In Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven, George Orr wakes to discover that he has the power to control reality through his dreams. Each night while he sleeps, the world changes in profound and unexpected ways. In the morning, Orr alone remembers reality as it was. Soon, Orr (named, one would assume, for George Orwell) finds himself under the care of a psychiatrist, who, realizing that Orr has these powers, tries to use them to turn the world into a utopia. This does not go well for the world.
It doesn’t go well because dreams have their own logic. They are nonlinear and to some degree nonsensical, and so directing oneself to dream of world peace may result in an alien invasion. Technically the dream has been fulfilled. Earthlings have stopped fighting with one another, but only because all of Earth is now ruled by an alien species. In this new dream reality, a world ruled by aliens becomes the only world you have ever known.
That is what the American experience is beginning to feel like in 2025: Not as if we are living in President Donald Trump’s reality, but as if we are living in his dream. As the showrunner and director of TV shows including Fargo, Legion, and the upcoming Alien: Earth, I think a lot about how audiences navigate the tension between horror and the absurd. Now we’re all in this liminal space of the president’s devising.
When the Trump administration pretends that the three branches of government are not and never have been equal, it creates a state of unreality in the minds of everyday Americans, similar to that of a dreamer in a dream. When the president and his proxies ignore both laws passed by Congress and Supreme Court decisions, they seek to replace the vérité of our shared history and experience with a fantasy, turning the stabilizing force of precedent into the quicksand of dream.
Only in a dream could the bicycle you’re riding become a pony. But if you tell the pony in the dream that he used to be a bicycle, he will deny it. I’ve always been a pony, he will say. And because this is a dream, you will accept that. But what if you’re awake and your government is doing things and saying things that seem nonsensical? What are you supposed to think when you search for the Gulf of Mexico on Google Maps and discover that it no longer exists? What happens if, as a next step, the history books are revised to erase all records of the name? In this new reality, that body of water has only ever been called the “Gulf of America.” You can imagine the argument that will happen years from now, where you swear there was once a Gulf of Mexico, but, for the life of you, you just can’t prove it.
Over the past two months, the rule of law in this country has been replaced by the rule of whim. The whim is not just that of one man but of a loose cabal of Cabinet members and “special advisers” who are combining revenge fantasies with small-government dreams, xenophobic visions, and cryptocurrency delusions. And so former national-security officials have had their security clearances revoked, government agencies have been fed into the wood chipper, “alien enemies” have been deported despite a judge’s court order, and a vaccine denier and pseudoscience champion has been confirmed as the secretary of Health and Human Services.
The only thing these dreamers have in common is that they want to control reality itself, to rewrite the past, present, and future simultaneously. Their actions create a maelstrom of daily news and revisionist history that the mind struggles to combine into a coherent reality. As a result, we are moving from a waking state to a dream state, where logic is flexible and anything can happen.
The movie Inception introduced us to a world in which corporate spies infiltrate the dreams of CEOs. Once inside, they steal secrets or, in the central action of the film, seek to implant an idea that the dreamer will, upon waking, turn into a reality. Inception, as they call this process, is considered almost impossible because of how difficult it is to make someone believe that an outside idea is their own. In this framework, however, the logic of the waking world is distinctly different from that of the dream. It assumes a waking world in which things make sense. Where facts have meaning. Not a world whose richest man brandishes a chain saw onstage and hires teenagers nicknamed “Big Balls” to gut the federal government, while the president of the United States reposts an AI video of the Gaza Strip as a luxury resort destination.
Inception did not envision a world in which only dream logic exists even when the dreamer is awake; a world where the federal government is trying to both shut down the Department of Education and weaponize it in order to remake how and what children in this country are taught. A world in which the president signs an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act against immigrants from Venezuela, even though the country is not at war with Venezuela. In the administration’s dream logic, the executive order itself creates a preexisting state of war, allowing it to issue the order. The logic is circular. Without being at war, the administration cannot use the act to justify the deportations. Or whatever. The bicycle is a pony. The logic is dream logic.
In the past century, authors in Russia, China, and other countries with totalitarian regimes have written about how absurd life becomes under autocracy. But until you experience it yourself, you can’t fully comprehend the illogic of it—or, I should say, the dream logic of it. It is a feeling as much as an idea, a surreal sense of unreality, from which the dreamer wills himself to wake up.
As the Austrian-born psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote about life under fascism: “Thus has tyranny robbed men of their sleep and pursued them even in their dreams.”
