Team Trump walked into Jeffrey Goldberg’s trap

Jeffrey Goldberg laid a trap and Team Trump has blundered right into it. In Monday’s sensational story, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” the Atlantic editor rather pompously declared that he was withholding some of the information he had received on grounds of national security, contrasting his own propriety with the slapdashery of the Trump administration’s national security operation.

As an intelligent man who has spent years trying to undermine Donald Trump and his movement, he must have guessed what the response would be. The President and his team did what Donald Trump always does when attacked: counter punch, hard and wild. They poured scorn on Goldberg, his magazine and they rejected his claims. “Nobody was texting war plans,” said Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary. “And that’s all I have to say about that.”

“There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” added Tulsi Gabbard before the Senate Intelligence Committee. “It wasn’t classified information,” concluded President Trump, for his part.

That, of course, gave Goldberg a golden opportunity this morning to publish the follow-up he was always going to publish. “These statements presented us with a dilemma,” he claims (yeah, right), before pronouncing, “the statements… have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisors included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.”

Case disclosed. And now only the most dyed-in-the-wool Trumpist would deny that, if all reported accurately, the texts are truly damning.  

America is about to have an agonized, month-long media debate about what the words “war plans” actually mean. No, Hegseth does not appear to have shared the locations of the targets. But yes, he did declare, 31 minutes before the military strikes on Houthi targets began: “TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.” 

Centcom, or Central Command, is the military’s combatant command for the Middle East. He then went into further detail: “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package).”

“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)”

He then added “more to follow. We are currently clean on OPSEC (Operational Security). Godspeed to our warriors.”

Seventeen minutes later, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, the man whose telephone somehow added Goldberg to the text chat, follows up with a message addressed to Vice President J.D. Vance: “VP. Building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID. Pete, Kurilla, the IC, amazing job.”

“What?” asked an understandably confused Vance. “Typing too fast,” says Waltz, a busy man, clearly. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”

“Excellent,” replies Vance.

Ordo Amoris and so on, and which of us has not texted something we regret. But that’s a strangely unchristian response to the news that any human life has been snuffed out. And what about the alleged terrorist’s girlfriend? Did she die, too? Is that “excellent?”

It remains a mystery how on earth Waltz ended up adding Jeffrey Goldberg to the secret Signal group. His bizarre waffling performance with Laura Ingraham on Fox News last night didn’t exactly clarify matters. We may end up discovering that the “Houthi PC small group” balls-up was indeed a dastardly deep-state plot to undermine the Trump administration. For now, however, the point is surely that it worked. Goldberg’s story has shown that several of the most important figures in the Trump administration, with their emojis and breathless texting, are emotionally incontinent when it comes to social media (which is what Signal is after all, never mind the end-to-end encryption).

They display a warped, almost schoolgirlish excitement about sharing dangerous information. The initial story was bad enough. But, with their public hyperventilating in response to Goldberg yesterday, Team Trump teed up an obviously hostile journalist to embarrass them all over again. It’s catnip to the new administration’s many critics, who up until recently had very little to celebrate.