war-planning group chat to disappear after a matter of weeks.)
If the Trump administration’s members are habitually using Signal to conduct official business, the danger is not only that any foreign intelligence agency worth their salt (or any journalist who happens to benefit from their incompetence) could be listening in with relative ease. It’s that the records-keeping apparatus that is meant to preserve such conversations could not reach and document them – meaning that the use of Signal would specifically make such sensitive national security information more accessible to foreign adversaries and less accessible to historians and journalists here in the US.
The content of the chats themselves is grim, too, providing an insight into the petty and eager social dynamics within Trump’s inner circle and the administration’s principle-thin commitment to any understanding of policy. Vance pipes up to suggest delaying the strike; he claims to be worried about public opinion on the issue, and complains that an attack on the Houthis would provide economic benefits to Europe, who he wants to punish for some reason. He does not seem to feel he has enough clout to actually oppose the strike, however, undermining his own complaints with caveats that he will defer to others.
The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, chimes in, clearly thinking he’s supposed to be the center of attention, to eagerly but insubstantially support Vance’s points before pivoting to saying he wants to go ahead with the strike anyway. He has the cringing eagerness of a personality hire: he wants to be seen talking, but doesn’t really have much to say.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s surrogate in the chat, says, bizarrely, that Europe will be made to compensate America for the strike at some later date, reflecting the Trumpian vision of all politics as an extortion racket to extract money, favors, or – perhaps more to the point – shows of deference. Everyone defers to Miller immediately. It is a group of very stupid people, trying to create post-hoc justifications for something their boss told them to do, not thinking too hard about what they’re actually doing – which is killing people.
There is a risk, in talking about the Trump administration’s decision to plan a military strike over a Signal group chat in which they accidentally included a prominent journalist, of making it seem like the only problem with the administration’s actions was in their breach of confidentiality and decorum.
But the controversy that erupted about the Signal chat after Goldberg revealed his inclusion on Monday almost to overshadow the strategic folly and moral depravity of the strike itself: a reckless escalation in a volatile region that risked provoking Iran, the Houthi’s backer and a nuclear state, and which took the lives of 53 human beings, including five children. That the strike seems to have been planned in a way that endangered national security and violated several federal laws should not blind us to the fact that the strike itself was stupid.
But there is something in the story of the accidentally leaked war secrets group chat that speaks to the essence of the second Trump administration: its cavalier incompetence, its contempt for human life, its fealty to grievance and resentment, indifference to consequence, and jeering, jocular enthusiasm for violence. It shows us something about the Trump administration that we have previously seen only rarely: what they act like when they think they are in private. It’s not a pretty sight.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
