Why Signalgate Might Break Through

It's not the D push back we want, but it may be the D push back we need

This week we learned that Trump’s national security team of doofuses and fuck ups were organizing strikes against Yemen over Signal, a commercial and unsecure app. We found this out because they accidently added Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat.

Almost immediately after the story broke, there happened to be already scheduled hearings in the Senate on US global threats at which Director of National Intelligence/right wing Putin boot licker Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director/clown John Ratciliffe testified. And for once Democrats managed to sound impassioned, enraged, and effective. More, even open sycophants like Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson had trouble defending the administration.

I’m wary about predicting the future, but early indications suggest that Signalgate may get treated as a BIG THING by Democrat and the media in a way that other horrific news out of the Trump White House (like an illegal armed takeover of a nonprofit group, for example, or the kidnapping of people without due process so they can be shipped to an El Salvadoran slave labor camp) have not.

Why this thing? I think there are a couple reasons.

First, the fuck up here is not a partisan issue. Democrats are not disagreeing with Republicans on policy; no one is talking about whether the US should be dropping bombs yet again in the Middle East. The scandal can be discussed purely in terms of national security and the safety of our troops, since Trump’s team apparently texted operational details and compromising details about a CIA informant on an unsecure network to a journalist.

Democrats and the media have both tended to treat Trump’s policy goals, no matter how unconstitutional, as divinely sanctioned by his election victory. But this is not a policy goal; it is a straightforward issue of callous incompetence. Nobody feels like they have to hold back.

Second, the fuck up here doesn’t directly involve Trump. Trump was not in the chat, and in fact has said he knew “nothing” about it. That’s embarrassing considering he’s the commander in chief and it’s his responsibility to have some idea what his fascist minions are up to. But as a practical matter, this is an issue where Trump’s personal honeymoon aura from the election doesn’t apply.

Obviously, these are not good reasons. Democrats and the media should be willing to challenge Trump on his horrific unconstitutional policies. They should not be deferring to him by (for example) voting to confirm Trump nominees. The media should be in full on emergency scandal mode. And, you know, Democrats shouldn’t be blandly cosigning more bombing in the Middle East. You could argue that the need for a Signalgate to jump start opposition underlines the failures of both the Democratic party and the news media in dealing with Trump, now and over the last decade.

But…to some degree, what the scandal is matters less than that something finally breaks through. A month of headlines about the utter incompetence on display, a concerted campaign by media and Democrats to pressure one, or more than one, of the participants out of office: those are things that could crater Trump’s approval sooner rather than later. They could make everyone—Democrats, Republicans, the media, universities, institutions, etc.—feel like they’ve got more solid ground to stand up to the administration’s threats and lies.

No one thing is going to put an end to Trump’s reign of terror, obviously. But especially with a series of important special elections coming up, we could be seeing an inflection point which puts us in a better place for resistance. Signalgate is not necessarily the thing that I would like people to be most, most focused on, if it were up to me. But you fight with the scandal you’ve got.

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