Writing almost anything about the Trump administration is, in general, a lose-lose proposition for somebody in my position, because the normal rules of politics do not appear to apply to the Trump administration.
That said, I do think one of the few ways to keep oneself sane and grounded in a world of claim and counter-claim is to embrace the counterfactual. Or in layman’s terms, to simply imagine how you would react to a particular story were the circumstances and participants reversed.
For example, we could ask ourselves how we would be digesting the news that the seniormost members of President Joe Biden’s cabinet had broken with long-established intelligence handling rules to share details of a very sensitive US mission in a group chat, and accidentally included a Fox News (rather than a The Atlantic) journalist in their deliberations. We could imagine that those messages included strong evidence that the Vice President disagreed with the President, and that it was the practice of senior officials to communicate in emojis. We might also ask ourselves how we would feel if it had emerged that a junior soldier with left-wing political leanings had “accidentally” shared the Trump administration’s war plans with a left-wing journalist on signal.
If you can put your hand on your heart and say that you would consider that story in the exact same way as you consider the actual story emerging in recent days from the Trump administration, then congratulate yourself, for you have no “derangement syndrome” of any kind.
If, on the other hand, you are honest enough to admit that you would be jumping up and down if it was one side’s screw-up, and are writing it off as a nothingburger when it’s your own side’s screw up (or vice versa), then you view the world through a politically partisan lense. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But we should admit it.
One of the absolute certainties of politics is that, regardless of who is in power, screwups will happen. That is because no Government is stronger than its weakest and most incompetent member, just as no chain is stronger than its weakest link. In this case, it should not be a problem to admit, the Trump administration has screwed up. Bigly.
What has interested me, watching from afar in recent days, has not been the screw-up itself. Frankly, I find it perfectly understandable – even if technically improper – that senior figures in the US Government would choose to text over a secure messaging service out of sheer convenience. People are moving around constantly, and all of these people have secure phones. If the issue was simply that they had texted improperly instead of holding meetings in secure facilities, then it would be hard I think to get the public to care much.
Even the comic nature of the additional screw-up – adding a liberal journalist to a top secret national security group – is more comic-book caper than it is outright villainy. If I was to pick things that annoy me about the Trump administration, then the insane approach to tariffs and the imperilling of US alliances would both rank literally hundreds of places above this on the list.
No, the interesting thing is not the story, but the reaction to it. If anything, the reaction to the story from those involved in it has been the bigger scandal than the story itself.
Yesterday, Donald Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Waltz, went on Fox News to attack the reporter in question. He called Jeffrey Goldberg (who was the reporter added to the group chat) “the bottom scum of journalists”. He further suggested that some conspiracy may have been involved in Goldberg being added to the group, saying that “I am not a conspiracy theorist, but somehow this guy – who has lied about the President – gets added to the group”.
How Goldberg got added to the group is not a mystery. Mike Waltz added him.
Let’s be clear here: Whatever one thinks of Jeffrey Goldberg, he is the last person to have done anything wrong here. For example, Goldberg waited to publish his story for days after the military operation in question was finished, specifically to avoid any risk to US troops. He has published his evidence. He has brought to light what is evidently – and admitted by Donald Trump himself – to be bad practice within the Trump administration.
So why is he being made into a villain?
I wrote yesterday in relation to Sinn Fein that every Government needs effective opposition and scrutiny. That, believe it or not, also extends to Governments that one agrees with, because no Government is better than its weakest appointee. What Goldberg reported was transparently in the public interest and was an important part of holding the US Government to account for its practices.
Further, I have absolutely no doubt that if the roles were reversed as I suggest above, and Goldberg worked for Fox News and was reporting this about a Biden or Harris administration, 100% of his critics would be calling him a hero and praising his reporting.
I am often accused, by some readers, of something called Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is apparently an unwillingness to recognise or acknowledge anything good carried out or done by the Trump administration or Donald Trump itself. But it is perhaps fair to note that there’s another form of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which prevents people from acknowledging obvious errors, even when acknowledging those errors would make the story in question go away faster, and be a much less important story than what it has become.
Sometimes, the smart play is to say “we screwed up”, and move on.