But His Group Chat

When you hire for incompetence, you get incompetence.

Photo by Gilles Lambert on Unsplash

You may have heard that the geniuses of the Trump national security team accidentally invited Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to their private group chat as they discussed plans to bomb the Houthis in Yemen. The chat was over Signal, a messaging app not approved by the federal government for classified communications, and included extremely sensitive information about targets and strategy. The situation was so absurd that Goldberg initially assumed it was a hoax or a trap by a foreign adversary — until the bombs started falling in Yemen.

It should go without saying that it is a tremendously foolish idea to use a messaging app — which can be intercepted by foreign adversaries — to share extremely sensitive and highly classified information about military actions and national security. It should go without saying that this kind of breach is unprecedented, the kind of colossal fuckup that simply wouldn’t — couldn’t — happen in an administration that took even the most basic level of care.

As Goldberg writes:

Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

No one except Michael Walz, who added Goldberg to the chat, knows exactly what happened here, but the most likely explanation is that he accidentally clicked Goldberg’s name when adding him to the group — maybe there was another Jeff or another Goldberg; maybe it was just a slip of the finger. Either way, the problem is less “Michael Walz accidentally added a journalist to the group chat” and more “the highest national security officials in the nation were discussing the most sensitive US military plans on a group chat.” We know that the Chinese government has targeted the phones of top US officials and politicians, including JD Vance, which could give them access to chat logs. Phones are simply inherently insecure; if you want to keep a secret, don’t put it on your phone.

But this is what happens when you hire for incompetence.

For all of the Trump administration’s bluster about DEI and restoring American greatness, the president has appointed some of the least competent and least qualified people to his cabinet of any leader in the modern era. Several of the people on the oopsie-we-added-a-journalist group chat have no business being in their roles (Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard), bringing little experience and ample ego. I cannot emphasize enough that these people do not know what they are doing. They were hired not in spite of that fact, but because of it. Hegseth, Gabbard, and the rest of mostly-men who make up the Trump administration clown show would simply never have otherwise ascended to the positions in which they currently find themselves. No other president would have appointed them, because other presidents at least try to appoint for competence. Trump knows that people who have no career prospects without him will do whatever they need to do to stay in his good graces. And that matters more to him than actually getting anything done, or keeping America safe and prosperous.

When your only route to power runs through one man, you are loyal to that one man.

This group chat debacle is not an aberration; it is a predictable result of what happens when you put a bunch of people in power who don’t know what they’re doing, and when you fire everyone who does know something. Trump’s paranoia about the Deep State being out to get him is amplified in his second term; he feels that last time around, his ambitions were thwarted by career civil servants and those who had careers before him and ambitions after him. So this time, the confidence man has gotten rid of the competent men.

This breach is just one (extreme) example of what happens when you fire the people with expertise and replace them with people whose primary qualification of loyalty. We will continue to see facsimiles of this moment across the federal bureaucracy as agencies are shuttered, employees are canned, and the Trump administration cuts off the basic ability of the government to function under the guise of “efficiency” and “draining the swamp.” Scarier still is how quickly we have collectively adjusted to systemic incompetence: We expect that the Trump team will make major screw-ups, will put the nation at risk, will make Americans’ lives worse.

One question is whether anyone will pay any price for this. Remember the Hillary Clinton email scandal? Clinton used a private server for some of her emails while she was Secretary of State, a violation of protocol that resulted in weeks of breathless media coverage and a series of investigations and lawsuits. And to be clear, coverage and investigations were warranted, although not at the intensity and obsession that characterized that particular affair. But running some emails through a private server — which the Trump team has also done — is a mere speck compared to the universe of stupidity, recklessness, and potential illegality contained in this Signal group chat.

But refusing to penalize serious mistakes (although is it even a mistake if it was done on purpose, and an obviously bad idea?) is also part of the Trump administration’s MO. People get punished for doing things the administration doesn’t like — and this will likely qualify, given the level of embarrassment it has caused. But if I were a betting woman, my money would be on Walz being the head to roll, even though Walz’s slip of the thumb (or whatever it was) is really not the central problem here.

Incompetent people behave incompetently. That’s all part of the plan.

xx Jill