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.
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