The Leaked Signal Chat Should Be an Evergreen Story
They are who we thought they were. We can't let 'em off the hook.
In October of 2006, the 1-4 Arizona Cardinals were beating the 5-0 Chicago Bears by 20 points in the second half of a regular season football game. Despite the seemingly inconsequential nature of the game itself, it came at a point in the season where the difference between a 2-4 and a 1-5 record for the Cardinals sets two totally different tones for the rest of the season. With a win, they can get their season back on track knowing they have it in them to beat good teams and make a run. With a loss, they begin staring at a future in which they’re drafting in the top 5 again.
I am, of course, only talking about this game because the Cardinals would go on to blow that 20-point second half lead and lose the game. It was after this loss that Head Coach Dennis Green took the podium to address the press, giving us one of the all-time coaching rants.
“If you wanna crown ‘em, then crown their ass! But they are who we thought they were! And we let ‘em off the hook!”
We’re about a week removed now from the genesis of the Signal chat leak, and it’s high time we stopped letting them off the hook. It’s been the case over the course of this second Trump term that news moves fast, and any given story can be rendered obsolete within a single 24-hour span. Where some of their most heinous activity, like illegal deportations and threats to dismantle federal courts, will continue to rear its ugly head with each new instance, a screw-up like the Signal chat leak is subject to being buried with each passing day under the breakneck pace of this administration’s news cycle. They will undoubtedly mess up in all kinds of ways over the course of the next 3 and a half years, but the banality of how exactly we came to know of this chat serves a special purpose.
This was not a leak at the hands of a foreign country or a hacker prodigy, nor was it by the threat of blackmail. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and his fat boomer thumbs accidentally added the wrong person to a group chat. It was a glorified butt-dial, a mistake fully representative of the carelessness with which our government currently operates. There is no level of spin that allows for this fact to become ambiguous. Never let them forget how embarrassingly stupid this is.
While this is no doubt a major story, and the casual nature in which the most powerful people on planet earth use emojis to react to war crimes is depraved, watching Republicans this past week has been a particularly uplifting experience. In the face of rising American fascism, it feels nice to relish in the fact that the most smug and self-assured people we know were put on their backfoot with nothing to grab hold of. A public screw-up that only affirms the most abject criticisms about Trump and his circle.
These people want to be taken seriously so badly, but they cannot help how consistently inauthentic and fabricated their public personas really are. It’s why Kristi Noem and JD Vance keep cosplaying in photo ops, and it’s why I can’t help but laugh at Pete Hegseth getting a shout-out from Marco Rubio that looks like it was pulled from my Microsoft Teams chat. When we get to look behind the veil, we see a group of people who couldn’t be less resolute.
The Republican response to this has been messy. Mike Waltz was on Laura Ingraham’s show sort of kind of admitting that Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the chat by accident, but that Goldberg’s contact information was placed into his phone by an outside party. Tulsi Gabbard testified before the Senate and said they did not discuss classified information in the chat, but the fully released messages provide details of military action down to the exact minute. Trump thinks Signal sucks, but Pam Bondi thinks it’s still great. Pete Hegseth is barely answering questions about it and stands by the fact that there was no wrongdoing. The communication is disjointed because there is no excuse or line of reasoning that provides adequate cover for why we even know about it in the first place.
Obviously this story is rich with hypocrisy coming from the same people who spent a decade+ seething about Hillary Clinton using a private email server, but if hypocrisy were truly damning, we’d exist in a completely different reality. Ultimately this leaked chat works as a direct line of proof that the people who work so hard to project an image of strong, serious, infallible leadership are exactly who we think they are. They’re careless, callous, incompetent, and self-righteous. This group chat has it all.
There’s no grand conspiracy here because Mike Waltz legitimately just did some stupid shit that is either directly or adjacently similar to something we’ve all done on our phones. The only difference is we’re all not the National Security Advisor of the United States of America. When it comes to their more abominable policy positions, the cruelty is the point, and they do not care how evil or fascist it all is because they like being that way. This leaked chat, though, it makes them look dumb and clueless in a way they couldn’t be more insecure about.
A major criticism of Democratic opposition is that they don’t go hard on ad hominem attacks towards Republicans in the same way Republicans do towards them. Take this chat and never let them forget it. Republicans will not shut up about how important national security is, and that’s why we have to deport anyone with a tattoo, and that’s why trans people have to use their assigned birth gender on their passports, and that’s why we have to crack down on pro-Palestine sentiment. If they really cared about national security, they wouldn’t be using a private app on private phones for private discussions. So while the hypocrisy is certainly palpable, the cherry on top is that they just so happen to look so goddamned stupid at the same time.
We can’t let them off the hook for that.