Its response to the embarrassing spectacle revealed by Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg gripped Washington on Tuesday. An increasingly aggressive tone and the lack of resignations among top national security officials suggested the plan is to give no inch and to turn the storm into another example of the second Trump presidency’s capacity to defy the constraints that normally apply.
In a divided nation hardly fixated on air strikes on Iran-backed Houthi militants, and as conservative media and GOP lawmakers run interference, political impact from the furor may be minimal.
But the substance of the group chat, its impact on the reputation of Trump’s top national security aides and several important developments in US foreign policy that are unfolding as it plays out offer important insights into how the administration sees the world and how it will wield American power.
Trump’s foreign policy heavy hitters are left embarrassed
Trump is straining the Atlantic alliance to the breaking point; he wants to end the Ukraine war and to bring peace and geopolitical realignment to the Middle East; he aims to combat superpower China; and he is threatening territorial expansion in the Western hemisphere. But his crack foreign policy team apparently didn’t know enough not to discuss sensitive and even operational details of military strikes on their mobile devices, which are vulnerable to foreign intelligence agencies. Trump prioritized a telegenic appearance and ultra-loyalty over experience in his Cabinet picks. And this doesn’t seem like the kind of crew with the aptitude to defuse world crises.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth came across in the published chats just as might be expected for a TV anchor with negligible top-level national security experience. His boast that “we are currently clean on OPSEC (operational security)” is now a cringing metaphor for his greenness in his new job. And a post-strike round of clenched fist emojis and team self-congratulation in the Signal app seemed more appropriate for high schoolers than hardened national security operatives.
The standing of national security adviser Mike Waltz, who reportedly added Atlantic editor-in-chief Goldberg to the chat, may have been irretrievably damaged. Waltz, a decorated Green Beret, comes across in his books as a serious national security thinker who appreciates US allies thanks to the especially collaborative mission of his special forces unit and harrowing battlefield experiences. His selection by Trump was greeted by the foreign policy community in Washington with some relief.
The president may have warmly praised Waltz on Tuesday, but he’s notoriously fickle with top subordinates. Characteristically, Trump used Waltz’s embarrassment to extract a public show of loyalty and adulation – in the mold of ruthless authoritarian leaders that he most admires. “There’s a lot of journalists in this city who have made big names for themselves making up lies about this president – whether it’s the ‘Russia hoax,’ or making up lies about Gold Star families,” Waltz said on camera.
Trump’s White House communications director also launched an attack on Goldberg – even though the journalist’s selective publication of sensitive details showed more circumspection than Trump’s national security aides. Steven Cheung warned on X of a “Signal hoax outrage” and a “witch hunt,” alleging a conspiracy by the national security “establishment community” determined to bring Trump down.
This administration really despises Europe
European leaders took the hint from the first two months of the new Trump administration that the transatlantic alliance is over – at least by comparison with the unshakeable bond between United States and the continent for 80 years. The private vitriol shown to US allies in the Signal chat when officials thought they couldn’t be overheard suggests the breach is even more serious than it seemed.
“I just hate bailing Europe out again,” JD Vance wrote in. The vice president’s disdain for transatlantic allies shone through in the zeal he brought to his speech lacerating their political culture at the Munich Security Conference last month. And he’s likely to irk them again this week after announcing he’ll join his wife Usha on a trip to Greenland – which Trump is vowing to annex.
In the group chat, Hegseth seeks to ingratiate himself with the vice president, saying he thinks that European freeloading is “PATHETIC.” And a chat member identified as “SM” – presumably, Trump’s top adviser Stephen Miller – talks about forcing Europe to “remunerate” the US for the cost of strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen. This appears to be a reference to the White House view that reopening shipping lanes in the Red Sea would benefit Europe’s economy more than America’s.
This may be true, but requiring allies to pay for air strikes they weren’t consulted about is a bizarre way of conducting foreign policy, even for an administration as transactional as this one. And Washington is hardly acting against Yemen-based Houthis out of altruism toward Europe – it’s mostly sending a message to the militants’ sponsors in Iran and to protect Israel.
