That Atlantic Story is Very Very Bad But Also Very Very Funny

Let's appreciate some dumdums.

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By now you’ve probably seen Jeffrey Goldberg’s firsthand account of a secret group chat conversation among Trump administration officials planning military strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen, all of which he witnessed after being accidentally invited into a non-secure, Cabinet-level Signal chain by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. As Goldberg tells it, he simply sat back, unnoticed, as Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio schmoozed over Signal — a publicly available chat app — about operational details and the potential geopolitical fallout from the missile strikes, which, Goldberg notes, took place just a few hours later.

Say what you will about both Goldberg and The Atlantic — both of which are objectively Pretty Bad™ — but it sure seems that in this specific instance, he’s got the goods.

Since its publication yesterday, Goldberg’s story has already become a major scandal for the president and his enablers, many of whom spent this morning testifying on Capitol Hill, sighing deeply into their microphones and making faces like this:

Screenshot / CSPAN, Bluesky

To be clear, the transgression here isn’t simply that some of the most powerful people on Earth accidentally invited a journalist into their super-duper-top-secret group chat. It’s that they all seemed to have no qualms about having that super-duper-top-secret group chat conversation take place on the same commercially available chat software that the Pentagon had warned was dangerously insecure just one week earlier. It’s hard not to conclude that this wasn’t the first time top Trump administration figures had skirted public records laws by conducting official business on their easily hackable private devices. And if they’re doing it about launching missiles at Yemen—an action that, to be clear once again, is also a bad thing in and of itself—what else have they used Signal to illegally blab about before now?

So, yeah, Goldberg’s report is plenty important and not the least bit terrifying in terms of giving the public a firsthand peek at how astonishingly cavalier these people are when it comes to OPSEC and national security. But, it’s crucial to point out that not only is this whole incident as worrisome as it was predictable, it’s also very, very funny.