The Most Transparent Administration Ever Has Entered The Groupchat

Whoops! Whoopsie!

Mar 25, 2025

To be fair, Donald Trump’s team did promise to have the most transparent administration ever — a line I was planning to deploy on Fox News, but Peter Doocy beat me to it. Newly elected Montana Republican Senator Tim Sheehy was more blunt: “Well, somebody fucked up.”

It was only a matter of time before this White House, moving as fast as they have been, would make a glaring mistake. They had been relatively fortunate to this point, considering the sheer amount they’ve taken on in the early days of this administration, to have the screw-ups largely at a remove from the West Wing. Pam Bondi’s botches, DOGE having to rehire people, and migrants whose deportation priority is dubious even under aggressive enforcement policies — all have been mistakes where the blame doesn’t directly fall on the president’s closest team members.

Not so with the Mike Waltz Houthi Signal chat, which cuts directly against the competence-based narrative surrounding this new White House that Donald Trump’s team sought to advance after years of senility-driven negligence under Joe Biden. Consider it the difference between the way Boomers play fast and loose with secrets — the garage is locked, I swear! The Corvette is in there after all — and the way Gen X does it, with encrypted apps and frequent use of emojis. And the oddest aspect of it is who is apparently to blame: Mike Waltz, widely considered one of the more competent members of the Trump foreign policy cohort.

For the rest of that team, the incident is an eyebrow-raising moment. Waltz’s tenure on Capitol Hill was marked by a regular willingness to chat with the media. But having the likes of Jeffrey Goldberg in your phone, and saved not with warning exclamation points to indicate the importance of watching what you say but with a bland categorization easily confused for someone else on the White House team, is an indication of closeness that others on the team can’t help but consider eyebrow raising. Already scheduled to appear on the Hill this week, other officials will have to answer for Waltz’s error — and promise this sort of thing won’t happen again.

For the President himself, he’s downplaying the ramifications of the botched communication as a “glitch” to NBC News’ Garrett Haake:

“The President told me he believes the story is essentially a non-issue,” Haake wrote on X. “And that Goldberg’s presence on the chat had ‘no impact at all.’ The attacks [on the Houthis], he continued, were ‘perfectly successful.'”
Trump added that he believes the episode has been his administration’s “only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.”

If there is a positive takeaway for the administration, it’s that things could have gone much worse. Goldberg could’ve broken potentially useful information when it could’ve been taken up by America’s enemies; another devious actor could’ve lurked for longer in pursuit of more damaging information; and we could’ve gained insight from the threads showing a level of fractiousness or falsity on the administration’s team that has not yet been in evidence. Instead, what we see largely just reinforces what we already know about the ideological positioning of these figures — it turns out that, behind the scenes as they do in public, Vice President Vance is a Euroskeptic, Pete Hegseth is more hawkish in deploying deadly American power, and Stephen Miller is somewhere in between. But these are sentiments that, unsurprising as they are, shouldn’t be flying around on Signal, even if accompanied by inspirational peak Gen X Dad usage of emojis by Mike Waltz. Get your Fist Flag Fire shirts while they’re hot.

Four Loko's Basilisk: "Hegseth celebrates flag burning." — Bluesky

Europe Excluded From The Groupchat

Freddy Gray.

Mike Waltz follows up with what Goldberg calls “a lengthy note about trade figures, and the limited capabilities of European navies.” Waltz texts, “Whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes. Per the president’s request we are working with DoD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans.”
Vance rejoins the conversation, telling Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.”
“VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading,” replies Hegseth. “It’s PATHETIC.”
Then an account called S M – White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, we assume – “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, 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,” says Hegseth, who seems to specialize in agreeing. The Defense Secretary then, according to Goldberg, posted a detailed update about the upcoming strikes, two hours before the attacks occurred.
The recklessness and crassness of this conversation is revealing at one level. But the performative anti-European signaling is something else, and it is wrong-headed, too. America is clearly attacking these Iranian-backed rebels to further cripple Tehran, a major foreign policy goal of this administration, and to support Israel, which wants America’s support in diminishing Iranian influence in the region. Whether these goals truly in align with the America First agenda is a moot point, but it is not a clear case of the United States “bailing out” Europe, as Vance suggested.
There is clearly within the highest levels of the Trump administration a hasty tendency to pour scorn on Europe, no doubt related to the disagreements between Europe and Washington over what to do about Ukraine.
When it comes to war and peace, it seems, Trump’s America is increasingly seeking to please its allies in the Middle East – Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – while blaming European powers (and Egypt) for forcing America to act alone. This will be particularly galling for the European powers who took part in earlier, less dramatic strikes against the Houthis in co-ordination with the Biden administration – attacks which Mike Waltz has described as “feckless.” The sloppiness of discussing these acts on an insecure Signal group suggests that Waltz is not necessarily in a good position to lecture others about fecklessness. But the overall point is clear: the Trump administration will work with Middle Eastern powers to hurt Iran, but Europe is increasingly alone.

The Battle Over Abundance

Ross Barkan.

There’s a new war within the liberal intelligentsia and it’s got to do with a funny word: “abundance.” Is it good or bad to be abundant? Does it symbolize dynamism or shadow libertarianism? What ills will so-called zoning reform actually fix?
Two new books are at the heart of this struggle. One is called, of course, Abundance, by Ezra Klein, the star New York Times columnist and podcaster, and Derek Thompson, a journalist at the Atlantic. The other, Why Nothing Works, comes from Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. All three writers are Democrats or sympathetic to the Democratic cause. All dislike Donald Trump. All want blue cities, blue counties, and blue states from coast to coast.
But each man has riled up a certain number of left-leaning Democrats for somewhat similar reasons. One overriding issue is that many on the left are annoyed or even angered that such a debate is happening right now with the backdrop of Trump’s assault on the federal bureaucracy and democratic norms. Why care about “abundance” when the president is threatening judges and trying to deport legal residents for their political beliefs? It’s a fair argument, as is the reality that such an agenda — making government better at building and doing — isn’t an automatic salve for the Democratic woes in the heartland or anywhere really.
What has become obvious, though, is that the United States, despite its inordinate wealth, is not matching its twentieth century dynamism. Could this government — Republican or Democratic-run — stand up another interstate highway system? A network of railroads? Could this Department of Defense effectively invent the internet? There will be an America after Trump, and a republic too, and it’s worth mulling the greater arc of our nation. Not all issues are bound to electoral cycles, team red against team blue. If we are going to save our climate or guarantee every American an affordable place to live, these debates must be had — now.
The Klein-Thompson duo argues that an “anti-growth” mentality has constrained the left for the last several decades. NIMBYism and aggressive regulations have strangled housing supply and innovation. As government support for research and development dried up, science produced fewer society-wide breakthroughs. Once, we built whole subway systems in a decade, sent human beings to the moon, and created the internet. Klein and Thompson do blame neoliberalism — a long-running retreat from government investment and a foisting of responsibilities on the private sector — for this, which should make many progressives nod along. But they’d prefer lighter zoning and environmental laws to speed up growth. Can the Green New Deal come to fruition if NIMBYs can always sue to halt new solar plants and transmission lines?