Republished with permission from Common Dreams, by Abby Zimet

Because only the best people, the latest clusterfuck by “an unbelievable cocktail of incompetence and illegality” abetted a historic security leak wherein “national security” officials discussed classified military plans for airstrikes in Yemen on an unsecured messaging app that oops included a journalist. The response from our steadfast commander-in-chief, who was too busy with Greenland, George Clooney, and pudgy portraits to know about it: “You’re saying they had what?” Still, they’re sending us angels!

The news of “one of the most stunning breaches of military intelligence in history” by the “but-her-emails” party came from Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, in a piece titled, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans” (Gift link here). “The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. Eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen,” it begins.“I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming (because) Pete Hegseth had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.” Goldberg says the backstory began 10 days ago, with a connection request on the open-source app Signal, known for disappearing messages, from Trump National Insecurity adviser “Michael Walz.” Given Trump’s earlier attacks on Goldberg as “a guy named Goldberg” who runs “a failing magazine”—his crime: calling the famed “suckers and losers” jab chilling and historically illiterate”—Goldberg figured it was a troll seeking to “somehow entrap me.”

But in the next few days the messages kept coming from top officials’ accounts: Vance, Gabbard, Rubio, Hegseth, Nazi Stephen Miller, CIA head John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who was evidently in Moscow at the time but def didn’t connect his phone to the Kremlin’s guest WIFI network, where Signal is easily accessed. The messages ranged from specific plans from Walz—“Team—establishing a principles (sic) group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours” with deputy Alex Wong “pulling together a tiger team” to follow up from “meeting in the Sit Room”—to random Europe-bashing from Drunk Pete to JD: “I fully share your loathing of European free loading. It’s PATHETIC.” All told, the Military Timessays the content revealed “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing” On March 15, Trump bombed Yemen, citing the Iran-backed terrorist group’s attacks on international shipping routes over Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“Republicans, as everyone knows, are careful stewards of America’s security,” notes Jeff Tiedrich, and would never do anything as “clownfuckingly insane” as texting war plans to each other in such detail they even include the weather forecast over a phone app,” never mind inadvertently including a journalist in the discussion or, say, “absconding with dozens of boxes of classified documents, lying about having them, refusing to return them, hiding them, bragging about their contents to golf cronies, waving them in the faces of randos, scrawling to-do lists on them (and) then stashing them in the unspeakably ugly shitter of their vermin-infested Florida golf motel.”

Still, in a mind-blowing miracle of improbable spin, the White House tried to defend the historic, blundering, “final nail in the but-her-emails coffin” by claiming the leak was “a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials” who, added Fox News, “after years of secrecy and incompetence,” make us proud “these are the leaders making these decisions in America.” A succinct Hillary Clinton: “You have got to be kidding me.”

The latest evidence the regime is “a clown car driving against traffic on the interstate of leadership” was met with outrage, including among the GOP’s own members and even some at the top: “Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing—Mike Waltz is a fucking idiot.” The swift consensus: “Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels—and certainly not to those without security clearances. Period.” Also, “Fubar”—”fucked up beyond all recognition” and, “We knew it was amateur hour, but good grief.” Much of the rage was aimed at fascist, smirky, erratic, wildly unqualified Pete Hegseth, who’s spent his brief reign erasing black, brown and female military history and braying about “accountability”; before that, he liked to critique Biden for handling classified info “flippantly” and blast Hillary—”Hey, this you?”—for not being in jail.

VoteVets on Pete: “Gross incompetence.” One critic deemed him “an incompetent, xenophobic, reckless, unprofessional, unserious, ignorant, war- mongering moron. What a prick,” thus rendering especially surreal the thread’s plaudits: “Good job, Pete!” “Powerful start!”

Along with past, smug hypocrisies recalled online—Marco in 2016: “Nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton. We’re gonna hold people accountable” yada yada—were nods to the fact that no victims of Trump/DOGE incompetence, bigotry and greed, among thousands of “DEI” hires, veterans’ caregivers, medical researchers et al fired, ever leaked war plans.

