SignalGate is one example of Donald Trump administration incompetence but also symptomatic of growing stupidity

The Greater Scandal of SignalGate published in The New Yorker magazine by David Remnick:

For the cover of the April 7, 2025, issue, the cartoonist Barry Blitt borrows the visual imagery of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” to convey the sense of impending doom that seizes anyone who turns on the news lately. And in the wake of Signalgate, as David Remnick writes, it has become clear not only that the Trump Administration has made no attempts to disguise its autocratic intentions but also that its “qualities of malevolence, retribution, and bewildering velocity have obscured somewhat the ineptitude of its principals.”

The spectacle of incompetence and the attempts to smear a reporter are a misery; even worse is the encroaching threat of autocracy that cannot be concealed or encrypted.

Every era produces its own emblematic array of knuckleheads and butterfingers: Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops. The Three Stooges. The 1962, Mets. Beavis and Butt-head. Wayne and Garth. In Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War classic, “Dr. Strangelove,” the fools wield apocalyptic weapons rather than custard pies. 

Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, grows so feverish and paranoid about a Communist plot “to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” that he goes “a little funny” and orders a thermonuclear strike on the Soviet Union. But such fantastical heedlessness is the province only of comic fantasy, no?

In the initial months of Donald Trump’s second Administration, the qualities of malevolence, retribution, and bewildering velocity have obscured somewhat the ineptitude of its principals. This came into sharper view with recent reports in The Atlantic, in which the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, tells how he was somehow added to a communal chat on the commercially available messaging system Signal, labelled “Houthi PC small group.” Sitting in his car, in a Safeway parking lot, Goldberg watched incredulously on his phone as the leaders of the national-security establishment discussed the details of bombing Houthi strongholds in Yemen.

The comedy of Goldberg’s reports resides, at least in part, in the discovery that Vice-President Vance and the heads of the leading defense and intelligence bureaucracies deploy emojis with the same frequency as middle schoolers. 

More seriously, but not astonishingly, when prominent members of the Administration were confronted with their potentially lethal carelessness, they did as their President would have them do: they attacked the character and the integrity of the reporter (who proved far more concerned about national security than the national-security adviser), and then refused to give straight answers to Congress about their cock-up and the sensitivity of the communications. 

Everyone from Cabinet members to the Trump press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, followed principles inherited by the President from the late Roy Cohn: Never apologize. And be certain to slander the messenger.

This spectacle of breezy contempt regarding questions of process and policy was humiliating, for sure, but hardly an amazement. 

In the chat, Vice-President J. D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seem to compete in their denigrations of the Europeans. (“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Hegseth tells Vance. "It’s PATHETIC.”)😓💢

And yet, much of what is so depressing about the chat is how familiar we are with the details and its spirit. Vance has, publicly and repeatedly, unburdened himself of his and Donald Trump's unwarranted disdain for Europe—most flagrantly in a speech in Munich, in February, when he lectured European leaders on their supposed failures in the realms of immigration and free speech.

This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we were privy to a twenty-four-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance. Part of what was so appalling about Trump and Vance’s recent meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was not just their penchant for channelling the world view and negotiating points of Vladimir Putin but their comfort in expressing them, barking them, at the Ukrainian President in front of reporters in the Oval Office.

Similarly, it does not require months of painstaking investigative reporting or a middle-aged tech fail to discover that another member of the group chat, Steven Witkoff, the President’s leading shuttle negotiator, is no more steeped in the granular details of diplomatic history and strategy than any other New York real-estate developer from the eighties in Trump’s circle. In a long interview with Tucker Carlson, following recent conversations in Moscow with Putin, Witkoff consistently parroted Russian talking points and relayed that the Russian dictator (“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy”) had been “gracious” and gave him a “beautiful portrait” of Trump as a gift for the President. (Trump, in turn, “was clearly touched” by the painting, Witkoff reported.) Throughout, Witkoff’s grasp of the conflict was so wobbly, so Moscow-inflected, that one could almost hear the guffawing from the Kremlin. In a moment of contemplation, Witkoff admitted, “I underestimated the complications in the job, that’s for sure. I think I was a little bit quixotic in the way that I thought about it. Like, I’m going to roll in there on a white horse. And, no, it was anything but that, you know.”

