MAGA hypocrisy in mishandling classified intel
In a stunning display of incompetence, Trump’s national security team inadvertently shared classified war plans for Yemen with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally added him to a Signal group chat where they discussed operational details for a mission executed days later.
But let’s be clear: their careless chatter about war plans is no worse than Trump’s own mishandling of nuclear secrets, for which he was sensationally indicted. Lest we forget, he rode into the White House in 2016 on self-righteous rhetoric about Hillary’s private email server. Never mind that Republicans spent years investigating her and found no mishandling of classified information.
Simply put, this strain of MAGA incompetence spreads from the top down. So even Trump would be too self-conscious to fire anyone over this. But iPINIONS expects him to deflect blame onto Goldberg, who showed more care in reporting the breach than they did in handling the classified intel.
Not to mention that this incident makes Trump look far more clueless than Biden ever did. After all, Trump wasn’t just AWOL on this chat, but claimed “I know nothing” hours after the story broke.
Offending and losing the trust of allies
But nobody should be surprised. That’s why the key takeaway is that the transcript of their chat should dispel any illusion among Europeans that the US will continue to bear the lion’s share of the NATO burden.
So, kudos to Germany’s chancellor-elect, Friedrich Merz, for assuming the role as the new leader of the free world. He has already pushed the Bundestag to approve a €500 billion defense package — part of his plan to make Europe as formidable a stand-alone military power as the US or China.
Of course, MAGA’s “America First” doesn’t mean isolation — as its imperial threats toward Greenland make clear. It means going it alone. And it’s about to get very lonely. After all, the irony is that the transcript shows these nincompoops mocking Europeans as pathetic freeloaders. Yet Europeans have every reason to see America as no longer a reliable or trustworthy ally.
Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA minions think they can gaslight everyone else the way they gaslight their ignorant and willfully uninformed Republican supporters. But America’s allies are thinking they’d be fools to trust Trump’s national security team with the time of day.
Trump’s Cabinet shows DEI really means ‘didn’t earn it’
This is what happens when a president fills his Cabinet with White entitled incompetents (WEI) – who everyone knows didn’t earn it (DEI). But their positions say more about Trump’s narcissism than their incompetence. Because this breach exposes how he prizes loyalty to him even above national security.
And you can bet this was not the only breach. Indeed, adversaries like China and Russia may be among the most dismayed by this revelation. After all, the inadvertent exposure has probably compromised their clandestine access to US intelligence directly from the horse’s mouth.
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Monday, at 8:34 pm
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