»Redl ist ein System« or Why SignalGate Matters

SignalGate isn’t an isolated screw-up, rather a tell regarding the flaws and lies of America’s national security elites…meanwhile, the clock’s ticking

The second Trump administration is weathering its first major scandal. SignalGate is hardly a major scandal by Beltway standards, with no lives or wars lost, but it matters nevertheless given what it reveals about Team Trump’s habits. If you were expecting Trump 2.0 to display more caution and seriousness regarding our national security than they offered the last time they occupied the White House, you bet wrong.

The essence of this frankly stupid scandal is simple enough, as this newsletter recently explained. Top Trump officials involved with national security used Signal, the open-source encrypted messaging service, to establish a group chat about Yemen, specifically the Iran-backed Houthi rebels there. Somehow, National Security Council boss Mike Waltz mistakenly invited Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and a known Trump-hater, into the group. In the chat, which included America’s most senior defense and intelligence officials, those bosses shared classified information, above all Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who divulged details about imminent U.S. military strikes on Houthi sites in Yemen.

This never needed to be a major scandal at all. Had Team Trump played this smartly, SignalGate would have been a two-day bruhaha, three at most, plus nothing that normies beyond the Beltway much care about. As this author learned long ago, details regarding classified information and the proper handling thereof simply don’t register outside Washington, DC, and a few adjacent places. Hegseth, Waltz, and the principals who were in the group chat merely needed to publicly concede that “mistakes had been made” and they were learning and will do better. Besides, no lives were lost and the mid-March U.S. Central Command strikes on the Houthis were a success, which was the big issue here.

That would have been that. Professional Trump haters gonna hate, as they say, there’s still considerable lucre to be made in that line of work, as The Atlantic knows well, but the Signal misuse scandal would have disappeared from the headlines quickly.