‘Crisis’: Text sends Donald Trump over the edge

OPINION

During World War Two there was a saying: Loose lips sink ships.

Do you think that US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth has heard that phrase before?

Secretary Hegseth, who until two months ago was a weekend breakfast TV host, has just proven himself to be one of the truly great dumb-dumbs of modern life by handing us the first really monumental cock-up of the second Trump presidency.

This week, it was revealed that The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg had been accidentally added to a group chat (via the Signal app) including pretty much every senior member of the Trump administration – aside from the President himself – where they shared war plans and emojis.

Bomb emoji. Red-faced emoji.

Whoopsie doodle.

It could be a real tipping point.

This could be the first el scandalo that has some of those whatcha me-call-its.

Consequences.

For nearly a decade now, no matter the scandal, nothing has affected Mr Trump’s standing with his tireless army of supporters, the former reality show host like a sort of greased up duck: everything has simply slipped off his back.

However, unlike the 199 Trump scandals that have come before it, Chatgate is a firestorm that the MAGA-verse – and anyone between the ages of three and 103 – can immediately and simply get: War plans put in a group chat. The end.

Already, this has caused genuine mass public anger, with 74 per cent of Americans, including 60 per cent of Republicans, saying the war plans fiasco was a very or somewhat serious problem, according to YouGov polling.

Trump & co have been unmasked for all to see as utter dimwits and certifiable drongos.

Using Signal was only “a few steps above leaving a copy of your war plan at the Chinese Embassy”, one Washington defence expert told Politico.

There have also reportedly been conversations among national security experts whether such handling of defence information might have violated the Espionage Act.

The people from the chat with the most egg on their faces?

National security adviser Mike Waltz who added, god knows how, Mr Goldberg to the group and Mr Hegseth, who shared the specific details of the US’ bombing of Yemen on March 15.

Mr Hegseth’s messages were sent 31 minutes before American warplanes took off and two hours and one minute before the Yemen bombing raid began, and clearly endangered the military involved.

“You’re going to kill somebody,” one air force pilot told The New York Times.

And that’s what sets the Yemen chat mess apart – it’s a perfectly straightforward s**tshow.

Their unparalleled buffoonery could have killed military personnel, and Americans can immediately understand that.

Mr Waltz and Mr Hegseth might have just achieved what Stormy Daniels and reams of dogged prosecutors and Democrats have largely failed to do until now – to dent Mr Trump’s adamantium armour of a reputation among his followers.

For people in the US to fully appreciate the severity of the situation, they don’t have to be someone with an active New York Times subscription and be willing to wade into the finer points of campaign finance laws (Mr Trump’s criminal payment to Stormy Daniels) or care about him inflating the value of his real estate holdings or believe he should not have nicked classified documents from the White House and quite literally stored them in the Mar-a-Lago loos.

This is the first great crisis that might actually stick to Mr Trump, and which might penetrate the craniums of his base.

Because everyone from diehard MAGA loyalists with ‘Mar-a-Lago Or Bust’ tattooed on their bottoms to a dumbfounded Kamala Harris at her undisclosed location (restorative gong retreat with optional valium smoothies?) can immediately see just how wrong this is.

It doesn’t get any more devastatingly and blatantly unpatriotic than to risk the brave men and women of the armed services.

What next? Mr Hegseth hunting American bald eagles for sport or bad mouthing apple pie?

What further sets this fiasco apart from the procession of crises that preceded it is that there is no weaselling out of it.

There is no dodging of who did what and when, because Mr Goldberg has the screenshots. Literally.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had to meet Deepthroat in a murky DC parking garage to bring down President Richard Nixon; Goldberg just had to casually pick up his phone every time it went ding, ding, ding.

He actually found out the US was about to bomb Yemen when his phone pinged while he was sitting in his car in a supermarket parking lot.

Republicans also look like exquisite hypocrites after having mounted the “lock her up” campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016 over her use of an unsecured personal email server.

Now they have been caught with their pants around their ankles doing nearly exactly the same thing.

“Their personal phones are all hackable, and it’s highly likely that foreign intelligence services are sitting on their phones watching them type the s**t out,” a former White House official told Politico.

“It is safe to say that anybody in uniform would be court martialled for this.”

One member of the chat was actually in Moscow meeting with Vladimir Putin at the time the messages were flying around.

This disaster comes at a shaky point for the President, whose approval ratings have been falling as Americans turn on him for having unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has been slashing and burning sections of government like a carving knife-wielding Freddy Kruger having a bad day.

Mr Trump’s numbers have also been affected by the fact that, despite his repeated campaign promises that he would whip out his magic wand and somehow fix grocery prices and cost of living pressures on “day one”, he has failed to actually do what he promised.

He has not even lazily attempted to have a bit of a crack at it, because his plate has been full, shilling for Tesla on the White House front lawn like a used Mazda salesman trying to make his quota.

Let me do as Mike Waltz actually did and simply sum things up with a few emojis.

Laughing emoji. Fire(d) emoji. Trump & co? They’ve finally been hit with smiling poo emoji.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles