The White House, the Republican Party and their MAGA media mouthpieces think the American people are idiots.
That’s the only explanation for the Trump administration’s ludicrous, insulting, borderline Orwellian response to the revelation that top national security officials were discussing a military strike in Yemen — and revealing what was very likely classified information about it — on the Signal messaging app with the unbeknownst presence of Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic. And it’s the only explanation for Trump’s enablers in Congress and right-wing media going straight into deny-at-all-costs mode.
Over the past four days, the White House’s response to the emerging scandal has followed a familiar playbook — denial, obfuscation, attacks on critics, gaslighting and whataboutism. The sad part is, considering that many of the president’s supporters will believe every word he says, combined with the cowardice of Trump’s GOP congressional allies, it’ll likely work.
The White House’s response to the emerging scandal has followed a familiar playbook — denial, obfuscation, attacks on critics, gaslighting and whataboutism.
When Goldberg first broke the story in The Atlantic on Monday, it sent jaws to the floor across Washington and beyond. The Trump team adopted a familiar strategy — denial. In congressional hearings the next day, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe said no classified material had been discussed on the Signal chat.
“Nobody was texting war plans,” said Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, even though Goldberg’s article about the incident showed that Hegseth had done precisely that — and White House officials had already confirmed that his reporting was correct.
However, as is often the case with Trump and his acolytes, they quickly shifted gears into attack mode.
“You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes,” Hegseth said of Goldberg. “This is a guy who peddles in garbage.”
White House press secretary Katherine Leavitt claimed that the crux of the Signal story was not the White House’s disregard of security safeguards but rather proof that “Democrats and their propagandists in the mainstream media know how to fabricate, orchestrate and disseminate a misinformation campaign quite well. And there’s arguably no one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg.”
National security adviser Mike Waltz labeled Goldberg a “loser” and speculated, without evidence, that the magazine editor had snuck his way onto the group chat.
Others in the MAGA-sphere picked up Waltz’s line of attack, with Fox News’ Jesse Watters claiming that journalists like Goldberg, who he called the “lowest of the low”… “sometimes send out fake names with a contact with their cells to deceive politicians.” (In fact, there is no evidence Goldberg did anything like this, which would be an egregious breach of journalistic norms.)
Keep in mind that Waltz directly added Goldberg to the group chat. If Goldberg is as awful as the White House claims, what was he doing in the chat? And if a reporter of allegedly such low character somehow snuck onto the chat, what does that say about Waltz’s decision to initiate a discussion about U.S. war plans on a third-party messaging app?
Faced with the truth, the Trump team switched to its perhaps most favored tactic — gaslighting.
The drumbeat of attacks on The Atlantic and Goldberg were, in effect, daring the magazine to release the chat logs and prove they were lying … which it did on Wednesday. Those logs showed that Gabbard and Ratcliffe arguably perjured themselves and that Hegseth’s denial that he had texted out war plans was a lie.
Now, faced with the truth, the Trump team switched to its perhaps most favored tactic — gaslighting.
These weren’t “war plans,” the White House huffily argued … they were “attack plans.” According to Hegseth, since there were “No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information” in his texts, they weren’t “war plans” or even “attack plans.” It was just 18 good friends getting on a group chat and shooting the breeze about a military attack. Nothing to see here.
Only in the Trump administration’s alternate universe is information about a pending military attack not classified. Moreover, Hegseth didn’t just say an attack was coming — he listed the specific times they’d be occurring and the types of weapons systems that would be used.
There is no world in which such operational plans — if they became available before an attack — wouldn’t be helpful to the enemy and potentially put U.S. fighter pilots in harm’s way.
Imagine, for example, if on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, U.S. intelligence officials intercepted a Japanese cable that said their planes were bombing targets in Hawaii in two hours. Would U.S. officials ignore it because, as Hegseth claims, no locations, routes, or units were identified? And yet, Republicans are still trying to defend this mess. According to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, “The messages The Atlantic released only prove that America is STRONG again. President Trump’s national security leaders are patriots who collaborate and then act decisively to take out terrorists. A welcomed, needed change after four years of weakness from President Biden.” Never mind that Biden, as president, ordered multiple attacks on the Houthis in Yemen. No matter what Donald Trump does, no matter how badly his minions screw up, his supporters will always come around. Then, when all else fails, there is always the GOP’s favorite strategy — whataboutism. Asked on Thursday about whether there would be an FBI investigation of the release of classified material in the Signal scandal, Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “If you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton’s home that she was trying to BleachBit.” Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin took a similar tack, arguing that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was far worse than anything on the Signal chat. Unless Mullin has previously unknown evidence that Clinton leaked military attack plans hours before the attack commenced, this is not remotely true. Others tried to divert calls for accountability for those involved in the unclassified group chat by pointing to the supposed lack of accountability for the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan during the Biden administration. Children are frequently reminded that two wrongs don’t make a right. Apparently, that lesson has failed to penetrate the upper echelons of the Trump administration, the Republican Party, or its slavish media cheerleaders. The sad part of all this lying, distraction and gaslighting is that it will almost certainly work. A poll today from YouGov showed that 60% of Republicans viewed the scandal as a very or somewhat serious problem, with 28% saying it’s a “very serious” problem and 16% said they weren’t sure. It’s rare these days to see that kind of disapproval of the Trump administration from Republicans, but, give it a week, and those numbers will likely come crashing back to Earth. If there is one consistent political reality in the last 10 years, it is that no matter what Donald Trump does, no matter how badly his minions screw up, his supporters will always come around. Try to steal an election, incite an insurrection, get convicted of 34 felonies, screw up the handling of a global pandemic, share classified information on an insecure unclassified messaging app … all is eventually forgiven. After all, how can anyone get angry with Donald Trump? In their thinking, whatever he might have done, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Joe Biden almost certainly did something worse.
Michael A. Cohen is a political writer and a fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation. 