On the Cabinet’s confederacy of dunces: “Thank goodness they’re all White men so we know they didn’t really do anything wrong.” And there are the crimes. By law, government communications must be archived; use of unsecured Signal, which erases content and proof of its existence, was likely an illegal effort to avoid government channels and the prying eyes of Congress—”a conspiracy of the highest magnitude.”

The use of Signal also likely violated the Espionage Act, which sets rules for handling national security information—on approved government systems—and makes it a crime to remove such information “from its proper place of custody” (ditto). That’s without sending classified information to a journalist without clearance and not noticing it.

All told, the “epic fuck-up” was blasted as “a stunning breach of security” and “historic mishandling of classified information” that would end any officer’s career with criminal charges. Eric Swalwell urged all on the thread to be fired: “Their idiocy just put a giant target on America. We are not safe.” Mike Young saw “a neon sign of (Trump’s) utter contempt for competence, security, and the American people,” from slashing people’s rights to putting troops at risk. Pete Buttigieg called it “the highest level of fuck-up imaginable” by miscreants who “claim to care about competence and merit. These are not serious people.”

Jared Moskowitz, with an assist from Jamie Raskin, went for trolling: He held up a sign with three emojis—fist, flag, fire—Mike Waltz sent on Signal to celebrate the Yemen strikes. Rather than a speech, he said, “When we do things where we agree, I just hold this up. When we’re in like a chat with friends, right? About, like, where we’re dropping missiles…..And this will tell you I think it’s good.” Later, he took to social media to use the emoji combo to like a possible My Cousin Vinny sequel and a cat TikTok.

The GOP, meanwhile, deflected and downplayed. Sean Hannity whined a “media mob” is “obsessed with an accidentally leaked text,” hence their “phony outrage.” Brit Hume conceded it was “a major leak” but added, “Fortunately, it was leaked to an American citizen,” albeit a Jew, which might not count. Mike Walz told Laura Ingraham he’s “not a conspiracy theorist,” but “of all the people out there, somehow this guy (Goldberg) who has lied about the president, the bottom scum of journalists (is) the one that somehow gets on somebody’s contact.”

And their leader, either actually dumb or playing dumb when asked about it, insisted, “I don’t know anything about this,” followed by the obligatory smear: “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. It’s, to me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business…But I know nothing about it. You’re saying that they had what?” Later, he said the fiasco was “the only glitch” in “two perfect months,” and “not a serious one,” and besides Walz, “a good man,” had “learned a lesson.” Whew. We feel better already, knowing his “national security” team and the rest of Freedonia is on the job.

We’re also reassured knowing that, even though he might sometimes forget who he’s bombing when, he’s busy making America great again. Having randomly disappeared with no evidence or due process over 200 mostly innocent Venezuelans for having tattoos to be tortured in an El Salvador prison—an act yet another judge eviscerated with, “Nazis got better treatment”—his lawyers are invoking the “state secrets” privilege to refuse to provide a D.C. judge with information about their victims. Insisting “no further information will be provided,” they cite Trump’s absolute authority to remove “designated terrorists participating in a state-sponsored invasion of the United States,” despite multiple intelligence documents, family claims, news reports, and pieces of evidence that contradict their allegations.

For good measure, he also abolished all the Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights and detention abuse watchdogs—basically, everyone charged with providing oversight of the treatment of people by the department’s various policing agencies—in the worthy name of his growing authoritarianism.

In more unintended consequences of both his and DOGE’s tyranny, the IRS estimates that DOGE-driven disruptions are on track to reduce tax receipts by more than $500 billion for non-discretionary funding, which means most government functions except the military and safety net services like Social Security and Medicare. In other words, in about eight weeks, DOGE has managed to “lose the U.S. government—more or less light on fire—more than half of what goes to most of the stuff we think of as the government.”

Between DOGE and ICE, they’re also inadvertently creating a national labor shortage so critical that Florida lawmakers are considering loosening child labor laws to fill the gap; their proposed new law would let children as young as 14 work overnight shifts on school days, a move that Gov. Ron DeFascist supports. “Yes, we had people that left—aka were brutally deported—but you’re also able to hire other (imaginary) people,” he says. “And what’s wrong with expecting our young people to be working part-time now? I mean, that’s how it used to be when I was growing up.”

