It’s now Friday and people are laying odds on whether Mike Waltz goes under the bus or Pete Hegseth. Or maybe neither. Trump world is not equipped to deal with a scandal of this magnitude because scandal bud-nipping requires a measure of accountability. And Trump can’t do that. It’s not in the MAGA ethos. Unfortunately, this scandal has grown some legs. A recent poll shows that not only a majority of Americans are worried about SignalGate but a majority of Republicans and Independents, in addition to the Democrats, believe something very serious happened. On top of that, inside the GOP, they are “ripshit behind the scenes” to quote Rick Wilson.
That is catastrophic, right there. So Trump has to do something because this scandal is not going to go away until he or somebody in his cabinet does something decisive. So the watchword today is which choice will Trump Make:two choices: nip this in the bud or let it get worse? Which will Trump choose?
The mood at the Pentagon is savage, and Hegseth is now in a lion’s den from which vastly better men have been torn to shreds. Senior leadership in the JCS and at the service level will obey lawful orders, but there are a million ways in which Bully Boy Pete is about to get fucked by trained professionals.
Senior Senate Republicans are ripshit behind the scenes, of course. A source tells me Lindsey Graham’s private meltdown rattled the White House even Trump’s complacency. They thought he’d be fluffing Trump till the heat death of the universe. Even the most loyal MAGA foot soldiers are pissed.
And let’s be honest: most of the loudest dopes in that Signal chat don’t even run the asylum. One comes away from this chat…less than overwhelmed.
J.D. Vance emerges from the leaks like your least-favorite seminar kid: a whiny, pseudo-intellectual “but ackshually…” Yale dorm-room bullshitter cosplaying pinging the Thiel Talking Points. His McKinsey-brained concerns were dismissed with the derision they deserve by his fellow criminals in the illegal Signal chat.
Pete Hegseth, as Tim Miller aptly put it, is a try-hard.
SECDRUNK is every D.C. cocktail party blowhard rolled into one: always in the know, always whispering, “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you—unless it gets me laid.” Mike Waltz is so out of his depth you’d need a bathyscaphe to find him. And Stephen Miller, the Nosferatu of the West Wing, lurks in the shadows, clearly pulling the strings.
This mess is entirely their own doing. No one tricked them into exposing national security secrets in a group chat. Jeffrey Goldberg didn’t hack his way in.
And no matter how hard KKKaroline Leavitt screams into the void, this isn’t just another media hit job. The damage is real, and they’re bleeding out in public.
The cancerous, cultish refusal to reckon with the truth is devouring them from the inside.
The politics? Abysmal.
The optics? Nuclear.
The numbers? Brutal.Sixty percent of Republicans say Signalgate is a very or somewhat serious problem for Trump. Seventy-four percent of all Americans agree.
That’s why Karoline Leavitt spent all week in high-decibel meltdown mode. That’s why Trump’s been stammering like a Sterno drunk with rando Rumble streamers and trying to explain Signal vs. signal. That’s why the right-wing media machine can’t decide whether to scream FAKE NEWS or pretend it never happened.
But the can’t correct it. They won’t correct it. They’ll never learn, never improve, and never stop doing the wrong thing, 100% of the time.
And they haven’t even hit the bottom yet.
The question then becomes how low can this go? Unlike Watergate, or Bill Clinton’s dalliance with his intern, there’s not even an attempt at a cover up. It’s all DARVO, Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim Offense. Unfortunately, the fact that the journalist has written about Trump before and is deemed “Trump-hating” and his wife once worked for Hillary Clinton, is not the magic incantation that those words were originally thought to be. There are cold, hard facts here.
Let’s see if Waltz is still working by the end of the day. There’s a 50/50 chance he will be still. Trump initially blamed an underling on Waltz’s staff for the snafu but Waltz admitted to Laura Ingraham that it was his doing, putting Goldberg on the contact list. So there goes that excuse. And Hegseth may hang on, he most probably will, but he will now be eaten alive at the Pentagon, is my best guess. I agree with Rick Wilson. And this is Hegseth’s mulligan. His next screw up he gets no sympathy, no wiggle room. He’s backed into a corner. And he did it to himself and in less than 60 days on the job.
That’s some record. He was sworn in January 25 and he had a bona fide shitstorm raging by mid-March. This is a military record that will take some time to break. Bravo, Pete. You have made history in military lore. Not just any man or woman can do that, but you did. And not for valor, as is usually the case when someone in the military distinguishes themselves, but for rank incompetence and hubris. Your name will live on as a cautionary tale to future generations. You put our pilots in grave danger. That will not be forgotten. Congrats. Wear your ignominy well.
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Hey…news travels slowly to the back of the plane…are you saying neither the pilot or co-pilot has ANY experience in flying a plane? What’d you say? We’re armed with nukes? Oh that’s phucking great. Excuse me…stewardess…is it too late to order a stiff drink? I need enough substance assistance to carry me to the scene of the crash. Sober? That passed optional long ago.
Scott, you are awesome! (When are you going to come visit me again?)
Personally, I love this latest story about wifey Hegseth accompanying Pete places she shouldn’t be, doesn’t have a reason to be, nor a security clearance to be — not that trivia such as security clearances have much of an impact on this crowd.
The right-wing media machine can’t decide whether to scream FAKE NEWS or pretend it never happened.
Have you checked out the FUX news website recently? Nada, zip, zilch…never happened.
Meanwhile over at Social Security HQ: THEY ARE STEALING YOUR MONEY.
The right-wing media machine may hide, but it *can* be found. Sorry, kiddies, this really happened.
I’m having a fit about Social Security. I, and people I know, depend on that. I get one deposited and immediately start worrying about the next one.
It’s DARVO, Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim Offense. The problem is not Hegseth and Waltz, they’re perfect, it’s the Atlantic making up stories — that happen to have loads of evidence to prove that they’re true. Gaslight. Pure gaslighting.
From the day Hegseth was nominatewd he wasn’t exactly “Man most likely to succeed.”
Musk basically bought off Joni Ernst. He was prepared to have her primaried if she didn’t play ball. And who knows who else he threatened with the same thing?
I wasn’t entirely sure is you were going to fill in those asterisks with “fucked” or “FRAGGED”. He is altogether too close to deserving it. He clearly does not give a crap about our servicemembers.
Hegseth may wish he was fragged. That’s at least a fast death, if a grenade hits you or some such. The people at the Pentagon who are career professionals and know which way is up are not going to simply take orders and be docile. At least that is not what I’m getting from everything I read. Hegseth hung himself 60 days into the job. Less, actually. He was confirmed by Vance breaking a tie vote on January 25 and then he got this Signal snafu going on March 11-15.
The headline for this article made me wonder if the left has someone, or several someones, that could fill the role of a progressive dirty trickster like Roger Stone. If we do, it’s time to get them busy, past time.
I know. No matter the revelation, there’s a certain percentage of republican voters that will remain steadfast, we call them maga. But if the above graph tells me anything, it’s that over half of them are reachable, that a fair number may be wondering if they made a terrible mistake last November. The recent Pennsylvania election tells me that too!
The majority of republican voters may not be down with everything the democratic party stands for, but they’re even less down with madness and incompetence.