CNN
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The White House has switched from the stubborn inertia surrounding the Yemeni group chat scandal to a regular attack on critics and perennial defenses that President Donald Trump is a victim of a witch hunt.
That response to the embarrassing sight revealed by Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg grabbed Washington on Tuesday. The increasingly aggressive tone and lack of resignation between national security authorities suggested that the plan would be to not give inches and turn the storm into another example of the Second President’s ability to ignore the constraints that normally apply.
In a divided country that has little to stick to airstrikes against Iran-backed Houthi extremists, the political influence from anger could be minimal as conservative media and GOP lawmakers carry out interference.
But the realities of group chats, their impact on the reputation of Trump’s top national security aides, and some of the key developments in the US foreign policy that it unfolds provide important insights into how the administration sees the world and how it exerts its power.
Trump is nervous about the Atlantic Alliance at a breaking point. He wants to end the Ukrainian War and bring peace and geopolitical reorganization to the Middle East. He aims to fight China’s superpowers. And he is threatening the expansion of territory in the Western Hemisphere. However, his rift diplomacy team appears to have been unfamiliar enough to not discuss the sensitive and operational details of military strikes on vulnerable mobile devices against foreign intelligence reporting agencies. Trump prioritized the telegenic look and ultra-polarity over his experience with the cabinet pick. And this doesn’t look like a crew member with the aptitude to ease the crisis in the world.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegses may be expected to meet in public chats from a television anchor with a top-level national security experience that can be ignored. He boasts that “we’re now cleaned with OPSEC (Operational Security)” and is becoming a phor working on his environment in his new job. And the rounds of fist emojis and team self-comfort rushing rounds on the signal app seemed more appropriate for high schoolers than the enhanced national security operatives.
The status of national security adviser Mike Waltz, who reportedly added Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Goldberg to the chat, may have been irreparably damaged. A decorated green beret, Waltz comes across his book as a serious national security thinker who appreciates our allies thanks to his special forces units and tragic battlefield experiences. Trump’s election was greeted with some relief from the Washington foreign policy community.
The president may have warmly praised the waltz on Tuesday, but he is a whimsical man at the top. Characteristically, Trump used the embarrassment of the waltz to extract public shows of loyalty and praise within the ruthless type of authoritarian leader he admires most. “There are many journalists in the city who made big names for themselves lying about the president, whether it’s a ‘Russian hoax’ or a lie about the Gold Star family,” Waltz told camera.
Trump’s White House Communications Director has also launched an attack on Goldberg. The selective publication of sensitive details of journalists has been more cautious than Trump’s National Security Assistant Advisor. Stephen Chang warned X about the “rocket hoax rage” and “witch hunt,” claiming that a conspiracy by the “established community” has decided to defeat Trump.
European leaders have taken hints from the first two months of the new Trump administration that the Trans-Atlantic Alliance has ended, compared to at least 80 years of unwavering bonds between the US and the continent. A private vitriol shown to US allies on Signal Chat when officials thought they couldn’t hear, suggests that the violation is even more serious than it appears.
“I hate bailing out Europe again,” writes JD Vance. The scorn towards the transatlantic allies sparkled with the enthusiasm that brought to a speech that ripped off their political culture at a security conference in Munich last month. And he is likely to plague them again this week after he announced that he will join his wife Usha on a trip to Greenland.
In the group chat, Hegses says he is trying to break into the vice president and himself, and that he considers the European free road to be “pathetic.” And a chat member identified as “SM” (probably Stephen Miller, Trump’s top advisor) talks about forcing Europe to “reward” the US for the costs of a strike against the Hooty rebels in Yemen. This appears to be a reference to the White House’s view that reopening the Red Sea transport lane would benefit the European economy more than the US.
This may be true, but requiring allies to pay for unconsulted airstrikes is a strange way to implement foreign policy, even in such a transaction. And Washington has little action against Yemen-based Hootis out of altruism towards Europe. It mainly sends messages to protect Israel with Iranian extremist sponsors.
