“As soon as the news got out that Trump administration officials had added ‘The Atlantic’ editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat and discussed confidential plans for bombing the Houthis in Yemen, the internet didn’t miss a chance to mock them.
The security breach has caught everyone’s attention and netizens are all there to comment on the Trump administration. Although the Trump administration has said that “nobody was texting war plan,” but still the incident provided ammunition for critics, who promptly ridiculed the administration’s incompetence.
“New phone, Houthis,” chirped National Review columnist Christian Schneider on X.
“This has very Trump 1.0 fuck up vibes, honestly kinda fun,” posted Unpopular Front newsletter writer John Ganz.
The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein noted it was “very annoying they messaged ‘Jeff Goldberg’ and not, for instance, ‘Jeff Stein.'”
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who faced criticism for using a private email server during her tenure in the Obama administration, responded to Republican attempts to minimise the security breach: “You have got to be kidding me.”
The chat group, titled “Houthi PC small group”, comprised 18 senior officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
Vice President JD Vance’s account expressed opposition to Trump’s plans, marking an unprecedented divergence from the MAGA agenda by questioning the urgency of the proposed bombing.
“Vice President texting the group, ‘chat are we cooked’,” posted independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.
“Looks like I’m changing my initials to DJT on Signal now. Hoping for some scoops!” posted NBC News’s Amanda Terkel.
US defence Secretary Pete Hegseth denied on Monday that any sensitive “war plans” were shared in a Signal chat group that mistakenly included a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called” journalist.
When asked about the “war plans” against the Houthis in Yemen shared with the journalists in the Atlantic, Hegseth said, “So you’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again to include the, I don’t know, the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides hoax suckers and losers. Hope so. This is the guy that pedals in garbage. This is what he does. I would love to comment on the Houthi campaign because of the skill and courage of our troops.”
” I’ve monitored it very closely from the beginning, and you see we’ve been managing four years of deferred maintenance under the Trump administration. Our troops, our sailors were getting shot at as targets our ships couldn’t sail through. And when they did shoot back, it was purely defensively or at shacks in Yemen. President Trump said, no more. We will re establish deterrence, we will open freedom of navigation, and we will ultimately decimate the Houthis, which is exactly what we’re doing as we speak from the beginning, overwhelmingly,” he added.
At the last he said, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”
