Will Signalgate Be An Inflection Point?

Incompetence catches up to malevolence in Trump 2.0

Photo by Jonas Lee on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would like to apologize to anyone offended by yesterday’s profanity-laced newsletter. Multiple f-bombs are not everyone’s cup of tea. If the staff had worked hard enough, it might have been possible to describe the Trump administration’s beclowning of the executive branch using slightly less colorful language.

That said, it is worth speculating whether Signalgate — the administration’s national security team accidentally including Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg in their “Houthi PC small group” chat — is a big enough deal to warrant profanity.

And the answer seems clear: yeah, the Trump team fucked up. They fucked up real bad on multiple levels.

First, there is the obvious intelligence lapse. Signal might be encrypted but the phones that the Houthi PC small group used were certainly not secure, making them an inviting target for foreign intelligence services. The fact that none of the participants believed the Signal chat was out of the ordinary suggests there are more of these group chats discussing policy. Then there’s what Goldberg revealed, which was a set of policy principals that were not entirely on the same page.

For the Trump team, however, there’s a deeper problem: this story paves the way for plenty of additional stories using Signalgate as a hook to highlight other screw-ups.