President Donald Trump’s incoherent response to his senior military and intelligence officials compromising national security by sharing the details of an impending military strike on an unsecure text messaging app raises a terrifying question: Who is even running things around here?
Trump has repeatedly said that he’s either not been briefed on the massive security lapse, or has shown he doesn’t understand what happened—neither of which is reassuring.
For example, the day that Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported that he was apparently inadvertently added to a Signal chat with Vice President JD Vance, national security adviser Mike Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other top national security officials where they were discussing an imminent attack on a rebel group in Yemen, Trump said he didn’t know that happened.
"I don't know anything about it,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me it's a magazine that's going out of business. But I know nothing about it. You're saying that they had what?"
The question was posed to him hours after the article was published, giving him ample time to have had a response prepared. What’s more, since Goldberg had reached out to the White House for comment before the article was published, Trump should have known for even longer that the story was coming. The fact that he said he didn’t know about it means he was either lying or hadn’t been kept in the loop by his own staff—which again are both terrible scenarios.
Then on Wednesday, days after the story broke, Trump gave an interview to right-wing podcaster Vince Coglianese in which he suggested he didn’t even know what the Signal messaging app was.
“But somebody in my group, either screwed up or it’s a bad signal. It’s a bad signal, happens too,” Trump said, apparently thinking that this scandal revolves around a literal signal and not the Signal messaging app.
Additionally on Wednesday, when The Atlantic released yet more texts showing that Hegseth had shared classified information in the thread about the exact timing of the attacks and what weapons systems would be used, Trump falsely claimed to reporters that Hegseth wasn’t involved.
"Hegseth is doing a great job. He had nothing to do with this. How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do with it,” Trump said while sitting in the Oval Office.
Trump then went on to make more nonsensical comments about Signal, giving an answer that ultimately makes what his top administration officials did look even worse.
“You want to ask about whether or not Signal works? I don’t know that Signal works. I think Signal could be defective to be honest with you. And I think that’s what we have to do, because you use Signal and we use Signal and everybody uses Signal, but it could be a defective platform and we’re going to have to figure that out.”
That response certainly doesn’t help Trump’s argument that this is all a hoax, given that we know his aides used Signal to share classified information—which Trump described as a “defective platform.”
Of course, Trump is both a notorious liar and a moron, so you never know whether he is lying by playing dumb, or really doesn’t understand what is going on.
In this instance, it’s likely both, as the technologically illiterate Trump—who thinks his own son is some sort of genius because he can turn on a laptop computer—probably doesn’t understand what Signal is.
Nevertheless, we should have faith that our president has a grasp of what is going on and will hold his administration accountable for putting lives on the line by discussing classified information that could have gotten American troops killed.
But given that Trump is refusing to take responsibility for the security lapse, defending the bad behavior of his inept Cabinet officials, and lying about the scandal itself being a “hoax,” we are not holding our breath that any accountability is on the way.
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