On Monday, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief revealed that Donald Trump’s national security team accidentally added him to their Signal war-plan groupchat. People keep saying variations of “can you believe how stupid these people are?” Yes, I can, because I REMEMBER THE FIRST TRUMP TERM. It was extremely stupid, but millions of people apparently “forgot” the absolute f–king clownshow that comes with all things Donald Trump.
Anyway, this has become an unfolding catastrophe in a million ways. First off, national security officials aren’t supposed to discuss war-plans on Signal, they work for the government and they’re supposed to use secure, government comms channels. But her emails, remember? As it turns out, one of the guys in the groupchat – Steve Witkoff – was talking about war plans in Signal as he was in Moscow, meeting Putin. Meanwhile, everyone has settled on Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz as the one to blame for this screwup. Waltz was, after all, the one who started the groupchat and the one who added The Atlantic’s EIC. Waltz is also taking the blame for it publicly… even if Donald Trump wants everyone to blame an unnamed staffer.
The Trump administration may one day settle on a version of events regarding how a journalist got included in a Signal group chat about striking Houthis in Yemen, but Tuesday was not that day. White House National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, during a Fox News interview, took responsibility for the “embarrassing” error, while suggesting that The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg could have somehow schemed his way into the chat. Goldberg reported that Waltz himself invited Goldberg to it.
Waltz said, “We’re going to get to the bottom of it,” leaving much uncertain. But one thing he said did not happen was a staffer introducing Goldberg into the group.
“A staffer wasn’t responsible, and I take full responsibility,” he told Laura Ingraham. “I built the group. My job is to make sure everything is coordinated.”
Ingraham followed up moments later, “So, a staffer did not put [in] his contact information?”
“No, no, no,” Waltz said. “Of course not.”
Not so, according to Donald Trump. Just an hour later, in a pre-taped interview on Newsmax’s Greg Kelly Reports, Trump pointed the finger at a Waltz staffer.
“What it was, we believe, is somebody that was on the line with permission—somebody that was with Mike Waltz, worked for Mike Waltz at a lower level—had, I guess, Goldberg’s number, or called through the app, and somehow this guy ended up on the call,” Trump said. The method of communication was a group text, not a call.
“Now, it wasn’t classified, as I understand it,” Trump continued. “There was no classified information. There was no problem, and the attack was a tremendous success. So I can only go by what I’ve been told. I wasn’t involved in it, but I was told by—and the other people weren’t involved at all. But I feel very comfortable, actually.”
Trump’s comments echoed those from an earlier appearance before reporters, claiming “I don’t think he [Waltz] should apologize. I think he is doing his best. It’s equipment and technology that’s not perfect and probably he won’t be using it again, at least not in the near future.”
Tuesday’s mix-up hasn’t been the only instance of the administration not getting its story straight. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was also part of the group chat, on Monday denied texting about war plans, even though the White House National Security Council had confirmed the chat’s authenticity hours earlier. Hegseth appeared before the media again on Tuesday night at a briefing in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, again denying his involvement. “Nobody’s texting war plans. I know exactly what I’m doing,” he said.
I know this is all very serious but I’m laughing my ass off at “Nobody’s texting war plans. I know exactly what I’m doing.” Perfect response after you’ve literally been caught texting war plans and it has been revealed that you have no idea what you’re doing. Anyway, the only reason why Trump hasn’t asked anyone to resign over this is because he has no idea how groupchats work and he also doesn’t give a sh-t what his staff are doing on any given day.
Update: The Atlantic just published the complete transcript of the war-plan groupchat.
