The Last Taboo

What are we to make of the scandal that has so preoccupied American media? In any sober calculus, the group chat read around the world is hardly the most urgent, dramatic or appalling story of the past week. A non-comprehensive list of more deserving candidates for our collective attention might include Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s photo-op in a Salvadoran concentration camp, Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk getting disappeared by masked ICE agents for the crime of writing an op-ed, Israel’s recommitment to genocide in Gaza after abandoning the thinnest possible commitment to a ceasefire, and whatever other atrocities will likely unfold in the hours between when this column is written and when it is published. But still it is this story that has broken through.

On one level, the reasons for the group chat’s emergence and endurance as a marquee news event are obvious enough: the secrecy, the bumbling, the careful media rollout, the flagrant hypocrisy. These dimensions are obvious enough that they shouldn’t need to be litigated. If, during the first Trump term, the gap between moral crimes carried out in broad daylight and the preoccupations of the pundit class with abstract norms and symbolic insults felt grotesque, that dissonance now registers as self-evident. It is clear, moreover, that expecting even a critical mass of professional commentators to grapple with the escalating human tragedy and moral obscenity of American fascism is apparently too tall an order. The larger story — the essential story — continues to prove elusive.

Still, why is it that this story in particular has come to attract such intense, relentless attention? The intensity is chiefly a symptom. First, to say the obvious: the Signal chat story took off the way it did because of the Trump administration’s ludicrous and predictable response. At another time, with a different cast of characters, apologies and resignations would have followed and everybody would have moved on with their clicks, takes and lives. But Donald Trump — and especially this Donald Trump — is inimical to contrition and accountability, and if you work for him you must proceed according to those terms. So everyone has played along. They know that they can keep their jobs so long as they never slow down or betray the cardinal sin of showing weakness. The administration, its proxies and its self-appointed defenders are thus staying busy, offering a great many interpretations of the group chat. Taken together, these interpretations constitute a multistage barrage of weaponized kettle logic, flooding the zone and throwing everything at the wall at once.

According to the defenders, the Atlantic’s story represents neither a breach nor a leak, but rather an oversight, a bungle. Jeffrey Goldberg’s inclusion in the chat was an innocent mistake, but also an active form of malfeasance on Goldberg’s part — exactly what we should expect, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, from a “deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” Oh, and what was revealed to the public was not a “war plan,” but rather an “attack plan.” Nothing in it was classified, but also perhaps it became that way retroactively; no laws were broken, but Goldberg might well be a traitorous and longstanding Trump hater who should be sent to prison, or Gitmo. The image of the fiercely conservative Goldberg, who notably served in the IDF as a jail guard, getting the Jonathan Pollard treatment for aiding Houthis is certainly striking — but also, don’t worry, none of our warriors, whose lives are always on the line, was actually put at risk by his damnable transgression. There was a CIA intelligence officer actively engaged in dangerous intelligence work on that thread, and they have to stay anonymous, which they certainly have, but also, it turns out they aren’t working overseas anyway, which is the exception to the standard press rule about naming such figures. But never mind that. None of these protestations adds up, and they don’t have to, since they can be deployed flexibly one after the other as best suits the moment to muddy the waters, the way a squid swims backward while discharging a big cloud of ink behind it.

The complaints from the administration’s prominent liberal critics also have more than a little kettle logic to them. The Trumpists are using Signal’s disappearing message feature to evade accountability by FOIA, but also, we should all be terrified that such reckless OPSEC has brought the vitally necessary operations of counterterrorism out into the light. The Republicans claim they’re better on national security than the Democrats, but the Democrats would have never stood for such malfeasance. And don’t get us started on what a big deal those hypocrites once made of Hillary Clinton’s private email server. O tempora, o mores, and so on.

Like so much of contemporary liberal agita, this argumentation takes the shape of rote, formalist gripes over ideals of meritocratic professionalism, decaying norms and the contemptible unseriousness of Trump’s admittedly grotesque hangers-on. The animating blend of indignant self-righteousness, rose-tinted nostalgia and slavish deference to what so-called real military leadership should look like is not, at the end of the day, that far from what their ostensible opponents offer. We used to make real national security psychopaths in this country! People who had the resources and intelligence and inclination to at least feign to feign about giving a shit over appearances. Now more than ever, we must recall such icons and return decency and professionalism to our august institutions, which deserve so much better. At least give us some NatSec tough guys with fewer gross tattoos, less obvious religious derangements and a better capacity to hold their liquor.

