The danger of incompetence marinating under the faint light of dim bulbs

Trump is counting on the opposition to chase every outrage he commits, thus rendering a mishmash of counter-outrage so diverse, fragmented and likely flummoxing to the barely attentive public that his detractors will never land on what's really needed to help drag his job approval numbers into their appropriately squalid ditch: conveying one unambiguous message — think Carville's "It's the economy, stupid" — about the gravest national threat he poses collectively, his presidency-as-dictatorhip. Efficacious negative messaging centers on an often easily conceived but cleverly fashioned, unmuddled attack line pounded again and again with striking simplicity so that its withering essence can be grasped with speed and registered in the public mind just as quickly. The undesirable effect of splintering a uniform message into this or that outrage confronted daily is an enervation of the main assault body's crippling force. With a multi-viperous Medusa as its leading weapon the opposition endangers its holy mission of destroying Trump by instead obliging his highest hope: that his opponents unfurl their flag of human decency's indignation at his every differentiated turn of the screw.

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That said, I'm about to hypocritically add to the noble opposition's message dispersal. Some acts of Trumpian incompetence are just too aggressively gargantuan to let slide in favor of the singular motherlode. Some even enhance the central image of your average dictatorship when taking care to note its common features of routine ignorance and clockwork bumbling — a changing of the guard that aids no one but the nation's enemies in ways that were it not for their potentially serious repercussions, the dictatorship's ineptitude would be seen as mere laughable pratfalls executed by frightfully expert nincompoops. Such was the case this mid-month as the incomparably unfit secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, and Trump's crackerjack national security team texted to Atlantic magazine's editor in chief, Jeff Goldberg, the U.S. war plan to hit Yemen's rebel Houthis, Q.E.D. I should also note that Hegseth & Co.'s inclusion of an influential magazine's generally hostile-to-Trump chief editor in its war planning cesspool caused the editor no little bafflement.

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As much as possible without losing the story's nearly unbelievable thread I'll skip over some of the comically dreadful details of the security gush which, as we're informed by the man who in 2017 off-handedly provided "highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador" — intel kept from America's own allies — happens all the time under sloppy Democratic administrations but never not once from the rigorously disciplined Trump White House. Should you be in the peculiar mood for reading more about the latest iteration of his top staff's keen professionalism, the full fantasy tale and, penned yesterday, Goldberg's account of his big adventure are here. So, while cutting short the regime's amuk-running and after minimizing their disciplined ado, what follows is the gist of a vintage Trumpist clusterfuck. But take heart, these things occur only on days from each Monday through Sunday.

On 11 March Goldberg received a bizarre notice from National Security Adviser Michael Waltz: He'd be part of a Signal (a messaging tool) chat called the "Houthi PC small group," it said. PC stands for "principals committee," meaning the secretaries of defense, state, the treasury, and the CIA director. They'd be discussing "action items" concerning the Houthis. (Goldberg: "I had never heard of [a pc] being convened over a commercial messaging app.") An actual minute later absentee notices began pouring in: SecState Marco Rubio appointed a stand-in, as did Veep JD Vance, DNI Directror Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, even DoD's Hegseth and NSC's committee-organizing Waltz. Vance did take time to write "I think we are making a mistake. I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now" and of the "moderate to severe spike in oil prices." I can speak for Donald. He was altogether unaware and he wouldn't give a damn about price hikes. But JD the Good was "willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself." Somewhat thunderstriking is that Pete Hegseth was the one to utter the overriding observation, "Nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded."

Here, outsider Goldberg added, "I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence." Jeffrey my boy, we're talking Trump's favorite and most clueless lackeys.

I can see I must speed this up or we'll wind up with a novella. Goldberg soon received a Signal "TEAM UPDATE," which he refused to quote, nor "from certain other subsequent texts" since "the information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel.... What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing." What's a superlative for a Republican-Senate-confirmed defense secretary's astonishing amateurism and primordial know-nothingism about even the most elementary elements of his job? For Pete's and our sake I can't think of one.