You can now read the group chat for yourselves, here: https://t.co/KrTDd6y3lJ
— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) March 26, 2025
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
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- National Security Advisor Michael Waltz speaks to the media outside theWest Wing of the White House in Washington, DC, February 4, 2025. Copyright: xChrisxKleponisx/,Image: 960175069, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: imago is entitled to issue a simple usage license at the time of provision. Personality and trademark rights as well as copyright laws regarding art-works shown must be observed. Commercial use at your own risk., Model Release: no, Credit line: IMAGO/Chris Kleponis / CNP /MediaPunch/Avalon
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- United States Special Envoy to the Middle East Steven Witkoff, left, and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, right, speak to the media outside theWest Wing of the White House in Washington, DC, February 4, 2025. Copyright: xChrisxKleponisx/,Image: 960175315, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: imago is entitled to issue a simple usage license at the time of provision. Personality and trademark rights as well as copyright laws regarding art-works shown must be observed. Commercial use at your own risk., Model Release: no, Credit line: IMAGO/Chris Kleponis / CNP /MediaPunch/Avalon
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- US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth attends a press conference after her meeting with Polish Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz at the Defence Ministry headquarters in Warsaw, Poland, 14 February 2025.,Image: 963772031, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: POLAND OUT, Model Release: no, Credit line: Marcin Obara/PAP/Avalon
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- President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense United States Secretary of Defense-designate Pete Hegseth testifies at his Senate Armed Services confirmation hearing in the Dirksen Senate office building in Washington, D.C. Featuring: United States Secretary of Defense-designate Pete Hegseth Where: Washington, District of Columbia, United States When: 14 Jan 2025 Credit: CNP/INSTARimages
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- US President Donald Trump gives remarks to the media in the Oval Office of the White House, as he meets with Elon Musk, in Washington DC Featuring: Donald Trump Where: Washington, District of Columbia, United States When: 11 Feb 2025 Credit: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/INSTARimages
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- X, the son of Elon Musk, looks at President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, Washington DC Featuring: X, Donald Trump Where: Washington, District of Columbia, United States When: 11 Feb 2025 Credit: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/INSTARimages
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- President Donald Trump departs the White House Featuring: President Donald Trump Where: Washington, District of Columbia, United States When: 14 Feb 2025 Credit: CNP/INSTARimages
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- United States Vice President JD Vance speaks as US President Donald Trump meets with Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC Featuring: JD Vance Where: Washington, District of Columbia, United States When: 12 Mar 2025 Credit: POOL via CNP/INSTARimages.com
“I know what I am doing” says the alcoholic Fox News reporter.
People are now referring to him as “WhiskeyLeaks”. He needs to resign asap before he f*cks up even more.
That’s as good as Pete Kegbreath.
My fave is still SECDEF Jaegermeister.
😂
The audacity he has in denying it all and calling Goldberg’ story a hoax, it just makes my blood boil. He is such a piece of garbage but I guess these guys have learned from Trump’s example to NEVER take responsibility for anything.
Yep. I would like some clarification from him on this statement…like, at what point during any day of the week, Pete, do you actually know what you are doing? I’m pretty sure it’s not a frequent occurrence. Is he referring to his hair products? Because that seems to be the one thing he’s getting done on a daily basis.
This reminds me so much of when Rob Ford, then Mayor of Toronto, justified his being caught on film smoking crack by saying he was only smoking it because he was in “one of his drunken stupors”. Hegseth brings the same energy
Arpeggi—🤣🤣🤣🤣 Gotta give Ford credit—he tried to think on his feet. 😉
The chances of US 🇺🇸 surviving this self inflicted 😱 gets smaller everyday.😲
And to think we have been in this sh!t show for only two months….it feels like years. I feel so numb.
If I think about it too much I see myself as the stereotypical image of a madwoman, laughing hysterically and pulling at her hair. Then it’s dissociation time. 🤷🏼♀️
Y’all ever seen a white knuckling, not actually done the work sober person go spectacularly off the rails? He is going to get so many people killed.
Thanks to the 70m that voted for trump and the 75m who couldn’t be bothered to vote AT ALL.
Everyone suffers now.
Right? It’s clear he’s not sober and I don’t think he’s dry. I think he’s dry-ish. AND he’s clearly a liar. The group chat is bananas. They explicitly state that they planned to blame it on Biden cus the messaging is hard. These mother effers.
I do not, for one millisecond, think he is dry. Ever. His attempt at plausible deniability is only attempted bc he was probably blackout drunk (again). As usual.
You know, he’s here in Hawaii (or at least, has been these last couple of days). His drinking will be known. And it will be discussed. Everybody knows somebody who saw something.
When Putin bragged he would take America without firing a single shot he told no lies.
No. You really don’t. Your qualifications were being white, malignant towards women, rich and willing to sniff the tangerines terror’s depends. Any Senator who voted to confirm should be primaried.
Can you even imagine what kind of humiliation rituals he subjects these people to behind closed doors?!? You know he does.
That these folks are horrible and are being treated horribly is one of the few consolations here…
I kind of feel Trump 1.0 was like a bunch of kindergartners and there was still some loose level of built in safety measures. Eight years later, this group is a bunch of run amok middle schoolers. Awful, just completely awful.