Pete Hegseth is less prone to misty self-reflection. But his incompetence might have been predictable. Last December, after Trump nominated Hegseth, a weekend host on Fox News, to lead the Pentagon, Jane Mayer wrote a meticulously reported piece in this magazine on his florid background: his bouts of excessive drinking and profoundly sexist behavior on and off the job; his failures at managing enterprises somewhat larger than a dry cleaner but infinitely smaller than the Pentagon. No matter. Congressional Republicans were not inclined to deny Hegseth his appointment or to risk the President’s wrath. 

And they were similarly accommodating for another participant in the hapless Signal chat, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence.

And so the week’s scandal is rather like the ending of an O. Henry story, surprising yet inevitable. If a journalist is mistakenly dropped into a group text among the leaders of the American health bureaucracy, will we faint when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., refuses to recommend proven vaccines?

It would be unwise to dismiss the importance of secrets in this or any other Administration, but the point is that Trump and his ideological and political planners have made no secret of their intentions. While Richard Nixon tended to save his darkest confidences and prejudices for private meetings with such aides as Henry Kissinger and H. R. Haldeman, Trump gives voice to his id almost daily at the microphone or on social media: the autocratic actions intended to undermine the law, academia, and the media; the disregard for democratic partners and the affection for all manner of authoritarians; the hostile designs on Greenland, Canada, Panama, Mexico, and Europe; the ongoing attempt to purge the Republican Party of any remaining dissenters; and the constant effort to intimidate his critics and perceived enemies.

The threat of autocracy advances each day under Donald Trump, and it is a process that hides in plain sight. Some will choose to deny it, to domesticate it, to treat the abnormal as mere politics, to wish it all away in the spirit of “this too shall pass.” But the threat is real and for all to see. No encryption can conceal it. ♦

Published in the print edition of the April 7, 2025, issue, with the headline “Signal Failure.”

Root cause analysis of the modern political "witch hunt"~ Echo opinion

Rigged Witch Hunt!

Echo opinion by Jay Michaelson published in The Daily Beast

Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) with Roy Cohn (1927-1986) Senator McCarthy died from complications associated with heroin addiction and alcoholism and his Attorney Cohn died from complications with Acquired Immune Deficiency (AIDS). These two men were the root causes of modern political "witch hunts". 

Wait! Does Donald Trump want us to think the Russia investigation is a witch hunt? I’m starting to get that impression.

Indeed, the (MaineWriter ~ "failed") leader of the free world has tweeted the term “witch hunt” 106 times in 2018 alone—which, I’d like to propose, is a poor choice of metaphor.

If this were an actual witch hunt, Mr. Trump would be on the side of the hunters.

Estimates vary widely, but it is thought that between the 14th and 17th centuries around 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft (in Europe and America), and 75 to 90 percent of them were women.

Actual witch hunts were largely gendered affairs, with women being targeted because they were sexualized and literally demonized: one common theme was that Satan grabbed witches by the you-know-what. Another was that women were “weak.” Does any of this sound familiar?

Moreover, women accused of witchcraft were disproportionately those who did not conform to gender expectations. Outcast women (“sluts”), single women (including widows), women who disobeyed their husbands. Nasty women.

Once again, methinks the president doth protest too much.

He learned that stuff from (Roy) Cohn ~ ?perhaps reincarnated in Stephen Miller? (How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn's Ruthless symbiosis changed America), who before becoming Trump’s mentor, was Senator McCarthy’s henchman. 

It was Cohn, not Robert Mueller, who helped orchestrate the actual “greatest witch hunt in political history,” now known as McCarthyism.

Careers were ruined, lives destroyed, and anyone who ever supported a union or protested a politician was regarded as guilty until proven innocent.