In this warped reality, rather than dreading sleep, we begin to dread waking up, because every day there is a new dream, one that, like George Orr’s, threatens to fracture our reality yet again. Our job over the next four years is to remember what life was like before the dream so that one day we can make the world a logical place again.
Re: Walter Hinteler (Post 7392865)
"Right Now, the U.S. Is Ceasing to Be a Democracy"
This is excellent; thanks, Walter.
I wonder what all the pro-Trump Christians (and Musk) will say about a new climate justice handbook by the World Council of Churches, which sets out practical ways for faith organisations to help protect young people and future generations from the climate crisis.
I wonder what all the pro-Trump Christians (and Musk) will say about a new climate justice handbook by the World Council of Churches
Outrage after White House accidentally texts journalist war plans: ‘Huge screw-up’
Security leak triggers bipartisan anger after Atlantic reveals officials inadvertently broadcast classified military plans
White House inadvertently texted top-secret Yemen war plans to journalist
A catastrophic security leak is triggering bipartisan outrage after the Atlantic revealed that senior Trump administration officials accidentally broadcast classified military plans through a Signal group chat with a journalist reading along.
On the Senate floor on Monday, the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called it “one of the most stunning breaches of military intelligence I have read about in a very, very long time” and urged Republicans to seek a “full investigation into how this happened, the damage it created and how we can avoid it in the future”.
“Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally,” the Delaware senator Chris Coons wrote on Twitter/X. “We can’t trust anyone in this dangerous administration to keep Americans safe.”
The New York representative Pat Ryan called the incident “Fubar” (an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition”) and threatened to launch his own congressional investigation “IMMEDIATELY” if House Republicans fail to act.
According to reporting in the Atlantic, the editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally invited into a Signal chat group with more than a dozen senior Trump administration officials including Vice-President JD Vance, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, national security adviser, Mike Waltz, secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, and others.
The reporting exposes not only a historic mishandling of classified information but a potentially illegal communication chain in which sensitive military plans about airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen were casually shared in an encrypted group chat with automatic delete functions.
“It has made us look weak to our adversaries,” the California congressman Ro Khanna told the Guardian. “We need to take cybersecurity far more seriously and I look forward to leading on that.”
As the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Jim Himes has overseen countless classified briefings. But the Signal group chat leak of impending war plans has made him “horrified”.
“If true, these actions are a brazen violation of laws and regulations that exist to protect national security, including the safety of Americans serving in harm’s way,’ he said. “These individuals know the calamitous risks of transmitting classified information across unclassified systems, and they also know that if a lower-ranking official under their command did what is described here, they would likely lose their clearance and be subject to criminal investigation.”
Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, posted on social media: “This administration is playing fast and loose with our nation’s most classified info, and it makes all Americans less safe.”
The Republican senator John Cornyn described the incident more colloquially, telling reporters it was “a huge screw-up” and suggesting that “the interagency would look at that” to determine how such a significant security lapse occurred.
The White House confirmed the leak. The national security council spokesperson, Brian Hughes, told the Guardian: “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”
But the White House attempted to defend the communications, with Hughes describing the messages as an example of “deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials”.
“The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security,” Hughes said.
But most lawmakers don’t see it that way. The Rhode Island senator Jack Reed said on X that the incident represented “one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen”.
The echoes of past document controversies are also coming back to haunt some of the senior officials in the chat, who previously criticized similar security breaches. In 2024, Waltz – the current national security adviser – had said “Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account. And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing.”
In 2023, Hegseth had his own critique of the Biden administration handling classified documents “flippantly”, remarking on Fox News that “If at the very top there’s no accountability”, then we have “two tiers of justice”.
The bombshell revelation also potentially violated federal record-keeping laws. The Federal Records Act, which mandates preservation of government communications, typically mandates that records are kept for two years, and the Signal messages were scheduled to automatically delete in under four weeks.
The New York Republican representative Mike Lawler summed up the bipartisan consensus: “Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels – and certainly not to those without security clearances. Period.”
Last year was the hottest on record, and global average temperatures passed the benchmark of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times for the first time. Simultaneously, the growth rate of the world’s energy demand rose sharply, nearly doubling over the previous 10-year average.
As it turns out, the record heat and rapidly rising energy demand were closely connected, according to findings from a new report from the International Energy Agency.
