Commentary: Trump’s Signal Weakness

By Abe Greenwald

One of the most frightening aspects of the Signal group-chat scandal is the least discussed. It gives our enemies the impression of a hapless American national-security apparatus. This will surely inform their future calculations. 

Think of it. According to the transcript of the exposed chat, the vice president, secretary of defense, and various high-level U.S. officials are fulminating in tough-guy mode about “European freeloading,” which will come as nothing new to European heads of state. But if you’re Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, you look at the very fact of the revealed messages and think, “How did we get so lucky?” 

If a Russian or Chinese defense official butt-dialed a journalist into a discussion of a planned bombing attack, heads would literally roll. For Putin and Xi, information discipline is a deadly serious matter. Authoritarian regimes foster a culture of fear around secrecy in order to preserve their strength. They look at our text-happy blabbermouths and see weakness.

They’re not entirely wrong. No matter the issue, the Trump administration’s biggest weakness really is indiscipline. From DOGE’s showboating, to ICE’s sloppy deportation prep, to the Justice Department’s overenthusiasm, to Vance’s public dyspepsia, to planning military strikes on a messaging app, the root problem isn’t a penchant for tyranny, oligarchy, or unconstitutionality; it’s wild impulsivity. We’re governed by ADHD patients who seem unable to govern themselves. 

And, of course, it starts at the top. Donald Trump all but makes policy from his own social-media platform Truth Social. Sometimes he does so late at night, as when he “hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT” Joe Biden’s pardons for members of the House Select committee on January 6. He dreamed up that quasi-official decree at 12:35 A.M.

In Trump’s world, you do as he does. If he wears blue suits and red ties, so do you. If he likes tariffs, you now like tariffs. If he hates Ukraine, you’re done with Ukraine. And if he takes a loosey-goosey, break-things-and-have-fun approach to policy and affairs of state, you end up on a compromised Signal chat using all caps to call Europe “PATHETIC” while disclosing war plans to Jeffrey Goldberg. As did Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who also followed the Trump template in then calling Goldberg a “so-called journalist.” Only he judged wrong, as the White House had already confirmed Goldberg’s story. 

Hegseth is a wild card who’s new to this level of responsibility. But group indiscipline spreads, and it infects even those who should know better. Which is how National Security Adviser Mike Waltz ended up in the chat and inadvertently invited Goldberg to sit in on it.

Government officials are apparently allowed to use Signal to schedule meetings, not bombings. But a serious national-security team wouldn’t even use it for that. Kremlin teams have long been at work hacking away at the app. Why should they potentially get the jump on a meeting of U.S. foreign-policy decisionmakers? If nothing else, Signal and similar platforms should be taken off of all federal employees’ devices and machines. Trump could make it official and announce it on Truth Social.

But, of course, someone should be fired over this. Trump often says that Biden never fired anyone, no matter how bad a job the person did. He’s right. And it’s true that Trump has no problem getting rid of people. But, here too, Trump acts impulsively. He fires those he doesn’t like, not necessarily those who need firing. If everyone involved in this embarrassment keeps their jobs, that too sends a message abroad.

This administration is hard to read with any consistency. As Americans, we look at the occasional absurdities and think, “I hope someone serious is in there keeping this thing together.” Moscow and Beijing, however, look at the administration and fear that things aren’t as confused as they sometimes seem. The Signal blunder gives us more reason to worry and gives our enemies less reason to fear the United States.

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.