Trump Redux: The Death of Democracy, or Overblown Hyperbole?

[Trollheart]

Next move: mysterious fire/bomb/outbreak of virus at the headquarters of The Atlantic...

[DJChameleon]

To add someone to a Signal chat it is very intentional.

I use Signal during protests because of the disappearing messages but you need the person's phone number and you see the name of the person when they are added to the group chat. I think the slight mix up was that the journalist had his Signal name as JG and they meant to add someone else with the same initials. So when they saw JG was added to the chat they thought it was someone else but you have to put in the number of the person so it still doesn't excuse the mix up.

[SGR]

To add someone to a Signal chat it is very intentional.

I use Signal during protests because of the disappearing messages but you need the person's phone number and you see the name of the person when they are added to the group chat. I think the slight mix up was that the journalist had his Signal name as JG and they meant to add someone else with the same initials. So when they saw JG was added to the chat they thought it was someone else but you have to put in the number of the person so it still doesn't excuse the mix up.

Thanks for the firsthand info DJ. Yeah, I'm guessing we'll learn a bit more about how it happened in the coming days/weeks (or at least we'll be sold a story about 'how it happened')

[Lisnaholic]

...but one thing I did notice is that beyond the fact that a complete opsec failure was exposed, there isn't much to add on to the scandal. In other words, if the operation went haywire because of this, or someone(s) got hurt due to the poor security adherence, it would be a much bigger scandal. To your question of justice, my guess is that whoever added Goldberg (and we're in the 'fog of war' info phase, but it sounds like it might've been a staffer for Waltz) to the chat will get axed. I'd be surprised if it really resulted in higher heads rolling like Waltz himself or Hegseth, even though many Dems are calling for that.

Yep, that's my guess too, SGR: Waltz will blame some assistant and that guy will carry the can for everyone else.

I also feel like the story doesn't have natural oxygen to sustain it beyond a weekly news cycle or two  (at least in the public's interest, legal cases might play out longer)- beyond the opsec failure, there's only a few illuminating tidbits in the chats I've seen (tell me if you think there is something I've missed). ...

Beyond that though, there are news stories about emojis that the chatters used, and if we're talking about emojis, then that's a signal that there's not a lot of juicier drama or internal conflict to ply from:

Trump team sparks fury with 'sickening' choice of emojis while describing their war plans in leaked Signal chat

^ Yes, the poor-taste emojis isn't much of a story in itself: it's just a little media add-on really, isn't it?
If there is something you missed, then I don't think it's in the original Signal messages or in the initial blunder: it's in the way that so many White House officials are denying what we can all see for ourselves. We now have on-record lies from Hesgeth and various others, and that process will extend the story for some time, I suspect:-
 

journalist asks about the information exposed in chat > politician lies about it > more headlines or ridicule > rinse and repeat

Also worth considering in this context is the response from other nations to this breach of security, especially from Europe. Their reactions might extend this story furthur because I bet they won't be taking the White House line of "oh, no damage done."

And actually, mentioning the word "ridicule" gives me an excuse to show Stephen Colbert's spot-on comments from last night:-

All that being said, Trump promised a government of transparency, didn't he? I just don't think this was what anyone had in mind. 

Good one, SGR ! With remarks like that you could become a writer for S Colbert - or perhaps help press sec Karoline Leavitt make herself look like even more of a clown than she already is.

[SGR]

@Lisnaholic remember James Carville's "play possum" (do nothing, let Republicans flounder, then pounce) strategy? Well, I think it's this sort of thing that he was talking about/waiting for (he's probably released comments or a video about this whole thing, but I haven't seen it yet). Democrats should try to get as much juice out of this as they can politically. I'm just not sure how long the juice will last - that was my main point with the "illuminating" stuff in the chats. To your point, Hegseth and others downplaying or lying about whether or not the discussed subjects were 'classified' or not might fuel the news cycle a little bit more and result in some legal proceedings, but I don't think that sort of thing is out of the ordinary for a US administration caught in a scandal. If, for example, the chats showed one or more admin officials privately bashing or ridiculing Trump, or the operation resulted in the loss of American life because of this ham-fisted handling of operational security, the longevity of this scandal would probably be much greater, and in either of those cases, my guess would be that high-level heads would roll. Obviously, admin officials lying/downplaying would look much worse if they were doing it about something that resulted in the loss of American life, rather than a haphazard breach of opsec that resulted in an American journalist getting an enviable scoop.