Along with GOP efforts to return children to “clean” coal mines, they’re also looking for new places to exploit. This week, Usha Vance, wife to history’s most disliked VP, will visit Greenland for a pricey photo-op, a move blasted by P.M. Mute Egede as a “provocation (to) demonstrate power over us,” which is why he won’t meet with her. Trump said they invited her; they didn’t, which is clear from their new red hats: “Make America Go Away.” (Canada reportedly wants them, too.)

Now J.D. says he’s also going “to reinvigorate the security of the people of Greenland- I didn’t want her to have all that fun by herself”—which will piss them off more: “Trump needs to get the difference between ‘yours’ and ‘mine.'” He also has “Danish Viking blood boiling,” with Denmark leading a growing movement in Europe to boycott U.S. goods. Danes are skipping U.S. beer, popcorn, Pringles, Oreos, Pepsi, Colgate, ketchup, power tools, California wine, and Tesla, choosing E.U.-made options and buying more champagne. One said that after he bought dates from Iran, he was shocked to realize, “I now perceive the United States as a greater threat than Iran.”

At home, Trump is still diligently grifting, whining, lying and lashing out. For the first time in 150 years, he’s turned the White House annual Easter Egg Roll into a branding opportunity, offering corporate sponsorships to buy $200,000 worth of goodwill with the other fat cats and, “Be a part of history.” The “petty, insecure baby” and “sensitive snowflake” is also haranguing “radically left” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to take down a chubby, “purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before” (except all the other times) Trump portrait, where aides once put up a prank Putin one; Trump’s was commissioned by a GOP admirer, but he says “many people” have written to complain. Uh huh.

Finally, the leader of the free world took time out from his onerous schedule to slam George Clooney as “a ‘Second Rate Movie Star’ who never came close to making a great movie” after Clooney blasted his regime for bullying the media, and them in turn for buckling under the pressure. “What does Clooney know about anything?” Trump sneered. “(He) should go back to television.” Clooney’s response: “I will if he does.”

Back in the grown-up world, his lackeys still struggle to shake off the Signal scandal, toeing the “No classified material was sent to the thread” line with their usual class, insight, mud-slinging and whataboutism. “Jeffrey Goldberg is well-known for his sensationalist spin,” said Barbie Press Secretary, insisting we’re all good “thanks to the strong and decisive leadership of, you know. In a seething, palpably furious response to reporters, a testy Pete Hegseth—nah, he’s not a loose cannon—echoed her: “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly-discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of pedaling hoaxes…Nobody was texting war plans.”

The next day, still testy: “Nobody’s texting war plans. I know exactly what I’m doing.” Half of America noted the White House already confirmed the text chain was authentic, all Goldberg has to do is release the text (which he’s reportedly mulling doing), Pete is “a fucking liar,” also a national security risk who should be fired. On Tuesday, his accomplices squirmed, lied and prevaricated before Congress, a sordid show of clowns and bunglers.

But despite fighting the Quakers, the Baptists, the Lutherans, the Catholics and most of the world, they still claim God on their side. Now, televangelist, spiritual adviser, “Special Government Employee” and head of White House Faith Office Paula White is offering a special Passover/Easter deal. For just $1,000, she will get us seven supernatural blessings. The best: “God will assign an angel to you.” Ooh, Pete can get one! God will also Be an enemy to your enemies, give you prosperity, and give you a special year of blessing.

Okay, so other evangelicals call her a “spiritual wolf” and “false teacher leading people to Hell”; one skeptic says, “There’s got to be a special place in hell for this whore”; her 2020 speech to elect Trump was a tad intense—”Strike, strike, strike, I hear a sound of an abundance of rain, victory, victory, victory, angels are coming from Africa”; and she didcherry-pick Exodus 23, leaving out, “Do not spread false reports, Do not deny justice to your poor people, Do not accept a bribe, Do not oppress a foreigner. Still, if you act now, you’ll also get a Waterford crystal cross, regularly $100, now $30% off. But for only the best people.

Presidential spiritual adviser Paula White is currently leading an impassioned prayer service in an effort to secure Trump's reelection. pic.twitter.com/hCSRh84d6g

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) November 5, 2020

Update: Whoa, The Atlantic went there. Excellent.