That’s because hotter weather led to increased use of cooling technologies like air-conditioning. Electricity-hungry appliances put a strain on the grid, and many utilities met the added demand by burning coal and natural gas.
All of this had the makings of a troubling feedback loop: A hotter world required more energy to cool down homes and offices, and what was readily available was fossil-fuel energy, which led to more planet-warming emissions. This dynamic is exactly what many countries are hoping to halt through the development of renewable energy and the construction of nuclear power plants.
Put another way, the I.E.A. estimated that if 2024’s extreme weather hadn’t happened — that is, if weather was exactly the same in 2024 as in 2023 — the global increase in carbon emissions for the year would have been cut in half.
It’s not all bad news: Increasingly, the global economy is growing faster than carbon emissions. “If we want to find the silver lining, we see that there is a continuous decoupling of economic growth from emissions growth,” said Fatih Birol, the executive director of the agency.
Extreme heat helped drive global demand
A major factor that raised global electricity demand last year was extreme heat, particularly heat waves in the U.S., China and India, the report found. Last spring, temperatures in New Delhi hit 126 degrees Fahrenheit, and temperatures in northern China broke records.
All that added load had consequences, the I.E.A. found. These temperature effects drove about a fifth of the overall increase in demand for electricity and natural gas.
Other electricity-intensive sectors grew in 2024. For example, data-center capacity grew by about 20 percent, mostly in the U.S. and China.
High temperatures led to burning more coal
Renewables, like solar and wind, are not that good at handling large, sudden upticks in electricity demand during heat waves. And they’re still not being deployed fast enough to meet global goals to triple renewable capacity by 2030.
To meet urgent demand for electricity and help people avoid heat stress, some countries burned coal to help power air-conditioners and other cooling technologies.
That led overall coal demand to increase by 1 percent last year to reach a record. The agency’s report found that the entire increase in coal demand could be explained by extreme temperatures.
China remained the world’s biggest global coal consumer, burning 40 percent more coal than the rest of the world combined.
Global electricity demand jumped
In 2024, global energy demand grew by a little over 2 percent, almost twice as much as the average annual increase over the previous 10 years.
This trend held across the board: Oil, natural gas, coal, renewables and nuclear all had an uptick in demand. Most of the global growth was concentrated in nations with emerging and developing economies, led by China and India.
The numbers were even up in the European Union, where energy demand has largely not grown since 2017, with a post-Covid rebound year being the exception.
The result of all this growth? Once again, energy-related carbon emissions reached a record in 2024. The I.E.A. estimated last fall that global carbon-dioxide emissions will peak in the next few years, then fall by 3 percent by 2030 under current national policy commitments.
Global emissions would need to fall by 43 percent by 2030 in order to keep global warming below the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold established in the 2015 Paris Agreement, according to the U.N. The temperature goal is seen as increasingly unattainable by scientists and policymakers.
Renewables and nuclear are growing
About 80 percent of new electricity generation came from renewables and nuclear least year, and renewables accounted for almost a third of total electricity generation.
Solar installations led the charge. In the United States, solar and wind electricity overtook coal for the first time.
Global carbon emissions would have been 7 percent higher last year without clean technologies like solar, wind, nuclear, electric cars and heat pumps, the report found.
For the first time, oil dipped below 30% of global energy demand
Growth in oil demand continued to slow last year, with factors including consumers’ buying electric vehicles and ditching gas-powered cars.
Last year, just two categories accounted for virtually all of the growth in oil demand: Aviation and shipping, and plastics.
Plastics have become an increasingly important part of oil companies’ growth plans as cars and trucks go electric and other sectors use less oil. Oil is a key material in plastics manufacturing.
Today the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped the story that senior members of the Trump administration planned the March 15 U.S. attack on the Houthis in Yemen over Signal, a widely available encrypted app that is most decidedly not part of the United States national security system. The decision to steer around government systems was possibly an attempt to hide conversations, since the app was set to erase some messages after a week and others after four weeks. By law, government communications must be archived.
According to Goldberg, the use of Signal may also have violated the Espionage Act, which establishes how officials must handle information about the national defense. The app is not approved for national security use, and officials are supposed either to discuss military activity in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, or to use approved government equipment.
The use of Signal to plan a military attack on Yemen was itself an astonishingly dangerous breach, but what comes next is simply mind-boggling: the reason Goldberg could report on the conversation is that the person setting it up included Goldberg—a reporter without security clearance—in it.
