Our Country is Run By Idiots

Word of the day: Idiocracy

We’re heading into the week with what may be the most embarrassing government operational security failure in modern history.

Michael Waltz, the national security advisor, created a group chat on Signal—a publicly available app with no secure channels—where senior officials casually discussed plans for a military strike on Houthi targets in Yemen.

Michael Waltz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, John Ratcliffe.

All are senior White House officials or Cabinet members, each holding top-level security clearance—and each of them should be removed from office immediately.

If discussing classified, need-to-know war plans on an unsecured app set to delete messages after a week wasn’t already a fireable offense, accidentally including a civilian—who happens to be The Atlantic’s editor in chief—absolutely should be.

This isn’t espionage. It’s stupidity. And it’s the clearest example yet of how unserious this administration is, how little it values both governance and the responsibilities of government.

When asked about the leaks, William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, didn’t promise accountability or improved protocols. Instead, he confirmed the validity and clarified that despite the screenshots showing Vance saying, “I think we are making a mistake,” the vice president remains fully aligned with the president.

White House spokesperson Steven Cheung, meanwhile, has launched straight into the Trump playbook: deny, deny, deny.

Everything that challenges Donald Trump becomes a “witch hunt.” It was a witch hunt when Russian disinformation campaigns targeted Hillary Clinton to benefit Trump’s 2016 campaign. It was a witch hunt when Trump flushed documents down a toilet at Mar-a-Lago and refused to return classified materials.

And now, it’s a witch hunt—even after the White House confirmed the authenticity of the leaked group chat.

Pete Hegseth is leaning into tired “fake media” tropes to discredit Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist accidentally included in discussions of classified war plans. Trump, claims ignorance and insists the leaked messages had no impact on the Yemen operation—completely missing the national security threat this leak poses.

This, from the same party that once called for Hillary Clinton’s arrest over a private email server—one that never transmitted classified information.

We are watching unserious people play games with serious power. If a single wrong person had been added to that group chat—if Iranian officials had intercepted coordinates or strike details—we could be facing a trap or a full-fledged war.

The military operates on trust in the chain of command. But when the top of the chain behaves like a drunken frat boy, texting war plans with emojis, that trust collapses—not just at home, but around the world. As if America’s erratic, schizophrenic approach to tariffs hadn’t already made us a laughingstock.

Having such an unprecedented breach of security this early in the administration makes a future misfire or compromised mission not just hypothetical — but inevitable. If this had occurred in any other country, we’d be calling it a crisis and warning of an impending World War III.

Europe doesn’t trust us. Canada loathes us. And we can’t trust our own government not to CC Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on an email containing Secret Service security details. In this administration, the only real qualification is loyalty to the king.

The bar for diplomatic leadership should be higher than “try not to start World War III.”

These loyal idiots need to be removed.

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