On Monday, Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg broke some bizarre news. He’d been accidentally included in a group chat on the messaging app Signal where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vice President J. D. Vance, and other high-level figures in the Trump administration were discussing their plans to bomb Yemen. This was extremely confidential information, and most of the reaction to it has revolved around the administration’s failure of “operational security.”
Goldberg himself is a neoconservative commentator who rarely meets a war he doesn’t like. He doesn’t seem to have the slightest objection to the content of the plans discussed in the group chat. But he was clearly disturbed by his own inclusion.
Democrats have lined up to accept this framing. Chuck Schumer and the leaders of several relevant Senate subcommittees, for example, sent a letter to Donald Trump expressing “extreme alarm” about “the astonishingly poor judgment” shown by accidentally including Goldberg in the chat. In other words, they’re fine with bombing Yemen. They just want the government to do a better job of keeping it secret.
The truth is that this is the kind of story that liberals love, because it gives them a chance to preen about process and “seriousness” and display their patriotic zeal about “national security.” In the decade since Trump began his first run for the presidency, their consistent impulse has been to gravitate toward issues that allow them to hammer home that message. Hence the years-long obsession with “Russian collusion” that fizzled out into not much, the years of relitigating the January 6 riot at the Capitol, and…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