Goldberg reports that on March 11 he received a connection request from someone named Michael Waltz, although he did not believe the actual Michael Waltz, who is Trump’s national security advisor, would be writing to him. He thought it was likely someone trying to entrap him, although he thought perhaps it could be the real Waltz with some information. Two days later, he was included in the “Houthi PC small group,” along with a message that the chat would be for “a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis.”
As Goldberg reports, a “principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.”
The other names on the app were those of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Brian McCormack from the National Security Council, Central Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator Steve Witkoff, White House chief of staff Suzy Wiles, perhaps White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Trump’s nominee for head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent.
Goldberg assumed the chat was fake, some sort of disinformation campaign, although he was concerned when Ratcliffe provided the full name of a CIA operative in this unsecure channel. But on March 14, as Vance, for example, took a strong stand against Europe—“I just hate bailing Europe out again”—and as Hegseth emphasized that their messaging must be that “Biden failed,” Goldberg started to think the chat might be real. Those in the chat talked of finding a way to make Europe pay the costs for the U.S. attack, and of “minimiz[ing] risk to Saudi oil facilities.”
And then, on March 15, the messages told of the forthcoming attack. “I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts,” Goldberg writes. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
On the chat, reactions to the military strikes were emojis of a fist, an American flag, fire, praying hands, a flexed bicep, and “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” “Kudos to all…. Really great. God Bless,” and “Great work and effects!”
In the messages, with a reporter on the line, Hegseth promised his colleagues he would “do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC,” or operations security. In a message to the team outlining the forthcoming attack, Hegseth wrote: “We are currently clean on OPSEC.”
Two hours after Goldberg wrote to the officials on the chat and alerted them to his presence on it by asking questions about it, National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes responded: “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”
When asked about the breach, Trump responded: “I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it. You're saying that they had what?” There is nothing that the administration could say to make the situation better, but this made it worse. As national security specialist Tom Nichols noted: “If the President is telling the truth and no one’s briefed him about this yet, that’s another story in itself. In any other administration, [the chief of staff] would have been in the Oval [Office] within nanoseconds of learning about something like this.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is evidently going to try to bully his way out of this disaster. When asked about it, he began to yell at a reporter that Goldberg is a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” Hegseth looked directly at the camera and said: “Nobody was texting war plans.” But Goldberg has receipts. The chat had “the specific time of a future attack. Specific targets, including human targets…weapons systems…precise detail…a long section on sequencing…. He can say that it wasn’t a war plan, but it was a minute-by-minute accounting of what was about to happen.”
Zachary B. Wolf of CNN noted that “Trump intentionally hired amateurs for top jobs. This is their most dramatic blunder.” Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) told Brian Tyler Cohen: “My first reaction... was 'what absolute clowns.' Total amateur hour, reckless, dangerous…. [T]his is what happens when you have basically Fox News personalities cosplaying as government officials.” Foreign policy scholar Timothy Snyder posted: “These guys inherited one of the most functional state apparatus in the history of the world and they are inhabiting it like a crack house.”
Many observers have noted that all of these national security officials knew that using Signal in this way was against the law, and their comfort with jumping onto the commercial app to plan a military strike suggests they are using Signal more generally. “How many Signal chats with sensitive information about military operations are ongoing within the Pentagon right now?” Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) posted. “Where else are war plans being shared with such abject disregard for our national security? We need answers. Right now.”
National security journalists and officials are aghast. Former commanding general of United States Army Europe and the Seventh Army Mark Hertling called the story “staggering.” Former CIA officer Matt Castelli posted: “This is more than ‘loose lips sink ships’, this is a criminally negligent breach of classified information and war planning involving VP, SecDef, D[irector of the] CIA, National Security Advisor—all putting troops at risk. America is not safe.” Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who spent seven years as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, posted: “From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of f**kup imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.”
Rhode Island senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said: "If true, this story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen. The carelessness shown by President Trump's cabinet is stunning and dangerous. I will be seeking answers from the Administration immediately." Armed Services Committee member Don Bacon (R-NE), a former Air Force brigadier general, told Axios that “sending this info over non-secure networks” was “unconscionable.” “Russia and China are surely monitoring his unclassified phone.”