What if we allow ourselves to entertain the possibility that the more blatant displays of shamelessness, cruelty and rank stupidity among the powerful today, as opposed to those of the powerful of yore, may simply represent an intensification in degree rather than a radical difference in kind? What if we see the current Signal debacle in continuity with, say, the Clinton team’s lax practices with its own email server, even as we also register that the entire Trump crew appears to have put their entire lives, corruption and silliness alike, from records of Venmo payments to journalists to shirtless photos (Hegseth, extremely on brand) online? What if we reject the comforting temptation to see war waged by quiet and bloodless technocrats as markedly distinct from and superior to management at the clumsy hands of clowns who are so unseemly in their expressions of bloodlust? What must we acknowledge then?

Several things, I think, then become undeniable.

First, the world’s most powerful military levelling an entire building to kill a single person is, in a word, evil. If the phrase war crime has any meaning left, this is where it should apply. On March 15, the U.S. government flattened a building and killed an untold number of people in what was just one of what appears to have been at least 40 strikes on Yemen, a daylong barrage that was itself merely the first salvo in what has now been two weeks of sustained, near daily attacks. This intensification of carnage is but the latest installment in an ongoing campaign of relentless airstrikes for which the American government has yet to provide any real accounting, whether in terms of estimating the total number of casualties or by naming the identities of any of the specific persons whom it supposedly has targeted and killed.

The elision of this broader context, like the ubiquitous caveat of any and all deaths being reported by “the Houthi-run Health Ministry,” offers a grotesque tell. Never mind that the White House, like most American media outlets, has downplayed or outright ignored casualty estimates offered by independent entities like UNICEF. If flipped-script counterfactuals help, consider how Americans might react to reports on the toll of a hypothetical Houthi attack on American soil that were reflexively hedged with the proviso of their issuing from “MAGA-run” institutions or even a “RFK-Jr.-headed Department of Health and Human Services.” Of course, such formulaic gestures of unsubtle denialism at mass murder abroad are by now deeply familiar, since the phrase “Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza” has essentially become a standard feature of most Western media outlets’ house style. The continuity is brutal and direct: Much like our ally Israel has done and continues to do in Gaza, the U.S. government is killing people, and lots of people, and that’s that. The question of how many people — like the question of which people, combatant or otherwise — is, for their killers, entirely irrelevant, subordinated simply to the fact that we have already decided they deserve to die. The parallel to the logic offered by a State Department spokesperson this week (“We’ll revoke the visas of whoever it is that fits within the category of what it is we’re deciding is going to get your visa revoked”) is direct.

To be sure, Americans have long nursed a grotesque appetite for celebrating mass killing abroad. (The fetish for ever-higher “body counts” as the single most important metric of “progress” in the Vietnam War comes immediately to mind.) That appetite has metastasized. These days, on the domestic front, we hear more claims of ever-higher tolls of destruction: more troublesome foreigners deported, more lazy federal employees fired by DOGE, more underserving Social Security recipients purged from the rolls, and so on. Our two parties differ when it comes to the shamelessness of their glee, as well as to their rhetorics of moral desert and policy necessity. But when it comes to their most vulnerable targets, and their embrace of the institutions of repression, the actual continuities are undeniable. Democrats have spent multiple elections now arguing, as though it was some kind of virtue, that, in fact, Barack Obama deported loads more immigrants than did Trump, and that Joe Biden in turn set a standard that Trump has, thus far, only moderately exceeded.

How many times have we been told, by Republicans and Democrats alike, that no matter who else wound up vaporized in any given strike, what matters is that we took out one notorious enemy? This time, per the group chat, we bagged “their top missile guy.” A classically Trumpian formulation, but is this really so different from any number of presidents who have urged us to celebrate the achievement of a “decapitation strike” against the latest head of the latest terror threat? Israel regularly “mows the lawn” in Gaza; America, for whom the entire world is our “backyard,” has its own routines of murderous groundskeeping, too.