The finale: The first explosions in Yemen arrived Eastern time at 1:45 p.m., 15 March. Goldberg then backed out of the Signal group, "understanding that this would trigger an automatic notification to the group’s creator, 'Michael Waltz,' that I had left. No one in the chat had seemed to notice that I was there. And I received no subsequent questions about why I left—or, more to the point, who I was." From there he reflected on the group's quite possible violations of the Espionage Act, an issue raised by "several national-security lawyers" interviewed by a magazine colleague. 1) No U.S. official should ever stage such an online thread to begin with; 2) information covered by the group was commensurate with the legal definition of "national defense," yet the Signal app they used lacks government approval for sharing classified information; 3) the team should have held discussions in "a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF"; 4) because cell phones are disallowed in SCIFs, it's reasoanable to assume the particpants "were sharing information about an active military operation" on cells and perhaps in public, where a lost or stolen phone ran a "potential risk to national security."

And 5), a familiar one, something similar brought to us rather recently by the neophytes' most inept-since-Nero dictator himself. Trump's NSC director triggered a one-week message-disappearance device on some remarks made by the group and created a four-week vanishing wand for other remarks, deeds that probably "violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved." Former national security officials told Goldberg they had used Signal to share unclassified information "when traveling overseas without access to U.S. government systems. But they knew never to share classified or sensitive information on the app, because their phones could have been hacked by a foreign intelligence service, which would have been able to read the messages on the devices."

A few years back I did some field production work for the History Channel, interviewing an expert on the Allies' code-cracking of Nazi Germany's Enigma machine using the good guys' deciphering device still being federally housed and closely protected in a Baltimore-based government facility. After 50+ years the meticulously watchful security surrounding me, the interviewee and the camera crew was ludicrously intense. My confidence level was pretty high that no Nazi spies were lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce and flee with the Allies' ingenious mechanism. Some national security agency's anal overkill was just plain silly, but active, minute-by-minute military plans for bombing terrorist facilities in the Middle East? Yeah, on that score I can see an indispensable need for the tightest security — I can, you can, most anyone can see that. Trump's secretary of defense and national security adviser could not. Goldberg concluded his stunned recap with this:

It is worth noting that Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president), repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state. (It is also worth noting that Trump was indicted in 2023 for mishandling classified documents, but the charges were dropped after his election.)

Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.

All along, members of the Signal group were aware of the need for secrecy and operations security. In his text detailing aspects of the forthcoming attack on Houthi targets, Hegseth wrote to the group—which, at the time, included me—"We are currently clean on OPSEC."

We see that Hegseth is learning some Pentagon acronyms, the one and possibly the only trifle of knowledge necessary for DoD bureaucratic survival and Pentagon leadership. One doubts he has learned much of anything beyond that, with the probable exception of reconnaissance intel on which D.C. watering hole is closest to his nascent cirrhotic liver, ultramanly mind bursting with counterfeit manliness and taxpayers' squandered $246,000-a-year salary.

The point, though — and there is (or was) a point to all this — is that stories secondary and others certainly tertiary to the deeply perilous centrality of Trump's dictatorialism detract and subtract from the far more powerful punch of piercing concentrations on his traditional-America-annhilating reign of raw, unmitigated evil. The bloated bag of unrestrained retaliatory vengeance is as sick-brained and emotions-twisted as Milton's Satan in the first of Paradise Lost's 12 books. Today the magnificent English poet would write of not yet America Lost, but of a once-largely positive world presence placed on a freefalling path to perdition, carried out by one miserable little man whom the on-edge majority of 330 million Americans can't stop? That, gentle reader, is a national portrait in suicide — and a portrait I do not recognize. Most Americans are tougher, smarter and nowhere as meshuga as the weak-minded, spiritually gone goons of the MAGA crowd. When the strong awaken and realize they've had enough of the petty swindler's dictatorial madness they'll rise and hurl him into the post-Waterloo oblivion he's earned. And those who write about his coming Fall can accelerate America's liberation by emphatically focusing on the near-exclusive bullseye of Donald Trump's greatest strength —hence his greatest vulnerability. For now he's thriving by the dictatorial sword, and from that he'll perish at the dictating hands of decent Americans' wrath.