That the most senior members of Trump’s administration were sharing national security secrets on unsecure channels is especially galling since the people on the call have used alleged breaches of national security to hammer Democrats. Sarah Longwell and J.V. Last of The Bulwark compiled a series of video clips of Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, and especially Pete Hegseth talking about the seriousness of handling secret information and the need for accountability for those who mishandle it. When they were accusing then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton of such a breach, they called for firings, accountability, and perhaps criminal charges. Indeed, Trump rose to power in 2016 with the charge that Clinton should be sent to prison for using a private email server. “Lock her up!” became the chant at his rallies.
Today, for her part, Clinton posted a link to the story along with an eyes emoji and wrote: “You have got to be kidding me.”
A Hostile Northern Border
Josh Marshall
|March 25, 2025 2:34 p.m.
Let me take a moment to flag your attention to the stunning deterioration of U.S. relations with Canada. Yes, you know about the tariff fight and the fact that the U.S. national anthem gets routinely booed at NHL hockey games. But a few additional points. The Canadian Liberals were on track for a massive drubbing in an election that had to happen soon. It’s not even really ideological. The Liberals had been in power for a decade. They’ve seen the country through the pandemic and it’s aftermath. All those parties are unpopular. Ask Joe Biden. They were behind by like 25 points. Now eight weeks later, solely and entirely because of a wave of defensive (in both senses of the term) nationalism driven by Donald Trump, the Liberals look on track to win an outright majority.
Defending the country against the United States is now the sole issue in Canadian politics.
Meanwhile, the country’s newly minted incumbent Prime Minister Mark Carney is seeking to join Europe’s new defense production and purchase consortium. The Europeans, seeing the new direction of the U.S., are trying to dramatically up their own military production and agree jointly to purchase most of their weapons within Europe. In other words, not from the United States. Canada wants in too. Carney also just signed an agreement with Australia to jointly develop over-the-horizon radar technology. That’s newly important as a climate-change era arctic becomes a zone of Great Power competition. And finally, Carney has put Canada’s agreement to purchase 88 F-35 fighter jets under review.
These aren’t precisely defensive military agreements. They’re military procurement and weapons development agreements. But the two are never that far apart. And these specifically and by design exclude the United States. The concept is simple: you can’t depend for your weapons on someone you might be fighting.
Now I don’t imagine the U.S. and Canada will literally be in a military conflict. NORAD, as far as I know, is literally the only binational military command in the world. NORAD is a joint operation of both countries to patrol the skies of North America, especially over the arctic — which is why Canada’s role is so critical. But these moves aren’t symbolic. And they’re not simply economic hits — losing an order for 88 fighter jets is a huge deal for Lockheed Martin. These are extremely serious and rapid moves for a country that feels radically endangered by its southern neighbor.
Their motivation is even more jarring when you focus on the difficulties involved. Choosing a different country to buy your weapons from isn’t like switching supermarkets. The best analogy from ordinary life is switching from PCs to Macs or vice versa. But even that greatly understates the challenge. They’re weapons systems. Your soldiers are trained on one fighter jet system and not another. They use different parts. The different systems are designed to operate together. It’s a huge change and one you only make under duress. And they’re doing that.
All of these moves are, to put it simply, unimaginable. Or they were until eight weeks ago. The U.S.-Canadian border has been undefended and mostly unmonitored for more than a century. The idea that Canada is making defense-adjacent security agreements for the purposes of excluding the U.S. is simply unimaginable. And yet it’s happening. Because the United States made it necessary. There is some level of political convenience. It’s leveraged the revival of the Liberal party. But it’s done that because no one in Canada at the moment can deny the very real threat. No one in the country is pushing that argument because everyone is in unison on not just the threat but the affront to national dignity and sovereignty. The fury one sees in Canadians’ public expressions of anger and betrayal is unmistakable.
Speaking for myself, when I see this I feel a mix of shock combined with bewilderment and shame. I find it impossible to believe but I fully understand. We did this. The United States did this.
President Donald Trump said Vice President JD Vance and an American delegation are visiting Greenland on Friday “to let them know that we need Greenland for international safety and security.”
“We need it. We have to have it,” he said.
Asked later by radio host Vince Coglianese whether he thought Greenlanders were eager to become U.S. citizens, Trump said: “I don’t know. I don’t think they’re uneager. But I think that we have to do it. And we have to convince them, and we have to have that land.”
Trump — who has pushed to acquire Greenland despite opposition from Greenlandic and Danish officials — made the comments the day after his administration scaled back the planned visit to Greenland after resistance from officials there. Vance and the U.S. delegation now plan to visit the U.S. military base on Greenland rather than making a broader cultural visit.