A key point in Europe from the chat is that resentment to the continent runs far deeper than Trump’s obsession with NATO spending and trade deficits. The official with the ears of the president is more hostile than he is.
The fuss over group chats in Washington distracted attention from the slightest point from the regime talks in Saudi Arabia, which aimed to end the Ukrainian war. The White House stressed that Russia and Ukraine had argued that it was an agreement to “eliminate” the use of force in the Black Sea. However, Moscow has imposed exorbitant conditions, including lifting restrictions on agricultural and fertilizer exports at banks and market access to curbs.
Ukrainian President Volodimia Zelensky accused Russia of deceiving our intermediaries and trying to twist the agreement. And Washington may not be able to meet Russian demands for concessions. European countries warned against lifting critical sanctions in the Kremlin until a full ceasefire is agreed.
The slow negotiations don’t look like the swift march of peace deals that Trump continues to promise, but they do match Moscow’s classic approach. This was what Zelensky warned him at a recent meeting in his oval office, which erupted in anger by the President and Vance. Painful and progressive progress only promotes the impression that Russia is not going to end a war in which the military is slowly progressing.
“The Russians are very skilled at using the negotiation process as a smokescreen to continue their military ambitions,” former Ukrainian ceasefire monitor Samir Puri told CNN’s Audi Cornish on Monday’s “CNN Toming.” “They fight and talk at the same time,” said Puri, director of the Global Governance and Security Centre at Chatham House in London.
The Trump administration has determined that US interests are best served by a quick halt of the war. Trump was empowered to move towards negotiating a ceasefire through election victory and constitutional privileges over foreign policy. However, his administration’s actions nevertheless raise concerns about the motivation for consultation. In particular, Steve Witkov, the envoy to Trump’s talks, has read from the Kremlin script about the region of eastern Ukraine since another infamous signal chat official, Steve Witkov, gathered President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
It was coincidentally that two other members of Signal Gang, Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, are scheduled to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Tuesday. While neither official emerged unharmedly from the unbearable session, Gabbard especially struggled to provide a credible answer to Democrat senators who were furious about the administration’s Cavalier attitude towards sensitive information.
But her appearance may be most memorable due to a major change in US foreign policy. The intelligence community’s annual global threat assessment was first led by warnings that cross-border criminals, terrorists and other non-state actors are pose a major risk to their homeland, producing and trafficking enormous amounts of drugs. The assessment brings secret agencies in line with Trump’s political views and warnings that undocumented immigration around the southern border represent a major national crisis.
Gabbard testified that drug cartels and criminal gangs “most immediately and directly” threaten the well-being of the United States and its people. She highlighted the Mexico-based multinational criminal organization as a leading supplier of illegal fentanyl to the US market, and warned of threats from cartels that promote human trafficking and criminal groups engaged in human trafficking, arms and human smuggling.
So, what does this mean? Intensifying management rhetoric in Mexico does not occur in a vacuum. Since Trump took office, the US military has stepped up surveillance for Mexican drug cartels, with sophisticated spy planes flying at least 18 missions in international airspace around the southwestern United States and the Baja Peninsula, CNN reports. Her remarks on Tuesday are likely to encourage speculation about the administration’s willingness to take military action against the cartel.
Gabbard’s testimony also undermined Trump’s claim that Canada is a major source of fentanyl coming to the United States. This is the main justification of his tariff threat.
Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, noted that the annual threat assessment did not mention fentanyl coming through Canada. Gabbard said, “My focus on the opening and the ATA was to focus on the most extreme threats in the region. Our assessment is that the most extreme threats associated with fentanyl continue to come from and through Mexico.” Heinrich then said that less than 1% of synthetic drugs entering the US come across the country’s northern border.
This raises the question of why Trump was shipwrecked with one of Washington’s oldest and closest friends about a threat surrounding a barely existing threat.
