The Houthi group-chat leak reveals some truly unserious people The Trump administration has too many chuckleheads and too few people of substance. Tim Black
It is a security cock-up of monumental proportions.
We now know that a dozen senior Trump administration officials, including national-security adviser Michael Waltz, vice-president JD Vance and defence secretary Pete Hegseth, were using Signal, a commercial messaging service, to discuss the plan to launch airstrikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels earlier this month. This in itself ought to set alarm bells ringing. To talk about highly sensitive, top-secret military plans, officials are required to use approved government equipment in a compartmented information facility, not a slightly flashier form of WhatsApp. For obvious reasons.
The reason we know about any of this is even more worrying. Earlier this month, Waltz – the guy charged with maintaining national security, no less – accidentally invited Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Trump-hating Atlantic, into this ‘Houthi PC small group’. It beggars belief. Waltz effectively gave a journalist diametrically opposed to the current administration a full view of the Trump White House’s military planning. Goldberg saw all the operational details of the then forthcoming strikes on Yemen. He saw which weapons were to be deployed, the identity of the targets and the sequencing of the attacks. He saw information that could have easily been used to harm US military and intelligence personnel in the Middle East. That it wasn’t is solely down to the fact that Goldberg has been careful about when and how he revealed what had happened, taking special care to withhold and redact key details.
So incredible was this security lapse that Goldberg didn’t believe it at first. He thought he was being entrapped. It was only when the US actually carried out the airstrikes on the Houthis on the day and time that had been discussed in the group that Goldberg finally accepted it was real. Waltz had genuinely given him a front-row seat into the innermost sanctum of the Trump administration. ‘Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a fucking idiot’, a source told Politico on Tuesday. They’re not wrong.
Of course this is not the first time US officials have used their own private emails or messaging apps to talk policy and share plans. As Goldberg himself notes, national-security officials do communicate on messaging apps like Signal, although they usually confine their chats to routine work matters, rather than top-secret plans to bomb militias in the Middle East.
It’s also a little rich watching Democrats and their media cheerleaders gorging themselves on this security fiasco. They really shouldn’t be chucking rocks, given the dilapidated state of their own glass house. In 2016, it emerged that state department official Jake Sullivan, later the national security adviser to Joe Biden, had been sending messages to Hillary Clinton’s infamous private email account, brimful with highly classified information.
Still, the lack of seriousness on show here is something to behold. These people occupy the most senior offices of state in America. Yet here they were chatting away about launching lethal airstrikes in Yemen on a messaging app, as if they were arranging a night out.
Vice-president Vance complained about ‘bailing Europe out again’, on the grounds that the Red Sea shipping route menaced by the Houthis is used more by European freight than American. To be fair, this is nothing Vance wouldn’t say to European leaders’ faces. But it does capture something of the incoherence of American First foreign policy – a nation at once determined to bend the world to its interests, while being reluctant to protect a shipping lane used by US tankers. The response of defence secretary Hegseth is even more telling for its caps-locked shrillness: ‘I share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.’
When it came to the military action in Yemen itself, the group’s members frequently resorted to communicating in emojis. A few praying hands ahead of the attacks, followed by fist-bumps, muscle flexes and fire symbols in the attack’s aftermath. They came across less as statesmen than as freshmen. And they did so in full view of a journalist whom one of their fratpack had unwittingly invited over.
This speaks to a problem not only within the Trump administration, but also within many of today’s populist movements, organised as they often are around a handful of forceful individuals. While their principal figures have something about them, there’s often a bit of a personnel problem beneath. Trump’s MAGA insurgency is a case in point. Too many in his administration seem out of their depth. Hegseth might have made for an entertaining Fox News host, but he seems a bit of a chucklehead as defence secretary. The less said about Waltz the better.
Politics is about much more than competence – you need ideology, a vision, democratic support and clout. But you really can’t get much done, or avoid disasters like this, without it. Serious roles demand serious people. Not attention grabbers. Not show-offs. And certainly not people who’d share classified military info and carry on like a teenager on a group chat with a stranger. FFS.
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