Officials have responded to the text-thread security failure and other weighty controversies with sass and indifference.
Officials have responded to the text-thread security failure and other weighty controversies with sass and indifference.
D efense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first impulse following the revelation that The Atlantic’s editor in chief was included on a private text thread in which cabinet-level officers conducted sensitive deliberations regarding imminent U.S. military action overseas was to obfuscate.
“You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again,” Hegseth said yesterday. “This is a guy that peddles in garbage. It’s what he does.”
Hegseth might have been unaware that the administration had already confirmed the veracity of the text thread to which The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was privy. That avenue having been closed off, the administration’s allies pivoted to insisting that the exposure of U.S. war plans on a site that isn’t allowed on federal mobile devices was no big deal. In fact, you’re kind of a sucker if you think it matters.
“Best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of The Atlantic magazine, because no one ever goes there,” read one of Elon Musk’s typically impertinent social-media posts. Senator Josh Hawley agreed. He dismissed the scandal as merely “the president’s advisors discussing among themselves options they might recommend to the president,” adding that the “leftist media” has been “reduced to griping about who is on a text message and who’s not.”
Hawley’s argument, which he boiled down to “I mean, come on,” proved equally unpersuasive. So, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took another stab at spinning the embarrassing episode by claiming that no “war plans” were discussed, nothing classified was divulged, and the White House Counsel’s Office has provided “guidance” regarding the use of unapproved digital communications platforms.
It seems unlikely that a government that over-classifies everything would not have limited access to what Goldberg insists he did not publish: the identities of active CIA operatives, specific targeting details, strike sequencing, and the weapons platforms used in the attack. Even if you dismiss the objective violation of records laws and are skeptical that this conduct constitutes a breach of U.S. security, Leavitt’s claim is dubious. The value in her remarks is more to be found in her aggressive contempt for Goldberg and his penchant for “sensationalist spin.”
This episode is a product of this administration’s flippancy. Its casual unseriousness is what produced a text message in the first place. So, too, did that outlook license the way in which the administration’s principles disclosed its internal disputes, which are of inestimable value to our enemies, to say nothing of our capabilities. That same unseriousness produced this unsatisfying cleanup operation, which fails to marshal a persuasive argument and relies instead on the assumed partisanship of the intended audience. We have seen this sort of thing a lot from Republicans in the second Trump era.
No other word but flippant describes the process that led to a White House event in which MAGA-aligned social media influencers were handed the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files — folders full of previously disclosed documents adorned with false classification markers. Flip is also how you would describe the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee’s response to naïve internet sleuths who felt burned by the disclosure (in which the Committee’s social media account retailed the real Epstein files in a link that directed users to Rick Astley’s 1987 hit tune, “Never Gonna Give You Up”).
Sassy impudence typifies the administration’s response to judges who either rule against the administration or merely have the temerity to enjoin its actions in observance of its failure to follow proper procedure. Anyone who objects to the administration’s failure to provide deportation targets with their due-process rights finds themselves accused of actively supporting terrorists — up to and including our own Andy McCarthy. It’s unclear who Trump administration officials believe will climb out on this thin reed, but the administration appears confident that a narrative as flimsy as this is sufficient to satisfy their critics (or, at least, shut them up).
The president himself isn’t above frivolity when discussing policy prescriptions with the potential to impose profoundly undesirable consequences on the American people. When he deigns to acknowledge the “pain” he admits would accompany the onerous tariffs he would impose on seemingly all foreign goods and industrial inputs, he insists that Americans will bear that burden indefinitely. But he never displays enough respect for the voting public to explain what they are supposed to sacrifice for, what the objective metrics for success are, and to what extent they will be evaluated by anyone other than himself.
In this regard, Trump’s vice president is worse. JD Vance panned the notion that any of America’s European allies are capable of standing up a peacekeeping force to be deployed to Ukraine — allies he described as some “random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years.” Vance insists it is “absurdly dishonest” to suggest he was referring to America’s longstanding allies. But at the time of his remarks, only the U.K., France, and Australia had signaled their interest in deployments to Ukraine — three nations that have not only fought often alongside America in the past but are engaged in active operations with the U.S. in the Red Sea right now. So, to whom was the vice president referring? He has not said.
Maybe he, too, is hoping that partisanship will paper over the manifest deficiencies in his arguments. That seems to have been the assumption that led Vance to insist that anyone who is skeptical of the administration’s approach to peace talks over Russia’s war in Ukraine — folks like former Vice President Mike Pence — want “to start a nuclear war with Russia.” The casual disrespect for his audience’s intelligence should irritate his allies more than it apparently does, but the vice president doesn’t seem to be playing a long game. Indeed, this administration’s pathological frivolity seems less tactical than instinctual.
It’s not as though the Biden administration was any less flip. The former president’s contempt for voters (“You’ll know my position on court packing when the election is over,” Joe Biden had the gall to say aloud in 2020) and the administration’s nonchalance as the skies over North America became a combat zone targeting Communist Chinese assets were similarly unnerving.
Maybe it’s better that Trump 2.0 has dispensed with Biden’s mock solemnity even if it has retained his insouciance. Still, the degree to which this administration seems comfortable discussing matters both grave and trivial as online gamers would in a Discord forum is as puerile as it is reckless.
The work of government is serious business. The American public deserves serious people at the helm. So far, and for elusive reasons, this presidency seems to believe that voters will disregard its mistakes if its officials act as though anyone who notices and objects to them are picayune obsessives and cranks. This strategy, such as it is, is not working.