3 days ago

Let's put it in language the Signal leakers will understand: what a bunch of pathetic sleazebags | Emma Brockes

The Maga-fication of American political discourse, which started, arguably, with Donald Trump mocking a disabled reporter in 2015, peaked this week with news of Pete Hegseth referring to European countries in the leaked Signal chat as “PATHETIC”, and enjoyed a detour last Tuesday when Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and former running mate of Kamala Harris, appeared at a town hall in Wisconsin and called Elon Musk “a dipshit”. (This is not the first time he has referred to Musk this way. Right before the election last year, Walz told a crowd: “Look, Elon’s on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit.”)

Parking for a moment the perfection of the phrase “skipping like a dipshit” to capture Musk’s very particular style of movement and speech, the range of what can and can’t be said in politics has clearly, radically changed. When you look back on the phrase that caused Hillary Clinton so much trouble in 2016 – “basket of deplorables” – it sounds like a quote from an 18th-century novel. “Take that, sir! You and your basket of deplorables!” Now we have Trump referring to Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor mistakenly added to the Signal chat, as a “sleazebag”, and Hegseth, the US defense secretary, telling JD Vance that he fully shares the vice-president’s “loathing of European free-loading”. We are millimetres away from someone shouting “asshole” across the floor of the Senate.

The Signal chat, obviously, wasn’t supposed to be public, and responding to the leak this week has put the White House in a delicious bind – or rather, a bind that we might have enjoyed as delicious had it not underscored just how petrifyingly stupid Trump’s team really is. On Wednesday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, had simultaneously to dismiss further revelations from the Atlantic designed to expose the White House lie that none of the information discussed was classified, while slamming the magazine for leaking “sensitive information”. Well, Karoline, which is it?

The new information shared by the Atlantic on Wednesday was, to use government-approved language, freaking MIND-BLOWING. Two hours before the Yemeni bombing raid, Hegseth, Vance and national security adviser Mike Waltz went into extraordinary detail as to the exact timing, nature and target of the bombings. “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s),” wrote Hegseth, followed by a stream of similar details. After the release of the information on Wednesday, retired military brass lined up in the US to tell cable news channels: “There is no question this is classified.”

And while it remained deeply unfortunate for the Trump administration that, of all the people they might have mistakenly cc-ed into the group, it happened to be a serious journalist like Jeffrey Goldberg, given the frat boy tenor of the exchange, it could also have been a lot worse. We should, surely, be grateful that Mike Waltz, the national security adviser who organised the group on Signal, didn’t do that thing – look, we’ve all done it – where you inadvertently send a bitchy message about someone to the person in question, or in this case a message outlining a plan to drop a bomb on their head to the Houthi rebel commander target. Or as Waltz described him, in the style of a man shooting the breeze at the water cooler, “their top missile guy”. One assumes the only reason that guy wasn’t in the chat, too, is that he hadn’t gotten around to signing up for Signal.

It’s not the rudeness, of course, it’s the flippancy that terrifies. The tone of the messages flying between the most powerful people in the world via an unsecure messaging app and on subjects of vital national security was that of someone idly texting with one hand while throwing and catching a hacky sack in the other. At one point, per Wednesday’s new trove, Mike Waltz wrote “typing too fast” and it must have taken every shred of collective will power in the group for no one to reply, “Sausage fingers!”

Waltz, by the way, is the figure who has come closest to saying sorry for the mess, remarking on Fox News on Tuesday that he took “full responsibility” for the error. But then he ruined the vanishingly rare moment of appearing to be the only adult in the room by referring to Goldberg – a hero without whom none of us would know any of this had happened – as “scum”. And, sadly, back we went to square one.