When our drones launch their Hellfires, our F-18s drop their payloads and our Tomahawks end their one-way journeys in a flaming crater, the purpose is always to get to someone specific, and someone bad. If even our most sophisticated “targeting” mechanisms happen to fall short, of course, that’s lamentable, but it’s also the reality of war (even if we simultaneously engage in handwaving or outright denialism about the toll). Besides, those people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is in itself pretty suspicious. “The lack of specific information about each [deported] individual actually highlights the risk they pose,” ICE’s acting field office director of enforcement and removal operations testified in March. “In fact, [it] demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”

That logic transcends borders and parties — see Nancy Pelosi’s unsubstantiated claims last year that she had had access to some kind of intelligence that unnamed student protestors were in the pocket, or at least dupes of, Russia and maybe other forces beside. “Nobody knows who the Houthis are,” Hegseth says in the group chat — another way of saying that, when we’re dealing with the Houthis, or the Houthi-adjacent, or anybody adjacent to anything or anyone else we find menacing, then those people also become nobody who matters, nobody we should bother knowing about, and definitely nobody whom anybody who matters should actually care about. And now that we think about it, isn’t it interesting how you want to know more?

Questions themselves are suspicious. Self-doubt is a sin. Even as they structure much of the conversation around preparations to brief Trump, JD Vance, Hegseth and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz all seem deeply unclear on what Trump wants, knows, decides or even really cares about as his priorities. Even Stephen Miller — the most perspicacious of the bunch, uniquely comfortable engaging in blistering deception on- and offstage — is reduced to modest subjectivity: “As I heard it, the president was clear.” Uncertainty can be acknowledged, but it can never be voiced. Miller leverages an aura of closer proximity to the president in order to move things along, yet he can only speak in a qualified mode, in terms of how “he heard it.” But the substance of his intervention, which pivots in classic Schmittian style on a geopolitical sorting of friends versus enemies, is enough to clinch things, since it offers the obvious resolution: full speed ahead, it’s time for results, it’s time to kill. Trump is present, but only in the mode of an absence, and the participants carry on by invoking him the way grown-up children might invoke the exemplar and wishes of a comatose or straight-up dead patriarch or grand-patriarch as they continue running the family business as usual. The many contradictions of Trump’s policies and proclamations are revealed to be as meaningless in denotation as they are in implication: This is what we do, what we’re here for.

Trump has now spent several days claiming, at once absurdly yet also plausibly, that even he wasn’t quite sure what was happening, although he of course supports his friends in doing whatever great job they did. His adjutants’ group chat, then, is not a record of a group of people trying to “lead from behind,” deducing the Leader’s “true motives,” or otherwise acting per some new version of the classic Führerprinzip. This is a gaggle of killers who are also bureaucrats administering a machine for generating death and destruction because that is their job and that is all they can envision. Killing Houthis abroad, dismantling infrastructure at home, booting immigrants into foreign gulags, disappearing dissidents and beyond: death and destruction is what the machine does, and maybe even all it can do.

Hegseth, Vance and Miller can commit war crimes with good cheer and emoji, just as the system demands, but the one thing they can’t acknowledge is the living deadness of the man who gives their title and meaning. In this silence, however, they are not alone. What has all the sound and fury and kettle logic of these past days been, in its fully bipartisan stupidity, other than one giant exercise in refusing to see, let alone say, that same truth? If it were said baldly — that the presidency at this point is apparently an empty signifier, a placeholder — then the implications might rapidly spin out of control and definitely be devastating.

We might have to confront that the distress over the incuriosity and maliciousness of our so-called best and brightest is little more than a sideshow, as is the question of which encryption apps they do or don’t use on their phones. We might have to reckon with the fact that our present moment is a grotesque but legible fulfillment of four years of pretending that Biden was sharper and more in charge than ever. We might have to consider that partisans have spent at least two decades-plus pretending that his predecessors were each, in their own turn, figures who by virtue of their individual personality and will would and could change everything. The new boss will be entirely different from the old boss, and whether that means he will fix what the previous one broke and or finish what the other started, now — finally — legitimacy, presidentiality and even America itself will be great because it’s good. One more effort, one more president, and what has been smashed will be put right. We might have to acknowledge how, differences in rhetoric and variations in policy in other domains notwithstanding, the United States has spent a quarter century — at the least — doubling down on the centralization of lethal power in the executive branch alongside granting ever greater legal license, funding and deference to the military and security apparatus. And we might have to confront not just that last week’s biggest story isn’t much of a story at all, but that the only thing holding our empire together is the collective fantasy that somebody, anybody, is dynamic, cogent and, above all, in charge enough to lead and make sense of the machine. But some things, it seems, must remain taboo.