SignalGate! Donald Trump obviously never learned the President Truman lesson "The buck stops here!"

The Signal group chat, and the dangers of a president who believes his administration is beyond accountability.

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Globe Opinion columnist Renée Graham.

SignalGate❗

Donald Trump could have tamped down the roiling scandal now being called “Signalgate.” (Yes, it’s a gate.)

Its facts are unassailable. In fact, Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, to a text chat session with several high-level Cabinet members — including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Vice President JD Vance — to hash out plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen.

In a jawdropper of a story, Goldberg wrote that he knew two hours before the rest of the world when the first bombs would drop on March 15 because Hegseth “had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.” All of this, inexplicably, unfolded on Signal, an encrypted phone app.

On Wednesday, Goldberg and Shane Harris, a staff writer for The Atlantic, published even more damning details with additional text messages that starkly contradict Hegseth’s snippy denial, “Nobody was texting war plans.” 🤥

Morover, the security breach story also burns the administration’s false claims — including those made by Gabbard and Ratcliffe under oath at a Senate Intelligence Committee ❗hearing on Tuesday — that the text chain did not reveal classified information. 🤥

Jeffrey Goldberg and Harris wrote: “The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump — combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying🤥 about the content of the Signal texts — have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.”

Here’s another conclusion.

Trump should have admitted that *egregious* mistakes were made by Waltz and Hegseth. 

Trump should have demanded the resignation of at least one of them. That would have given the public some sense that the administration was treating this colossal security breach with the gravity it warrants. Perhaps Goldberg and Harris would not have felt compelled to write another bombshell story to counter the administration’s ridiculous narrative.

"the closest Trump ever comes to admitting a mistake is when he rips a former appointee who balked at doing whatever terrible thing he commanded them to do"

That’s why Trump spent the days since The Atlantic story dropped trashing Goldberg, a journalist Trump has despised since his first White House term for writing things that Trump did not like. 

Clearly, that’s the administration’s (failed defensive) strategy, with Vance claiming on X/ that Goldberg “oversold what he had,” Waltz calling Goldberg a “loser” and a liar, and Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, dismissing the stories as “another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

“Hoax” is MAGA code for “attention must not be paid.”

Even as evidence mounts against the confederacy of dunces who used a commercial app to conduct classified business about an imminent bombing attack on a foreign country, Trump has shown no inclination toward removing those responsible because that would be akin to admitting that he was wrong in nominating them in the first place.

The closest Trump ever comes to admitting a mistake is when he rips a former appointee who balked at doing whatever terrible thing he commanded them to do — and then it’s not about his lack of judgment but that someone, in his view, turned out to be disloyal.

This time Trump took no chances with critical thinkers or anyone with a shred of a conscience. He’s surrounded himself with loyalists whose only qualification is their deathless deference to him. In doing so, he has assembled the least qualified Cabinet in history, and the fallout from his arrogant miscalculation is unfolding in boldface headlines. Despite Trump’s many attempts to downplay the story, it clearly isn’t going away.

But, as a genetic serial liar, Trump is even more emboldened in his second term. After dodging any accountability for the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection, postelection interference to overturn his losing outcome in the 2020, presidential race, and his mishandling of classified documents, he believes that he is untouchable and owes no explanations to anyone about anything.

A leader who won’t own a wrong decision or immediately act to correct it is too dangerous to lead. Trump being Trump, he’ll probably stick with Waltz and Hegseth no matter how much Signalgate continues to metastasize. But it’s this nation and the world that will continue to pay an impossibly high price for having a president who will always favor obedience and sycophancy over competence and accountability.

This is an excerpt from Outtakes, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham.