No War but Culture War

One might think the Trump administration and its supporters would be dismayed to learn that top personnel discussed military strikes against Yemen on a group chat that mistakenly included a journalist. And indeed, they are furious. But the rage is not directed at the cavalier sharing of presumably classified intelligence. It is instead reserved mainly for the journalist: The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

The response to the scandal reveals a disjuncture between the seriousness with which MAGA treats foreign enemies and perceived domestic ones. The prospect of being compromised by the likes of Iran or China is distant in comparison to the visceral horror of giving a victory to the dread mainstream media. Marxists have a slogan: “No war but class war.” The MAGA version might be “No war but culture war.”

As Goldberg explained in an article published Monday, he was added to a Signal chat called “Houthi PC small group” by Michael Waltz, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. Discussing a secret military strike on an unsecure channel, and mistakenly inviting a journalist into the chat, is a shocking breach of operations security. But in the world of Trump, the far more shocking breach is that the person invited into the chat was the reporter who first revealed that Trump had referred to dead American soldiers as suckers and losers.

And so the focus for Trump and his allies has been on explaining to the MAGA faithful how it is that a journalist found himself in the middle of a military planning meeting. Those explanations have gone as awkwardly as you might expect.

Trump put the blame on an unnamed staffer. “Somebody that … worked for Mike Waltz at a lower level had, I guess, Goldberg’s number, who called through the app, and somehow this guy ended up on the call,” he told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]

Waltz, appearing on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program Tuesday night, denied that one of his staffers put Goldberg’s contact information on his phone.

“But how did it end up on your phone?” Ingraham asked. Waltz said “the best technical minds” were at work answering this mystery. Ingraham, obviously dissatisfied, persisted. “But you’ve never talked to him before, so how’s the number on your phone?”

“If you have somebody else’s contact,” he explained, “and then somehow it gets sucked in, it gets sucked in.” Planning a military operation on a device that sucks in phone numbers from complete strangers sounds like a bad idea. But Waltz seems to have calculated that acknowledging this vulnerability would be less damning than admitting that he had spoken with Goldberg at some point in his career.

“I can tell you for 100 percent I don’t know this guy,” he added. “I know him by his horrible reputation, and he really is the bottom scum of journalists.” Again, this explanation would seem to make the security breach worse. Waltz is saying the person who penetrated his chat is not merely an unauthorized civilian, but “scum”—bottom scum! Not even top scum! This strategy makes sense only if the priority is to prove that Waltz wasn’t chummy with a representative of the liberal media elite.

The Fox News host Jesse Watters appeared to have the same prioritization in mind when he shared the story with his audience. “This wouldn’t surprise me if Goldberg sneaked his way in,” he suggested, implausibly,. “He’s the lowest of the low.” From a national-security standpoint, this theory is the opposite of reassuring. If Goldberg could “sneak his way in” to a highly sensitive discussion about a secret military operation, shouldn’t we worry that Chinese or Russian or Iranian spies, who possess espionage capabilities perhaps even greater than those of a journalist, might also sneak their way in? But the fear of infiltration by foreign enemies pales beside the much deeper fear of a Trump adviser having spoken with a journalist.

[Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris: Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal]

One might wonder why Trump and his allies have devised such fantastical explanations. Why not simply blame everything on Waltz, finger him as a secret “deep state” agent, and fire him?

The answer is that doing so would violate another MAGA principle, which is that the independent press must be treated as completely illegitimate. As Will Chamberlain, a conservative lawyer, posted, “Under no circumstances should the Trump administration fire anyone based on anything published in the pages of The Atlantic.”

The retired army colonel and conservative columnist Kurt Schlichter advanced a similar argument: “The idea that we’re going take Jeffrey Goldberg’s word and throw one of our own over the cliff to please the likes of faux-fussy Tim Walz, Pete Buttigieg, a bunch of ex-generals who’ve never won a war, and the rest of these dorks is inconceivable to a based conservative.”

MAGA world believes it erred in Trump’s first term by legitimizing mainstream media and must now act upon Trump’s rhetoric that reporters who don’t faithfully promote him are “enemies of the people.”

Accordingly, after first confirming the veracity of the story, the administration has settled on minimizing it by disputing Goldberg’s characterization of what he inadvertently learned. Goldberg first described the information shared on the group chat as “war plans,” but the actual plans, Trump world now says, merely involved a military strike against a designated foreign enemy. “The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans,’” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed, sharing the headline of an Atlantic story describing “attack plans.”

[Tom Nichols: The Trump team’s denials are laughable]

If you describe them as attack plans, they cannot be war plans. We have never been at war with the Houthis, as Big Brother might say. The distinction between these terms is new enough that Trump himself wrote, when he touted the strike, “Our brave Warfighters are right now carrying out aerial attacks on the terrorists’ bases, leaders, and missile defenses to protect American shipping, air, and naval assets, and to restore Navigational Freedom.” Perhaps he should delete this message and replace the reference to “brave Warfighters” with “brave attackfighters.”

To be generous to the White House, though, administration officials may not envision the conflict with the Houthis in terms of war. War is something they may be able to imagine only in a domestic context. Chamberlain is fond of calling the Trump-era style of political combat “wartime conservatism.” Explaining why The Atlantic’s story could not be legitimated by firing anyone for the irresponsible behavior it exposed, he posted, “Wartime conservatism means your adversaries get no scapegoats and no scalps.” No war but culture war.