We'll see how it plays out I suppose. I think one thing that's clear, and that the Democrats will vocalize, is that Republicans would have raked Democrats over the coals for something like this had their positions been reversed. But my guess is that the interest in the story among Democrats will exceed the interest in the story among the public. As seemingly the first true scandal in the second Trump administration, it is novel, but I would be surprised if it's still being widely reported on in two weeks time.

[Lexi Darling]

Surprise surprise, "the party of free speech" was another lie.

[Lexi Darling]

This is terrifying Orwellian-ass shit. And they're also pretty much saying the quiet part out loud by saying one of the "divisive narratives that distort our shared history" is "race is not a biological reality but a social construct." Race science and white supremacy are now national policy.

[Lexi Darling]

Trump Pulls Research Funding To Protect Pregnant Women From Domestic Violence, Citing 'DEI'

MAGA hates women and minorities

[Lexi Darling]

The Trump administration is racist and want other countries to be racist too

[DJChameleon]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/26/yale-professor-fascism-canada

What does it say that a scholar of fascism is leaving the US right now? Said Stanley: "Part of it is you're leaving because ultimately, it is like leaving Germany in 1932, 33, 34. There's resonance: my grandmother left Berlin with my father in 1939. So it's a family tradition."

[Lucem Ferre]

At what point do all the people who rolled their eyes at me in 2016 admit that I was right?

[Buck_Mulligan]

You can't turn your back for a second...
You might expect this from the Taliban...

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/03/28/trump-aims-to-remove-improper-ideology-from-the-smithsonian-with-new-executive-order?utm_source=The+Art+Newspaper+Newsletters&utm_campaign=96f2fd3714-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_02_14_10_55_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-2f1faeda6a-62240358

If you were wondering why Trevor Milton (Who?) got a pardon...

https://electrek.co/2025/03/28/trevor-milton-claims-hes-been-pardoned-but-really-its-just-an-ad-for-a-documentary/?utm_source=Electrek+Daily+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=da70857073-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_03_28_11_00&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_76e57fe13e-da70857073-220818432#more-408198

https://apnews.com/article/nikola-trevor-milton-fraud-trump-pardon-3fcebb0a3820cecb205656f2dc3f6764

[Lisnaholic]

@Lisnaholic remember James Carville's "play possum" (do nothing, let Republicans flounder, then pounce) strategy? Well, I think it's this sort of thing that he was talking about/waiting for (he's probably released comments or a video about this whole thing, but I haven't seen it yet). Democrats should try to get as much juice out of this as they can politically. I'm just not sure how long the juice will last - that was my main point with the "illuminating" stuff in the chats. To your point, Hegseth and others downplaying or lying about whether or not the discussed subjects were 'classified' or not might fuel the news cycle a little bit more and result in some legal proceedings, but I don't think that sort of thing is out of the ordinary for a US administration caught in a scandal. If, for example, the chats showed one or more admin officials privately bashing or ridiculing Trump, or the operation resulted in the loss of American life because of this ham-fisted handling of operational security, the longevity of this scandal would probably be much greater, and in either of those cases, my guess would be that high-level heads would roll. Obviously, admin officials lying/downplaying would look much worse if they were doing it about something that resulted in the loss of American life, rather than a haphazard breach of opsec that resulted in an American journalist getting an enviable scoop.

Yes, I don't think this a scandal that'll bring down bring down a government, but also, as a breach of opsec, I rank it as "emblematic" or "indicative" rather than "haphazard", as you are labelling it. The inclusion of a journalist in the chat could, charitably, be written off as a random blunder, but the chat being in Signal in the first place is a total red flag of the admin's attitude, "Why's everyone bleating about national security all the time?"

We'll see how it plays out I suppose. I think one thing that's clear, and that the Democrats will vocalize, is that Republicans would have raked Democrats over the coals for something like this had their positions been reversed. But my guess is that the interest in the story among Democrats will exceed the interest in the story among the public. As seemingly the first true scandal in the second Trump administration, it is novel, but I would be surprised if it's still being widely reported on in two weeks time.