All of this woman-hating rhetoric, of course, was holy and wholesome and good, because religion. Seventeenth century Puritans believed women to be particularly susceptible to evil. Puritan women themselves believed this. Thus women had to be exceptionally pious and saintly, and also kept close at hand.

Mike Pence calls his wife “Mother.”

But it’s not only women that were targeted by witch-hunts, as by the president’s schemes of seduction: it was sexuality itself. 

Women outside the control of men and the church were seen to be dangerously sexual. The witch hunts of Europe and America were in part sexual inquisitions, often snaring those we might call LGBT today: perceived sexual deviants, ‘mannish’ women, ‘effeminate’ men.

Needless to say, all these impulses, too, are abundant within the current administration: sexual puritanism, the need to control women’s bodies, and the denial of dignity to those who are gender-nonconforming, transgender, or queer.

Indeed, the conservative evangelicals so lately enamored of our philandering president are the spiritual and sometimes literal descendants of those same Puritans: the extremely conservative theology, the bizarre belief that all of us are born sinners, the active roles Satan and Jesus take in human lives, the sex-phobia, the inability to let people live and let live, the rigid gender hierarchy.

Moreover, to the extent there really was witchcraft in the 16th to 18th centuries—most likely folk traditions and holdovers from the pre-Christian past—they share their Christian ancestors’ religious intolerance as well.

Even the notion, now prevalent on the Christian Right, that Donald Trump’s manifest unsuitability to be president only proves that he is an instrument of Divine Providence, is part of the same worldview that regards people as puppets of greater forces, whether benevolent or malevolent. Some people are instruments of Christ, others of Beelzebub.

Well, you might say, Trump doesn’t mean actual witch hunts—he means figurative ones, like McCarthyism. After all, that’s where the term entered common usage: the Red Scare was the inspiration for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which forever linked the two phenomena in American culture.

Here again, though, Trump is on the side of the hunters: namely, his loathsome political mentor, Roy Cohn.

People forget sometimes that Trump didn’t burst out of the womb with his pugilistic rhetorical style and reactionary political views intact.

It’s a short stone’s throw indeed from Cohn’s imprecations against all those he deemed Un-American to Trump’s evil claims that the free press is the enemy of the people—and, more recently, his stripping of security clearance from his critics such as former CIA Director John Brennan.

More broadly, McCarthyism was a burst of populist conservative paranoia, just like “Make America Great Again.” Both claimed that America was both the best nation in the world and threatened with imminent destruction by anti-patriotic elites and unpopular minorities “opposed to our way of life” (then: communists, African Americans, Jews; now: Muslims, immigrants, Jews).

Both movements are radically anti-rational, anti-education, anti-science. Both are fervently particularistic, placing America First and defining America as narrowly as possible (white, suburban/rural, conservative, Christian).

Trumpism is, itself, a great witch hunt, desperately in search of an enemy.

Really, it’s quite an irony: the flaxen-haired prodigy of America’s foremost witch-hunter now declaring himself the victim of a witch-hunt—no doubt an irony that Cohn himself would have admired, and been all too familiar with.

Remember, Cohn focused his attacks on people disproportionately like him, especially Jews and closeted queers (and, it turned out, he was among the queers! Hypocrite!).

Cohn, with the assistance of the closet queen J. Edgar Hoover, relentlessly persecuted gays in what became known as the “Lavender Scare,” associating homosexuality with ‘subversives’ and communism. That led to President Eisenhower’s order banning gay people from serving in government, which led to the firing of over 5,000 people.

This is what self-hatred looks like, and Cohn and Trump can’t help but show it off: the preening, the vulgarity, the tacky taste for the gaudiest luxuries imaginable, the constant need for validation. (If Roy Cohn could’ve hosted demagogic pep rallies in the 1950s, he would’ve done that too.)

In other words, whenever Trump tweets against contemporary witch-hunters, he’s attacking his own reflection in the mirror.