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IT’S WAR AND PEACE WITH DONALD AND PETE – AND THE WORST GROUP
CHAT EVER  
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Marina Hyde
March 25, 2025
The Guardian
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_ We absolutely won’t tolerate leaks, they said before looping in a
journalist to top secret war plans. Feel safe? Me neither _

President Donald Trump (left), and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth
listen during an event in the Oval Office of the White House in
Washington, Friday, March 21, 2025., ABACA/REX/Shutterstock

 

Once again, we find ourselves having an anguished debate about mobile
phones and online safety, in this case asking: should we ban the
devices for US national security advisers under the age of 60? Do you
know what your national security adviser is doing on his device
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Is he using it to stay in touch with other guys in the big-man-osphere
to talk about bombing Hooters? Or did he maybe add the editor-in-chief
of a leading general interest magazine to a Signal group in the
crucial period running up to a highly sensitive US military operation
in Yemen, seemingly committing so many alleged crimes that he should
have a full-body orange jumpsuit tattooed on him for ever?

By now, you will have caught up with the tale of one of the most
idiotic breaches of security imaginable – seemingly executed,
regrettably, by the actual US national security
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Mike Waltz seems to have been aided and abetted in his full-spectrum
fatuity by other ultra-senior figures, including the vice-president,
JD Vance, and the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, who shared detailed
operational and strategic information in a chat to which Atlantic
editor Jeffrey Goldberg had been accidentally invited. Is Hegseth OK?
Has he returned to being – how to put this delicately? – someone
you probably don’t want to give important tasks to “after
lunch”?

 

On another tangent, meanwhile, was there some extremely senior
military or government official with either the first name Jeffrey, or
the second name Goldberg, whom Waltz actually meant to add? And did
that intended Jeffrey or Goldberg wake up the next day, see the Yemen
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wounded sense of Fomo? “Wait, you guys bombed Yemen without me? I
hate you ALL. I demand you put me in the group chat NOW, just so I can
immediately flounce off and leave the group chat.”

The breach exposes so many things that it is difficult to know where
to start. It certainly highlights the almost immeasurably rich lexicon
of emojis. You realise that a certain type of guy deploys the same
three emojis for taking out a Houthi target as they would if Bryson
DeChambeau nailed a slightly tricky putt on the 14th at the West Palm
Beach Pro-Am. Punching fist, USA flag, flames emoji. Let’s GO,
Bryson!

That said, the emojis are obviously the best of it. Less easy to
scroll past is the bit where Vance, or his proxy, says: “I just hate
bailing out Europe again.” Then Hegseth replies: “I fully share
your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC.” Mm. Three
weeks ago, we had Vance offering a blanket disparagement
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of European forces as “some random country that hasn’t fought a
war in 30 or 40 years”. Now we have this Signal chat – yet another
sweet memorial to all the European service personnel who gave their
lives in the US Republican party’s endlessly stupid 9/11 wars. We
never asked to be reimbursed for that military assistance – very
BAD! very Wrong! – and are now repeatedly hearing that it meant
nothing to Marine-adjacent shutterbug Vance, who remains the most
unbearably loud and rude American at the luxury hotel breakfast. They
really should make a darkly satirical TV show about these absurd,
degenerate, unpleasant people. Call it The White Potus.

 
Needless to say, the first instinct of the Trump administration has
been to insult the journalist, when in less responsible hands than
Goldberg’s this could have been catastrophically endangering
information for involved US service personnel and intelligence
operatives. At time of writing, Hegseth’s sole comment on the bed he
and the guys just shat was to attack the man to whom they personally
served this scoop, calling Goldberg “a deceitful and highly
discredited so-called journalist”. Is he though? Come on, Pete!
Given the same information in real time, your boy Joe Rogan would have
livestreamed it and you know it. At least Donald Trump would have been
up to speed with it that way. “I don’t know anything about it,”
was the president’s sleepy verdict yesterday, a day he spent wetting
his pants about some oil painting of him
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hanging somewhere in the Colorado state legislature.

As for consequences, do please remember that we are dealing with the
biggest hypocrites on the planet. Consider their own thunderous
statements on infosec. Here is the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean
Parnell, just last week: “If you have a private that loses a
sensitive item, that loses night vision goggles, that loses a weapon,
you can bet that that private is going to be held accountable. The
same and equal standards must apply to senior military leaders.”
Also last week, here is Trump’s director of national intelligence,
Tulsi Gabbard: “Any unauthorised release of classified information
is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.” Was Tulsi on
the Signal chat? Course she was! If you still want more, here’s
Hegseth mining the seemingly endless potential of Hillary Clinton’s
careless use of a private server for classified information back when
he was a Fox News host: “If it was anyone other than Hillary
Clinton, they would be in jail right now.” “When I’m president
of the United States, neither she nor any of these other people are
going to be above the law,” was the previous verdict of one Marco
Rubio, last seen on the Houthi chat appearing in the role of secretary
of state of the United States.

We’ll have to wait and see if these clowns will hold themselves to
their own very high standards. In the meantime, please enjoy European
diplomats declaring that as far as the relationship between the
continent and the US goes, this is “the writing on the wall”. If
only it HAD been written on a wall – that would actually have been
more secure and secretive. Come to that, it would genuinely have been
more secure and secretive to hire a skywriting plane. Great job, guys!
Punching fist, USA flag, flames emoji, etc.

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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

* Donald Trump; Pete Hegseth; National Security;
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