Democrats Have Learned Absolutely Nothing From Defeat
Rather than focusing on the actual harms Republicans are inflicting on the American working class, Democrats are using the Signal group chat leak to obsess over violations of norms and protocols. This strategy is doomed to fail.
National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, pictured in the Oval Office of the White House on March 13, 2025, were all in the Signal group chat that accidentally included Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg. (Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
On Monday, Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg broke some bizarre news. He’d been accidentally included in a group chat on the messaging app Signal where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vice President J. D. Vance, and other high-level figures in the Trump administration were discussing their plans to bomb Yemen. This was extremely confidential information, and most of the reaction to it has revolved around the administration’s failure of “operational security.”
Goldberg himself is a neoconservative commentator who rarely meets a war he doesn’t like. He doesn’t seem to have the slightest objection to the content of the plans discussed in the group chat. But he was clearly disturbed by his own inclusion.
Democrats have lined up to accept this framing. Chuck Schumer and the leaders of several relevant Senate subcommittees, for example, sent a letter to Donald Trump expressing “extreme alarm” about “the astonishingly poor judgment” shown by accidentally including Goldberg in the chat. In other words, they’re fine with bombing Yemen. They just want the government to do a better job of keeping it secret.
The truth is that this is the kind of story that liberals love, because it gives them a chance to preen about process and “seriousness” and display their patriotic zeal about “national security.” In the decade since Trump began his first run for the presidency, their consistent impulse has been to gravitate toward issues that allow them to hammer home that message. Hence the years-long obsession with “Russian collusion” that fizzled out into not much, the years of relitigating the January 6 riot at the Capitol, and Kamala Harris’s bizarre strategy of touring the country with Liz Cheney to prove that “Country First” Republicans were on their side.
This strategy has flopped consistently, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats who have stubbornly refused to focus on the actual harms Republicans are doing to the American working class (the appeal of which has been dramatized by the runaway success of Bernie Sanders’s anti-oligarchy tour). And of course they won’t slam Trump for being a warmonger, because they don’t really disagree with his warmongering. Everyone in this story, from neocon Goldberg to the outraged Democrats to the allegedly “America First” Trumpists, takes it for granted that America has an unlimited right to project its imperial hegemony around the world.
With “Anti-Interventionists” Like These . . .
In his initial article, Goldberg said the plans shared in the group chat “included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.” He “could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans,” never mind that they would be so “reckless” as to accidentally include a journalist such as himself. And while quoting much of the rest of the conversation, he repeatedly omitted operational details that he worried could harm “national security.”
How exactly the “security” of anyone in the United States would be harmed by Yemenis knowing details of an attack against them they’ve been shown powerless to retaliate against is a fascinating question. A series of administration officials and media allies spent Monday and Tuesday denying that anything classified was discussed in the group chat, though, and so Goldberg came back on Wednesday with a second article quoting the parts about operational details. If the administration said it wasn’t classified after all, so be it. And the second article made it clear the administration’s denials were nonsense. Democrats crowed at what they saw as a massive self-own by Trump’s team.
Outside of Trump loyalists, it seemed like just about everyone (including myself) had a good laugh at the expense of the administration’s incompetence. But it’s important to take a long step back and see what was taken for granted in all of this. Rather than being glad that he had a chance to expose what the war machine was up to, Goldberg thought the only scandal was that he’d been inadvertently handed the scoop. And nearly everyone else, in the media and in popular culture, seems to agree.
The attack killed dozens of people, most of whom were women and children. This happened in a desperately impoverished country already devastated by many years of intense conflict. Nor, of course, was Congress consulted about initiating a new round of violence against a country with which the United States is not in a state of war. And what the chat logs reveal about the planning for this war crime show a striking level of indifference to both its illegality and its human consequences.
Vice President Vance, supposedly an anti-interventionist, made the mildest objections, not on either of these grounds but because more European than American shipping was affected by Houthi attacks on ships going through Israel, and so the Europeans should be left to handle it. Or if the United States did do it itself, the administration should wait a few weeks to help explain to the public why it was important to intervene against the Houthis, a group most Americans know nothing about. That was it. Those were his only objections. And Tulsi Gabbard, who was also in the chat and has an even bigger reputation as an anti-interventionist than Vance (having basically built her political career off that reputation), didn’t even echo these half-hearted concerns.
In fact, in what should have been the most shocking revelation in the second article, Goldberg shared a screenshot in which Waltz brags about having “positive ID” on a Houthi “missile guy” as that man was “walking into his girlfriend’s building.” That building, Waltz crows, is “now collapsed.” And J. D. Vance’s reaction to this stomach-churning confession of destroying an entire civilian apartment building to kill one person was, “Excellent.” A while later, Tulsi Gabbard chimed in, “Great work and effects!”
MAGA’s “anti-interventionists,” in other words, came off sounding a lot like . . . Jeffrey Goldberg. And the Democrats have been little better. When we take a step back from their obsession with process and “opsec” and look at the substance of the issue about Trump’s war crimes in Yemen, there’s not much daylight between the leaderships of the two parties. Everyone is fighting about whether the incompetence on display was disqualifying. The fifty-three dead people barely enter into the equation.
As Marxist academic Sam Badger wrote on Monday, an approximate equivalent situation would be if a group of mobsters in Las Vegas accidentally added a journalist to a group chat where they were planning to firebomb some rival gangsters whose main office was directly over an orphanage . . . and the headline the next day in the Vegas Sun was, “Incompetent Mobsters Irresponsibly Expose Mafia Secrets.”
The fire at the orphanage, of course, would be buried at the end of the article.