The good thing is that 2.0 is even less competent than 1.0.
NotSoSocialB, I’m incredibly worried. They were blocking women whose name didn’t match their birth certificates from voting in NH, a bunch of media billionaires who opposed Trump 1.0 flipped this time around, LGBTQ+ people are very vulnerable, tourists are being whisked away, government workers are losing their jobs,…I don’t have your optimism yet.
2.0 is made up of cronies and suckups which does make them more likely to be incompetent, but the structure of the framework was created by people who have been working toward this plan for decades and they are not incompetent and that’s what makes all of this so scary.
Federal employees are not allowed to delete records for records management purposes. By talking about military missions on Signal with the setting to delete the chat after a certain number of days, they are flouting those rules and preventing records from existing. It makes me wonder what else they’re chatting about of which no official record will exist.
Yep, what they did was actually illegal, per the Presidential Records Act. This was not a ‘mistake’, it was a willfully broken law.
🎯
Too bad Goldberg released all the texts and yes, that’s exactly what they were doing.
Considering the Atlantic released them texting war plans this morning…
Liar. They’re all liars on the take
They lie as easily as they breathe. Ironic that Hesgeth has kids because he is everything we teach our kids not to be.
And their lies don’t even make sense.
OK, let’s say it was a staffer who had access to this chat and added a reporter.
Why would a staffer have access to a group chat of this level of conversation, a level that should presumably be considered classified information that includes war plans and more? Let alone the ability to add anyone they felt like to it, undetected.
Obviously the “staffer” is made up, but even that BS should be raising questions.
The Atlantic just published the full text chain from Signal. Sure looks like “war plans” to me. I have a feeling Waltz will be fired eventually, maybe. It’s obvious that Hegseth SHOULD be fired, but time will tell. Besides learning that one guy was in Moscow while on this chat (!!!), Tulsi refused to say if she was using her personal phone (which means she was definitely using her personal phone).
Fun fact: Vice President Harris was not even allowed to text her husband and other family members for the four years she was vice president.
The media made fun of her for always using corded headphones because she thought wireless headphones weren’t secure enough, FFS.
Certainly looked like war plans to me too. Times, types of weapons, real-time updates on the attacks. Glad Goldberg decided to publish the full extent of the messages so we can see how much these clowns are lying and trying to gaslight the American people.
Bravo to The Atlantic. I am subscribing today.
Waltz should be fired. That moron was my representative in Florida and I voted against him every single time.
But he kept winning.
It’s the 🤡 Show.
As folks with better understanding of the laws around security have pointed out, they shouldn’t just be fired, they should be jailed for espionage, leaking top secrets, etc. If it really had been a staffer, they would absolutely be facing jail time rn.
What I want to know is why is no one making a bigger deal about the facts that:
1) the President still doesn’t know/understand what happened? Don’t be distracted by the “he’s too dumb to give a sh&t” discourse. He’s too senile to grasp the basic, horrific facts of the situation and the media is reprehensible for failing to frame it accurately like that.
2) why wasn’t the President, the Commander in Chief, on this chat? Why is everyone making plans without his knowledge? In a typical administration, this would be “everyone discussing in person in the war room” level of discourse – even if these fools did via text., why was POTUS not asked to at least weigh in?
Or included in the chat?
This is clear evidence that DT is not only not running the show, but isn’t even kept in the loop. (I know we already know that but it needs to be spelled out in the headlines here)
Focusing on the clown show aspects of this is a distraction.
DT saying again and again that he doesn’t know what happened should be way bigger news in itself, as a sign of his dementia and that the coup is pretty much complete.
And Tulsi Gabbard testified to Congress that there was no classified info on the group chat. Never mind they were discussing plans for a military operation. Every one of them must resign or be fired. Even Republicans are starting to get antsy over this. When you put our military in such danger it’s very difficult for the most cultish MAGA to rationalize.
Tulsi looked like she was going to cry this morning as Dems in Congress eviscerated her. Seeing a bully brought down gives me great satisfaction. Hopefully, karma is coming for all of them including Trump.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Chilling.
💯
🎯
Pete is a whiskey-soaked liar who’s way out of his depth. He’s not working for the American people — his loyalty is to Project 2025 and their agenda is all that matters to him.
A carnival barker would lead better than this guy.
Because Hegseth is a whiskey-soaked liar, I saw this whole sordid saga being alluded to as “Whisk(e)y Leaks” on socials.
