The Goldberg groupchat ‘glitch’ is a crisis of competence

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 Senator Tim Sheehy, a Montana Republican, was blunter: “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 image surrounding this new White House that Team Trump sought to advance after four 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 concerning. 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.

As for the President, he’s downplaying the ramifications of the botched communication as a “glitch” to NBC News’s 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 have broken potentially useful information when it could have been taken up by America’s enemies; another devious actor could have lurked for longer in pursuit of more damaging information; and we could have 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.