Smart Phones, Stupid People

If it were a situation comedy — “The Office” comes to mind — there would be delight and hilarity in watching the now-faded orange man and the clown car holding his alleged national security officials zooming around in search of an excuse for their breathtaking incompetence.

Our intelligence community, lacking in that particular quality, can’t find a credible excuse or someone else to blame, though it is certainly doing its best. It doesn’t matter to the religion-level Trumpians, the “Trump is my lord and savior” crowd, but to everyone with brainpower above that of livestock it is alarming.

In case you have been in a coma since Sunday, or on the advice of your physician you have been, wisely, avoiding anything having to do with the president and the circus he has installed in lieu of a government, I should probably summarize the big news story of the week:

As the United States prepared to attack the Islamic Houthi terrorists in Yemen, a group of Trump’s military and intelligence appointees gathered on the secure — yes, it’s secure, and we’ll get to that — Signal application and formed what they called the “Houthi PC small group,” a chatroom that in retrospection should have been called the “Houthi PC small-brain group,” where they engaged in governmental locker-room talk. This was in some respects reminiscent of the conversation with an “Access Hollywood” reporter that almost torpedoed (and should have), Trump’s 2016 campaign. Trump is blessed with terrible opponents (and managed to lose to one of those).

The chat room was organized by Trump’s National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz, and for some reason the editor-in-chief of Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, was included among the 18 participants, which is why it became a story. Goldberg said he at first figured it was a hoax, perhaps an attempt to trap him. He decided to let it play out. And over the next days the participants, which included Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Trump’s real-estate lawyer friend Steve Witkoff (in Russia at the time, where he has been busy subdividing Ukraine and, who knows, maybe wondering what that QR code on his phone does), CIA Director John Lee Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and others.

They talked about what we were about to do to the Houthis, who have been attacking ships transiting the Red Sea. There is no doubt that the Houthis deserve it, just as there is no doubt that the officials shouldn’t have been engaging in an online pep rally.

As events unfolded over the next few days, the participants discussed the planned attack, with Vance and Hegseth especially telling tales out of school. This was not because they are morons. It is because they are loud morons, concentrations of Trump’s worst qualities.

Hegseth was apparently unaware that Signal offers video chat, so what might have been his first choice, dropping his pants and waving it around, was replaced by manly proof of his vast power in the form of saying, before it happened, what, when, and to whom the attack was going to happen. He listed chapter and verse of the attack plan, ahead of time. There is nothing more secret, other than the nuclear launch codes (which are probably Trump’s phone password).

All of this came streaming into the phone of the incredulous Jeffrey Goldberg.

When the announced time of attack arrived, Goldberg did a web search and found that yes, the capital of Yemen was being attacked. The whole chat was real. The idiots playing king of the world over Signal were who they claimed to be. They even used emojis!

Having more regard for national secrets than the people in charge of those secrets displayed, he edited sensitive material out of the chat. He checked with the appropriate grownups in government and determined that, yes, the chat was real. Then he published it.

It was not a good time to be downwind of the fan, which had just gotten heavily contaminated. An honest administration would have admitted that it was a terrible mistake and that those responsible would now join the ranks of the unemployed. But this is the Trump administration, to which the word “honest” has never been and will never be applied.

Asked about it, the typically clueless Trump announced that he doesn’t like Atlantic magazine. Unaware that the intelligence community had already confirmed the chat’s authenticity, Hegseth angrily denied that it was real and that he had said the things he had said. (Today he denied that his descriptions of the attack plans were descriptions of attack plans. No one asked him what “is” is.)

Some of those in on the chat were hauled before a Congressional committee yesterday, where they lied through their teeth. Tulsi Gabbard said she conveniently could not recall anything about the chat. Even mobsters have the decency to invoke the Fifth Amendment’s provision that one needn’t testify against oneself, but Gabbard chose falsehood instead. (By the way, you “invoke” the Fifth Amendment, you do not “plead” it. Pleas take place in a court of law, and “guilty,” “not guilty,” and “nolo contendere” are the only ones available. When a television hairdo says someone “pled” the Fifth Amendment, that personality is merely announcing his or her own ignorance. But I digress.)

In the course of their litany of lies, Gabbard and Ratcliffe said that nothing in the chat was classified. With this get-out-of-jail card in hand, Goldberg today published much of the chat he had edited out earlier.

The White House decided that the proper defense would be an attack on Goldberg. It was still the official line today at the daily “briefing,” along with the “no harm, no foul” defense, in that the tremendous lack of security didn’t keep the Houthis from getting blown up.

Noted technology expert Mike Waltz suggested his phone had been hacked, a claim normally reserved for those who have had pornography discovered on their devices.

The news media, no better at technology than they are at Constitutional law, knowingly said that Signal is not secure. They were wrong about that, too.

As I write this, the leading actual explanation of Goldberg’s presence in the chat is that Waltz or someone else on the call had added him. It is very likely the only possible explanation. Nor is it a surprising one. Officials who want to leak information to reporters and reporters themselves often communicate by Signal. That is because Signal is the state of the art in security.

(I wonder if Waltz did it deliberately, knowing that as surely as the sun rises the boastful Hegseth would make an ass of himself. Maybe it would get the Secretary of Defense fired, as it should.)

Before we go any further, we probably ought to clear up the nonsense about Signal not being secure. One Signal account can be added to several devices by way of a QR code generated by the devices that have it installed and exposed to the devices one wants to have on the same account. Some months ago the Russians cooked up a “phishing” attack in which Ukrainian soldiers were tricked into using a QR code sent to them by the Russians. This let the Russians read and listen in on the Ukrainians’ conversations. It was almost immediately discovered and patched. This all happened weeks ago.

The fact is, the government does recommend the use of Signal. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, has advised that people in sensitive positions in and out of government use Signal.

It also recommends that users keep their software current. If you have Signal installed and there is a security upgrade, it is not shy about telling you so, and if you fail to upgrade it simply ceases to work at all. It is secure for all practical definitions of the word. And it can be made even more secure if you do not use your own name and employ a burner phone number that you use for nothing else.

The failed excuses are all distractions from the obvious, which is this: No matter how well a car does in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash tests, it is not safe if a monkey is at the wheel. The Trump circus, as we have seen, includes a lot of monkeys who shouldn’t be given access to cars — or telephones.

They should probably all be fired but, lacking that, Hegseth most certainly should be sent on his way. He’s not competent to do, really, anything. Maybe now that Mike Huckabee is heading to Israel to be ambassador, Hegseth could find satisfaction in selling patent medicine.

Once he’s released. We imprison those who leak government secrets online.

The excellent David A. French has some experience in that regard, which he described yesterday. Though it could be argued that his recommendation requires honor, and Hegseth displays no evidence of that.