You’ve got to be kidding
The thing about political news is that it doesn’t take days off – especially when idiots are in charge. Yesterday was a travel day for me, but it was also the biggest day yet in Donald Trump’s Pete Hegseth scandal – wait, Pete Hegseth’s Mike Waltz scandal? – it’s difficult to figure out who to name a scandal after when pretty much every key person in the regime was dumb enough to be involved.
In any case, even as the scandal, and attempted coverup, and subsequent attempted coverup of the failed initial coverup were all continuing to unfold yesterday, I was busy trying to cover it all while traveling. At one point yesterday morning I noticed that Trump hadn’t posted anything on Truth Social in fourteen hours, so I wrote an article about it. I quipped that Trump’s babysitters had probably taken his phone away for fear he’d begin talking about Hannibal Lecter.
Seven minutes after I posted that article, Trump’s babysitters threw a post onto his Truth Social page. Coincidence? Who knows. But then yesterday afternoon Trump held a press conference and – you guessed it – started talking about Hannibal Lecter. Sometimes I think these people are just screwing with me.
We still don’t know where this is headed. It appears that Hegseth, Waltz, JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe and others all committed felonies just by participating in the chat. Some of these people also appear to have committed subsequent felonies by lying to Congress about what was being discussed in the chat. Not that the Trump DOJ is going to prosecute any of these people, of course. But this is a criminal scandal. It also happens to be a ratings-friendly scandal because of how absurd it is, which means the media is going to keep running with it for as long as it can – especially with Trump and his people continuing to make it worse every time they open their mouths.
So this is all going somewhere. Trump could probably have made it go away by now, simply by forcing Hegseth and/or Waltz to resign. But he’s not going to do that as soon as he should have, because he’s too far gone to understand that he needs to do that. Maybe Trump’s babysitters will eventually convince him to do it once he gets tired of hearing about the scandal. But given that some of the people involved in this scandal are Trump’s babysitters, who would even tell him to fire whom?
So this scandal will drag on. And on. And on. Last night German news outlet Der Spiegel reported that the contact data for some of the Signal chat participants has been found publicly available online. This means that people other than the one Atlantic reporter may have had access to the war plans that Trump’s people were chatting about. It also appears that at least one of the Trump people in the chat was inside the Kremlin at the time, which means Putin’s people were certainly eavesdropping on the whole thing.
In other words, there are a lot more shoes to drop in this scandal. This is now day four? Five? Sorry, the travel has me wondering what day it is. But in politics, a scandal is considered out of control if it’s still being widely talked about by day three. We’re way past that now. And it’ll only get uglier. This is the kind of scandal that can keep a presidential administration from being able to carry out most of what it wants to do. In that regard it feels like we may finally be starting to gain the upper hand.
