How much does Signalgate matter?
And more of your questions, answered.
Hi everyone, happy Sunday! Welcome back to another subscribers-only mailbag edition. Here are the questions I’ll be tackling this week:
Will Signalgate hurt Trump politically?
Do the “normal” rules of politics still apply in the Trump era?
Will we still have free and fair elections going forward?
Did Project 2025 really advise Trump officials to use Signal?
Will Missouri ever tip from red to blue?
What’s worse: a government shutdown or hitting the debt ceiling?
And What would I do if I was added to the Signal chat?
Let’s get to it!
Q: How big a deal is Signal Gate? What are possible consequence or ramifications? What’s its effect from a political perspective (whether for Democrats, Trump, or the Public)?
Substantively, I absolutely do think it’s a big deal. It’s hard to remember an equivalent incident of such sensitive national security information being accidentally released by top officials into unwanted hands. Thankfully, nothing happened in this case (as far as we know) to put any Americans in harm’s way, largely because the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg handled the situation responsibly, but it’s easy to imagine the crisis that would have ensued if someone else had gotten their hands on the information.
And then, outside of the fact of Goldberg being included in the group chat, there’s the added matter of using Signal at all, which very well could be putting troops in harm’s way if officials have been using the app for other sensitive conversations and foreign governments have been hacking into their devices.
The political ramifications are harder to predict.