Quite a fitting legacy to be remembered by.
Trump can’t fire anyone because that would be an admission that they fucked up, and Trump would never admit that his cabinet is anything less than perfect.
This man has the competence of a skittles-addled third grader playing ice hockey for the first time.
Third- grader libel!
The stupidity is what the Heritage Foundation is known for. Heritage has been calling the shots in our state education department for years and our state superintendent of public instruction is known to be a numbskull of huge proportions. So we must brace ourselves for more dangerous blunders in the future.
All of these clowns should be fired. I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but the level of lying and gaslighting by the Trump administration is staggering. Now that Goldberg has released the full text of the Signal message exchange this morning in The Atlantic, these ghouls seem to focusing on his description of the exchange as “attack” plans rather than “war” plans. I can’t with these gaslighting assholes anymore. All they had to do was admit the mistake, YET they couldn’t even muster to do that. Instead? They attacked the reporter’s character, said he was a liar, and started to create f**king conspiracy theories about how he “hacked” into their Signal chat.
This is like a nightmare from which we cannot wake up from!!!
Not a ‘mistake’, a ‘crime’. They committed a crime. This is classified info & they used unsecured means to discuss that info.
“Not a ‘mistake’, a ‘crime’. They committed a crime.”
Absolutely!!
I always hear his name as Hegsdeath. ☠️
Try Kegbreath. It fairly rolls off the tongue.
This convo should have taken place in a secure comms room. They are so lazy and incompetent, they couldn’t even do that. Instead, they are chatting like I do on Messenger to multiple people who didn’t need to be in the decision chain about this stuff while they were home, on the road, in Russia, etc. These are not serious people. They are playing Battleship with our country’s military. It’s gonna backfire. God helps us when it does.
In the SitRoom, obviously. Not even a SCIF.
The Situation Room only.
At one point the VP essentially calls POTUS an idiot and no one seems to disagree. It’s a. Must read
Meghan McCain went hard for Tulsi Gabbard getting her job. She called senators to get her confirmed. Tulsi is her daughter’s godmother. Although Meghan claims to be a Russia critic, she is as much of a Russian asset as Gabbard since she worked so hard to get her into the top echelons of government.
These people are the worst, and they all have such huge complexes that they don’t even care if the US is being run by idiots. Idiots love idiots.
(If there was ever a reason not to hire another white man for a job, this certainly is it.)
Just think for a minute. If they hadn’t invited the journalist, they would be continuing like any other day. And probably are.
I work for an agency in the DoD. It is REALLY hard to go to work after reading about sh*t like this. Wasn’t classified, you say? Shoulda been. Wasn’t war plans. Yes they were. Know what you’re doing? Like hell.
They’re just digging and digging themselves in a hole every day . Karma will always remember What they did.
I see where Trump’s spokes-bimbo Karoline Leavitt outright denied that war plans were discussed. Gee Karoline, guess your BA in *Communications* while on a baseball scholarship really helps you put your Louboutin-shod foot in your prissy little Trump butt-kissing mouth again and again.
If I see her on my feed in SM, I ignore those posts. She’s an airhead.
Loathe that woman. She has no business being the press secretary. She’s a blond in high heels so guess that qualifies her though.
You definitely don’t know what you are doing.
The WH spokesminion has called it a ‘hoax’. A word – like ‘woke’ – totally devoid of any proper meaning now. Those texts are talking about war plans. Anyone who says otherwise lied. But like being a misogynist and preferably a sex pest, lying is a job requirement now. It just goes from bad to worse.
…you just keep saying that, Petey.
Since the National Security team denied that anything classified was exchanged in that chat group, the Atlantic has published those chats! Yeah!!…
These fools were using emojis while they were talking about dropping bombs. What is this, a frat? I still can’t get past that…
The problem is, no one in my life, who is Maga is reading the Atlantic. Until it’s on OAN or Newsmax or maybe Fox every Maga voter has no idea.
Oh but it is on Fox…they are trying to bury it with Hunter Biden’s laptop but the older MAGAs are more suspicious of technology and now this…
Trump just asked a reporter who asked about Hegseth, “Why bring Hegseth into this?”
I am without words.
Maybe it’s just me but I’m never comforted when a presidential adviser feels the need to proclaim publicly that he knows exactly what he’s doing. Somehow methinks he doth protest too much.
Looks like EVERYBODY knows what Pete is doing.