The key takeaway for Europe from the chats is that antipathy toward the continent runs far deeper than Trump’s obsessions with NATO spending and trade deficits. Officials with the president’s ear are more hostile than he is.
Russia is resisting Trump’s bid for a swift end to the Ukraine war
The uproar in Washington over the group chat distracted attention from the meager takeaways from the administration’s talks in Saudi Arabia aimed at ending the Ukraine war. The White House highlighted what it claimed was an agreement involving Russia and Ukraine to “eliminate” the use of force in the Black Sea. But Moscow imposed prohibitive conditions, including the lifting of restrictions on its market access for agricultural and fertilizer exports and curbs on its banks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of trying to deceive US mediators and twisting the agreements. And Washington may not be able to deliver on Russia’s demand for concessions: European states have warned against lifting key sanctions on the Kremlin until a full ceasefire has been agreed.
The slow negotiations, which look nothing like the swift march to a peace deal Trump keeps promising, are consistent with Moscow’s classic approach. This is what Zelensky warned him about during a recent meeting in the Oval Office, causing the president and Vance to erupt in fury. Painful and incremental progress will only fuel the impression that Russia has no intention of ending a war in which its troops are making slow progress.
“The Russians are extremely skilled at using negotiation processes as a smokescreen for carrying on with their military ambitions,” Samir Puri, a former ceasefire monitor in Ukraine, told CNN’s Audie Cornish on “CNN This Morning” on Monday. “They fight and they talk at the same time,” said Puri, now director of the Centre for Global Governance and Security at Chatham House in London.
The Trump administration has decided that US interests are best served by a quick halt to the war, which it fears could erupt into a third world war. Trump was empowered to make his move toward negotiating a ceasefire by his election victory and his constitutional prerogatives over foreign policy. But his administration’s behavior is nevertheless raising concerns over its motives in the talks, not least because of the way that Trump’s envoy to the talks, Steve Witkoff – another official on the notorious Signal chat – has been reading from the Kremlin script about seized regions in eastern Ukraine since meeting President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
A rising drumbeat of rhetoric about Mexico’s cartels
It was a coincidence that two other members of the Signal gang, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, were set to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday. Neither official emerged unscathed from an excruciating session, but Gabbard especially struggled to provide credible answers to Democratic senators furious about the administration’s cavalier attitude to sensitive information.
But her appearance may be most remembered for a major shift in US foreign policy. The intelligence community’s annual worldwide threat assessment led for the first time with a warning that transnational criminals, terrorists and other non-state actors pose a major danger to the homeland and are producing and trafficking vast quantities of drugs. The assessment brings the covert agencies in line with Trump’s political views and warnings that undocumented immigration over the southern border represents a major national crisis.
Gabbard testified that drugs cartels and criminal gangs “most immediately and directly” threaten the US and the well-being of its people. She highlighted Mexico-based transnational criminal organizations as the main suppliers of illicit fentanyl to the US market and warned of the threat from cartels promoting human trafficking and criminal groups that engage in extortion, weapons, and human smuggling.
So what does this mean? Intensifying administration rhetoric on Mexico is not occurring in a vacuum. Since Trump’s return to office, the US military has stepped up surveillance of Mexican drug cartels, with sophisticated spy planes flying at least 18 missions over the southwestern US and in international airspace around the Baja peninsula, CNN has reported. Her remarks Tuesday are likely to fuel speculation about the administration’s willingness to take military action against the cartels.
Trump’s claims on Canada undermined
Gabbard’s testimony also undermined Trump’s claims that Canada is a major source of fentanyl coming into the United States – which is a prime justification for his tariff threats.
New Mexico Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich pointed out that the annual threat assessment didn’t mention fentanyl coming through Canada. Gabbard replied, “The focus in my opening and the ATA was really to focus on the most extreme threats in that area, and our assessment is that the most extreme threat related to fentanyl continues to come from and through Mexico.” Heinrich then noted that less than 1% of the synthetic drug entering the US comes over the country’s northern border.
Which raises the question of why Trump has wrecked Washington’s relations with one of its oldest and closest friends largely over a threat that barely exists.
