This Is How the World Ends

Not with a bang but a text string.

Here’s the joke: Eight Trumpclowns walk into a war-planning text string with a neocon journalist. They don’t know he is there.

The punchline: No one cares.

Republicans in Congress won’t utter a peep after dining out electorally for years on the national security breach of “Hillary’s emails.”

Once, a Cabinet member using a non-government server was supposed to be such a dangerous practice that whole stadiums of Americans were chanting “lock her up.” Now, the Trump administration routinely uses the nonprofit encrypted messaging app Signal to avoid Freedom of Information requests and federal record-keeping laws.

So a clown car of Trumpers were chatting about details of national defense (really, more like offense — blowing up people and infrastructure in the Middle East) on a non-secure commercial platform. “Let’s just make sure our messaging is tight here,” Veep Vance texted at one point, “And if there are things we should do upfront to minimize risk to Saudi oil facilities, we should do it.”

Well, J.D., it doesn’t get any tighter than a Signal chatroom calling itself the Houthi PC Small Group!

Longtime neocon journalist and Atlantic Magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg, apparently accustomed to texting National Security Advisor Mike Waltz as a source, was sitting in a supermarket parking lot reading the texts in real-time. He wasn’t sure he was really online with the Secretaries of State, Defense, the Vice President, various White House potentates like Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Stephen “Nosferatu” Miller, and, ominously, unnamed “others,” until the bombs were actually falling on Yemen at 11:44 a.m. – the precise moment that Hegseth had named in the text.

That was about ten days ago. Goldberg apparently sat on this a while before deciding it was worth sharing. Yesterday, he published the story under the headline, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.” The subhead read: “U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.”

The article included the transcript of the texts. Mike Waltz had decorated his comments with an American flag, fist, and fire emojis because, like, wow, this is what real American Power looks like, man!

Within minutes of going online, Goldberg’s article was headline news in every major media outlet around the world. Shock and awe. And the great MAGA lie-making industrial complex kicked into high gear, thrumming like the biggest bitcoin farm in the universe. Every toady anchor, every conspicuous cross-wearing fem-fascist, every bot, every AI web crawler is right now activated, aimed at distracting and whatabouting the MAGA horde, which is still reliably entertained by making liberals cry.

Under normal security protocol, detailed war planning usually happens in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or SCIF, which is a government-accredited facility designed to protect classified information from unauthorized access, where sensitive compartmented information, also known as SCI, can be stored, discussed, and processed.

Of course, it was never about national security for the Republican Congressional jellyfish, any more than it was about corruption when wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on hearings about Hunter Biden’s business deals.

And now, in lockstep, they will all pretend the Trumpclowns in that Signal chat are more trustworthy than the federal judge who has asked the Trump Justice Department for details of the Gestapo-like extrajudicial midnight flights of hundreds of men to a for-profit jungle slave camp in El Salvador. While everyone’s eye was on the war-chat story, the DOJ claimed a “state secrets privilege” to deny the judge’s request, setting up another milestone in its attack on the Constitutional separation of powers.

Everywhere this morning, MAGA meatheads are manning the front lines. Testosterone-poisoned blockheads, muscles stuffed into ill-fitting suits, clamor for headspace in the online green rooms of right-wing media, waiting for a minute or two to perform the spectacular logistic acrobatics that will please the circus master.

“If you believe for one minute that Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Mike Walz, and JD Vance randomly and accidentally added this most rabidly anti-Trump journalist to a “national security” group chat… you’re definitely the mark,” posted an oaf named Joey Mannarino on Xitter. “Simply not possible. This is called media strategy and Trump is famous for stuff like this!”

Mannarino “used to work in R&B radio” and now calls himself a political strategist and commentator. Joey Da Man has 606,000 followers, 12,000 of whom quickly “liked” that tweet.

The Atlantic story was published while Pete Hegseth was on a flight to Hawaii. He had hours bouncing over the Pacific to get his story straight. He and his advisors chose the tried and true ad hominem attack the messenger strategy.

Like the slick TV anchor he was before getting handed control of the most lethal military in human history, Hegseth had his lines – and his strut – down before he descended the jet ramp stairs. "You're talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called 'journalist' who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again," Hegseth snarled. Goldberg is especially loathed by Trumpers because he reported the infamous story that Trump, while visiting the graves of American World War II dead in France, called the dead "suckers and losers.”

“Stunning … dangerous … staggeringly incompetent,” California Senator Adam Schiff, former Chair of the Intelligence Committee, spluttered on MSNBC last night. Of course Democrats will try to get traction off this. And today, news broke that Trump's negotiating envoy Steve Witkoff was added to the Signal chat while sitting inside the Kremlin.

However, these days, a massive security breach is barely a blip in the news cycle. MAGA will resort to one of the principles in the Roy Cohn Trump playbook: Never apologize. Never explain. And the Bannon rule of thumb: flood the zone with shit

In a day or two, all eyes will be on another zone-flooding smelly spectacle: Usha Vance and one of her kids photo-opping in Greenland with some sled dogs and whatever baffled bystanders the handlers manage to stick a MAGA hat onto. “National Security Advisor” Waltz will be skulking along behind her, unaccountable as ever, and by his mere presence, menacing the sovereignty of one of the nations America’s Mad King and his court of clowns consider conquerable.