According to the Trump Administration, one novel way to make America great again is to hire the least qualified, incompetent, and reckless people and give them leadership positions and oversight over our national security and foreign policy.
This is how we have former Fox host and alleged abuser Pete Hegseth as our Secretary of Defense. The man who paid a woman $50K to stay quiet about sexual assault deemed it wise to copy and paste classified military strike details on Signal, an app the Pentagon recently warned was unsecure and prone to hacking. In addition to Trump’s Cabinet members, The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was also in this Signal chat because he was accidentally added. After the shocking revelations, the Trump Administration and much of the right-wing media have tried - and failed - to desperately spin an utterly unspinnable clusterf*** of a mess.
They’ve even lost Barstool Sports founder David Portnoy, MAGA apparatchik Tomi Lahren, and Republican Rep. Don Bacon, who suggests Hegseth committed a crime. Furthermore, Bacon said, “This is a gross error, and it’s intentional. They intentionally put highly classified information on an unclassified device. I would have lost my security clearance in the Air Force for this and for a lot less.”
Rep. Bacon echoes Fred Wellmann, a veteran pilot and host of the On Democracy podcast and On the Line with Vote Vets, who told me that if he did something like this, his career would have ended immediately. However, if you’re a MAGA loyalist, you can publicize our national security, threaten our troops, and expose our military allies without accountability. Earlier today, it was revealed that Israel complained privately to US officials because they had provided intelligence from a human source in Yemen about the targets that were described in the Signal chat that have since become public.
To make it all worse, Wellman just published a piece on his Substack in which a high-level source in the Department of Defense confirmed that the Trump Administration approved the installation of Signal on government devices. This is now the primary means of communication for the White House.
Don’t you feel great again, America?
All of this begs several questions: why are they using Signal and not the usual secure channels? What information are they hiding from the public? How many other national security conversations have potentially been breached? What does Trump know, if anything, because as of now, he looks completely clueless?
To break down the significant implications this has for our safety and national security, I invited Wellman over for a Chai Talk to discuss the threats our country faces from the people currently occupying the White House.
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