“It’s an island that, from a defensive posture and even offensive posture, is something we need, especially with the world the way it is. And we’re going to have to have it,” Trump said on “The Vince Show.” “I hate to put it that way, but we’re going to have to have it.”
Monday’s astounding story that the most senior members of President Donald Trump’s administration planned military strikes on Yemen over an unsecure commercial messaging app, on which they had included national security reporter and editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, has escalated over the past two days.
On Monday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth looked directly at a reporter’s camera and said: “Nobody was texting war plans.” Throughout the day Tuesday, the administration doubled down on this assertion, apparently convinced that Goldberg would not release the information they knew he had. They tried to spin the story by attacking Goldberg, suggesting he had somehow hacked into the conversation, although the app itself tracked that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz had added him.
Various administration figures, including Trump, insisted that the chat contained nothing classified. At a scheduled hearing yesterday before the Senate Intelligence Committee on worldwide threats, during which senators took the opportunity to dig into the Signal scandal, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said: “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group.” Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe agreed: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.” In the afternoon, Trump told reporters: “The attack was totally successful. It was, I guess, from what I understand, took place during. And it wasn’t classified information. So this was not classified.”
After Gabbard said she would defer to the secretary of defense and the National Security Council about what information should have been classified, Senator Angus King (I-ME) seemed taken aback. “You’re the head of the intelligence community. You’re supposed to know about classifications,” he pointed out. He continued, “So your testimony very clearly today is that nothing was in that set of texts that were classified.... If that’s the case, please release that whole text stream so that the public can have a view of what actually transpired on this discussion. It’s hard for me to believe that targets and timing and weapons would not have been classified.”
Meanwhile, reporters were also digging into the story. James LaPorta of CBS News reported that an internal bulletin from the National Security Agency warned staff in February 2025 not to use Signal for sensitive information, citing concerns that the app was vulnerable to Russian hackers. A former White House official told Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel of Politico, “Their personal phones are all hackable, and it’s highly likely that foreign intelligence services are sitting on their phones watching them type the sh*t out."
Tuesday night, American Oversight, a nonprofit organization focusing on government transparency, filed a lawsuit against Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio—all of whom were also on the Signal chain—and the National Archives for violating the Federal Records Act, and suggested the administration has made other attempts to get around the law. It notes that the law requires the preservation of federal records.
Today it all got worse.
It turned out that administration officials’ conviction that Goldberg wouldn’t publicly release receipts was wrong. This morning, Goldberg and Shane Harris, who had worked together on the initial story, wrote: “The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.”
The Atlantic published screenshots of the message chat.
The screenshots make clear that administration officials insisting that there was nothing classified on the chat were lying. Hegseth uploaded the precise details of the attack before it happened, leaving American military personnel vulnerable. The evidence is damning.
The fury of Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), an Army pilot who was nearly killed in Iraq, was palpable. “Pete Hegseth is a f*cking liar,” she wrote. “This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.” Legal analyst Barb McQuade pointed out that it didn't even matter if the information was classified: it is “a crime to remove national defense information from its proper place through gross negligence…. Signal chat is not a proper place.”
The screenshots also raise a number of other issues. They made it clear that administration officials have been using Signal for other conversations: Waltz at one point typed: “As we stated in the first PC….” Using a nongovernment system is likely an attempt to get around the laws that require the preservation of public records. The screenshots also show that Signal was set to erase the messages on the chat after 4 weeks.
The messages reveal that President Trump was not part of the discussion of whether to make the airstrikes, a deeply troubling revelation that raises the question of who is in charge at the White House. As the conversation about whether to attack took place, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote about Trump’s reasoning that attacking the Houthis in Yemen would “send a message”: “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.” Later, he texted to Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again. Let’s just make sure our messaging is tight here. And if there are things we can do upfront to minimize risk to Saudi oil facilities we should do it.”
Hegseth responded: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.”
The decision to make the strikes then appears to have been made by deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who ended the discussion simply by invoking the president: “As I heard it,” he wrote, “the president was clear: green light, but we soon make it clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement.” If Europe doesn’t cover the cost of the attack, “then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”
“Agree,” Hegseth messaged, and the attack was on.
Also missing from the group message was the person who is currently acting as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Christopher Grady. In February, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr., who took on the position in 2023 having served more than 3,000 hours as a fighter pilot, including 130 hours in combat, and commanded the Pacific Air Forces, which provides air power for U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific region; the U.S. Air Forces Central Command, responsible for protecting U.S. security interests in Africa through the Persian Gulf; the 31st Fighter Wing, covering the southern region of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the 8th Fighter Wing, covering southeast Asia; U.S. Air Force Weapons School for advanced training in weapons and tactics for officers; and 78th Fighter Squadron.