^ I think your scandalometer is giving you false readings, SGR. First big scandal in my eyes was Trump placing Musk (unelected, unconfirmed by Congress and apparently unanswerable to anyone) in such a position of power. From that point on, there has been a scandal on an almost daily basis as he takes his quasi-legal chainsaw to one govt. department after another. If you think Signalgate is "the first true scandal" of this admin, you may be revealing how effective Bannon's "flood the zone" policy is as a method of getting people to swallow what was unthinkable during any previous presidency.
 

This is terrifying Orwellian-ass shit. And they're also pretty much saying the quiet part out loud by saying one of the "divisive narratives that distort our shared history" is "race is not a biological reality but a social construct." Race science and white supremacy are now national policy.

MAGA hates women and minorities

You can't turn your back for a second...
You might expect this from the Taliban...

Yep, it's just one sinister development after another: some of them happening before our eyes, and some of them getting language or precedent on the books so that regulations can be called up and used as and when required. Aside from people who are specifically being targeted, there must be a terrible "chilling effect" now being felt by universities, media outlets, lawyers, federal employees, dissenters, minorities etc, etc.

One quick measure of how extreme some of the Trump admin's actions have become:-
Back in the long run up from the Big Lie of Sept 2020, through Jan 6 2021, to the Nov 2024 election, Trump apologists in the media and Congress had a go-to response, "Yeah, but the Dems did something similar..." It seems to me that those guys have now largely fallen silent, which I'm guessing is because the Trump admin is so outstripping any kind of precedent.

So this clip may be one of the last "yeah, but the Dems..." speeches we'll be hearing for a while.
(1 min of the Attorny General's speech, then commentary from Brian Taylor Cohen):-

[Auroras In Ice]

It's just relentless awfulness, isn't it? Very much by design as a shock and awe strategy to overwhelm opposition since this is the window to actually interfere with this stuff taking root. Once it does root in, it's going to take a lot more struggle to get rid of it. Hard way it is, I guess. Anyhow, this is a lot to have happened just over just a couple months. Anyone who is even slightly clued in and still shrugging off the severity of this and denying the obvious trajectory it's all moving on is kinda on the same level as Flat Earthers to me. At this point there's either personal denialism or other factors at play that is well-beyond any rando on the internet to break through. The architect of Project 2025 saying this is all "beyond my wildest dreams" (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/16/project-2025-paul-dans-qa-00228890) is... concerning.

Aside from various historical parallels which we can pick over until the cows come home, the direction of this is into uncharted territory. In pretty much all modern instances of fascism and authoritarianism, it's emerged in nations that were truly on the ropes. Think of the devastated state of post WWI Germany that gave rise to Nazism as a means to restore national pride after humiliating defeats and imposition of severe austerity measures. This echoes across more recent authoritarian movements in Europe, Africa, and Asia... not to mention S.American dictatorships engineered and propped up through destabilization by the CIA and other western powers. The huge inflection point with the US is that it's the world's richest nation, the only superpower, and is at the seat of a global hegemony. Trumpism is still using the rhetoric of restoring the US to some former glory ("make america great again"), but the national humiliation and ruin it is reacting to exists pretty much as that... rhetoric. Neoliberalism is wrecking the US middle and working classes to enrich the few, but that's also happening everywhere. It is a brutal situation for many, but nothing compared to the socioeconomic conditions that previous authoritarian movements have emerged from. What fascism in a rich superpower with the capacity to wipe everything out many times over will look like versus historical examples coming from nations in tatters is anyone's guess. It's a wildly different starting point. Just a navel-gazing thought I wanted to put out and interested in other's thoughts on it.

[Trollheart]

You make a good point, @Auroras In Ice : it's like the school bully suddenly won the lottery, so now he has the power and the means to do whatever he wants, hire and fire who he wants, and nobody can stop him. It's pretty terrifying stuff. The whole world is about to slide into a recession, apparently, so perhaps when American voters start feeling it in their pocket, when their houses are being repossessed and their jobs are being lost, they might wake up and try to do something, though in all likelihood the only real path to any sort of action (other than outright revolution/civil war - yeah) is hitting back at the midterms, and that's two years away. Going to be, as they say, a long cold winter.