As Rolling Stone reported Wednesday, some Trump administration officials have been privately gossiping among themselves, comparing the now-infamous national security breach in a Signal group chat to something out of the HBO political satire, Veep.
These officials are getting it wrong. This ongoing mini-saga of the second Donald Trump era isn’t Armando Iannucci’s American series, Veep; it’s becoming more like Iannucci’s series, The Thick Of It, in which British politicians and their profane spin doctors constantly obsess over words, doublespeak, and linguistic technicalities in order to salvage their last shreds of dignity, against the backdrop of televised scandals and media feeding frenzies.
An uncomfortably similar dynamic is currently playing out as the Trump White House struggles to respond to the damning revelation that a group of the president’s top officials — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President J.D. Vance — were discussing highly sensitive bombing plans over an unsecured Signal group chat that they didn’t know included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, who broke the story. (Waltz apparently added Goldberg to the group chat.)
The administration’s only recourse has been to turn one of the dumbest national security fiascos in recent memory into an absurd game of semantics. Trump officials and their allies are now arguing that Trump’s national security officials were not discussing “war plans” in the Signal chat, as The Atlantic wrote Tuesday, after the outlet published copies on Wednesday of what it called “the detailed attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared” in the chat.
The Signal messages show Hegseth giving a detailed rundown of the administration’s planned bombing attacks in Yemen before they began. He even at one point wrote: “THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP.”
“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans,’” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote Wednesday on X after Goldberg released new details from the group chat. “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”
The Atlantic, however, made no such concession when it published screenshots of Hegseth discussing the imminent bombing of Houthis in Yemen.
The rest of the administration is deploying this same argument. “Nobody’s texting war plans,” an animated Hegseth told reporters on Wednesday. “They even changed the title to ‘attack plans’ because they know it’s not ‘war plans,’” he added. “There was no war plans on there,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized later on Wednesday. “This was a, sort of, description of what we could inform our counterparts around the world when the time came to do so.” The Department of Defense claimed on X that The Atlantic “backpedaled the whole ‘war plans’ thing really really fast,” noting that the headline on the story published Wednesday describes “attack plans.” The Pentagon called the publication a “hoax generating machine” a few hours later.
Regardless of the distinction between “war plans” and “attack plans,” Hegseth and others were discussing what was very clearly highly sensitive information about an upcoming military attack in an unsecured chat — and had no idea a journalist was reading along. They have refused to admit any wrongdoing or acknowledge the stark reality of the situation. Instead, they are trying to deflect responsibility by playing word games that anyone who has seen what was discussed in the chat should find insulting.
Some of the more self-aware members of Team Trump’s brass are willing to privately concede that debating the difference between plans for “war” and a high-profile military “attack” is not a real debate. “You may think it’s silly, but it’s what we’re going with today,” says a close Trump ally who’s been in touch with White House aides on this aspect of the crisis-communications strategy.
One administration official — who requested anonymity to candidly discuss this, in their words, “shitty mess” — simply says: “I don’t care if you want to call it a ‘war plan’ or an ‘attack plan,’ I think we shouldn’t leak either to reporters and so-called journalists who hate the president. I’m not going to include Rachel Maddow on my private group texts.”
Some Trump allies are voicing their frustration publicly. “Trying to wordsmith the hell outta this signal debacle is making it worse,” right-wing commentator Tomi Lahren wrote on X. “It was bad. And I’m honestly getting sick of the whatabout isms from my own side. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Admit the F up and move on.”
The Trump administration’s desire to play word games fits with the larger MAGA effort to render words meaningless so that Trump and his party can get away with, well, anything. Trump and his allies have frequently used the world “war,” in particular, to achieve their ends. The administration is currently citing the president’s “war authorities” to argue that it can deport Venezuelans migrants to a brutal El Salvadorian prison without due process, for example — even though the U.S. is not literally at “war” with Venezuela or gangs from there.
It also fits with the larger effort to convince Americans to doubt what’s right in front of them. “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,” Leavitt asked during a press briefing on Wednesday, “or do you trust Jeffrey Goldberg, who is a registered Democrat and an anti-Trump sensationalist reporter?”
The answer is obvious when considering there is no need to take Goldberg’s word for it. He published a group chat exchange that Trump’s own National Security Council confirmed was legitimate. The real question is whether Americans trust Hegseth, a scandal-ridden former Fox News host who multiple Republican senators believed wasn’t fit to lead the Pentagon, or their own eyes.
From Rolling Stone US