Hegseth publicly suggested that Brown had been appointed because he is Black. “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt,” Hegseth wrote. With Trump’s controversial replacement for Brown still unconfirmed, Admiral Grady, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, is fulfilling the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But he was not in the chat. The Pentagon's highest-ranking officer would normally be included in planning a military operation.
Also in the chat, participants made embarrassing attacks on our allies and celebrated civilian deaths in Yemen in the quest to kill a targeted combatant.
Attempts to defend themselves from the scandal only dug administration officials in deeper. On Monday night, independent journalist Olga Lautman, who studies Russia, noted that Trump’s Russia and Ukraine specialist Steve Witkoff had actually been in Russia when Waltz added him to the chat, underscoring the chat’s vulnerability to hackers. By Tuesday, multiple outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, picked up Lautman’s story.
Witkoff fought back against the Wall Street Journal story with a long social media post about how he had traveled to Moscow with a secure government phone and now it was not until he got home that he had “access to my personal devices” to participate in the Signal conversation, thus apparently confirming that he was discussing classified information with the nation’s top officials on an unsecure personal device.
Tonight, news of other ways in which the administration is compromised surfaced. The German newspaper Der Spiegel revealed that the contact information for a number of the same officials who were on the Signal chat is available online, as well as email addresses and some passwords for their private accounts, making it easy for hackers to get into their personal devices. Those compromised included National Security Advisor Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Hegseth. Wired reported that Waltz, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and Walker Barrett of the National Security Council, who was also on the Signal messaging chain, had left their Venmo accounts public, demonstrating what national security experts described as reckless behavior.
In the New York Times tonight, foreign affairs journalist Noah Shachtman looked not just at the Signal scandal but also at the administration’s lowering of U.S. guard against foreign influence operations, installation of billionaire Elon Musk’s satellite internet terminals at the White House, and diversion of personnel from national security to Trump’s pet projects, and advised hostile nations to “savor this moment. It’s never been easier to steal secrets from the United States government. Can you even call it stealing when it’s this simple? The Trump administration has unlocked the vault doors, fired half of the security guards and asked the rest to roll pennies. Walk right in. Take what you want. This is the golden age.”
Trump today did not seem on top of the story when he told reporters: “I think it’s a witch hunt. I wasn’t involved with it, I wasn’t there, but I can tell you the result is unbelievable.” When asked if he still believed there was no classified information shared, he answered: “Well, that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know, I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask the various people involved. I really don’t know.” He said the breach was Waltz’s fault—“it had nothing to do with anyone else”—and when reporters asked about the future of Defense Secretary Hegseth, who uploaded the attack plans into the unsecure system, he answered: “Hegseth is doing a great job, he had nothing to do with this…. How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do with it. Look, look, it’s all a witch hunt. I don’t know that Signal works. I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you….”
The administration appears to be trying to create a distraction from the damning story. Yesterday evening, Trump signed an executive order that would, if it could be enforced, dramatically change U.S. elections and take the vote away from tens of millions of Americans. But, as Marc Elias of Democracy Docket put it, the order is “confused, rhetorical and—in places—nonsensical. It asserts facts that are not true and claims authority he does not possess. It is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Rather, it is the empty threat of a weak man desperate to appear strong.”
After today’s revelations, Trump announced new 25% tariffs on imported cars and car parts including those from Canada and Mexico, despite a deal worked out earlier this month that items covered under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement Trump signed in his first term would not face a new tariff levy. The 25% tariff is a major change that will raise prices across the board and hit the automotive sector in which more than a million Americans work. Upon the news, the stock market fell again.
And yet, despite the attempts to bury the Signal story, the scandal seems, if anything, to be growing. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) wrote a public letter to Trump yesterday calling for him to fire Hegseth, accurately referring to him as “the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in American history.” Jeffries wrote: “His behavior shocks the conscience, risked American lives and likely violated the law.” “[H]ey Sen[ator Joni] Ernst and Sen[ator Thom] Tillis,” Jen Rubin of The Contrarian wrote tonight, “proud of your votes for Hegseth? This is on [you] too as much as Hegseth. You knew he was not remotely qualified.”
