The Sad State of SignalGate
How to make yourself look foolish 101
For those of you who missed it, here’s a gift link. I won’t spend time going over what happened. It’s a big enough story that I expect you already know what’s going on.
The response has been arguably one of the worst from any administration. National Security Advisor Michael Waltz is the one who added Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat. Here is Waltz on Laura Ingraham’s show:
“Somehow gets on somebody’s contact and gets sucked into this group” are words that don’t make any sense when put together like that. People don’t get “sucked into” Signal groups. You do not receive an invite that you approve. You are added to a chat, which is the invitation. If you remove yourself from that group, it is considered a rejection of the invitation. It’s that simple.
What on Earth is a “coordinated distraction?” Who coordinated it? Was it Waltz when he accidentally invited the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic into his principals-only chat? People not only don’t seem to understand this, but they are performing Olympic-level mental contortions to make their cult leader’s administration free from error.
This user suggests that Jeffrey Goldberg may have added himself to the chat. It’s not easy to believe this is an opinion from an adult. That’s just not how things work. If journalists can add themselves to any chat the story becomes a lot worse than it is.
Some of the responses to what happened are just outright delusional. How is this lady’s reply in any way connected to reality? Her sources must be wearing straight jackets if those are the leads she’s being spoon-fed. It very difficult to approach the other side and discuss anything with them if it’s not possible to agree on a common version of reality.
This is the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Director of the CIA admitting that they don’t understand the basic policies governing their respective agencies. Not using Signal is very low-level stuff. If what they’re saying is true they need to immediately resign. Speaking of, Hegseth lost the National Review. That’s a big deal.
Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) is correct. It was a mistake, but what makes it even worse are the ridiculous lies the administration is trying to sell about how it happened.
That’s the best the Secretary of Defense has to offer. Attempting to smear the journalist.
What I think we’re really seeing is ritual humiliation by Trump. When Waltz goes onto TV and makes these claims, what he is doing is humiliating himself in the eyes of his professional contemporaries. He is alienating himself into the Trump administration. His message is intended to sway the opinions of the masses who absorb the emotion from Fox News without ever dipping their toes in the shallow intellectual waters that trickle out of the network. Claiming that it was a mistake makes the person making the claim look like a buffoon to anyone inside of the cult’s most dedicated tranches. It has to be something that was “done” to the administration. They have to appear as victims.
Thus, Hegseth, Gabbard, Rubio, Vance, and Waltz are going to have to pretend that Goldberg has magic powers that grant him access to whatever digital realm he wishes to access. They will have to pretend to be idiots who cannot comprehend basic policies surrounding the use of communication apps like Signal on their personal phones, and they will have to make people assume that they’re not competent enough to manage their own employees’ adherence to agency policies.
Sometimes, the cost of doing business is your dignity, a truth that Trump’s staff is intimately familiar with. In this case, they truly screwed up because the initials JG likely meant Jamieson Greer, who is the US Trade Representative. They could have admitted the mistake and tried to move on, which would likely have worked. Instead, they told stupid lies that no one believes, and we’re all laughing at them.
The era of adults governing us has come to an end.