What The Hell America!

Kayyem: It is inconceivable why the details of particular strikes, timing, location, anything of that operational detail should go outside the Pentagon at all. Even a normal mission like this, you wouldn’t even have the comms people at the White House on a minute-by-minute. So there’s a lot of Hegseth, I think, wanting to show off; I think there’s really no other explanation for it. I’ve got the details. And remember where he gets these details from? He’s getting them from the Joint Chiefs. These are the military heads of all the branches, who are obligated, of course, to get civilian approval—that’s Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense—of any operational deployment like this, which is against the Houthis.

The first round was crazy because they had added Jeff Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, where I’m a contributing writer. This most recent drop clearly is coming in the context of a complete meltdown at the Pentagon. It follows the firing of senior leaders around Secretary Hegseth—including chief spokesperson, deputy chief of staff, a whole bunch of senior people, MAGA people—who look like they lost in what’s an internal battle within the secretary’s office. Basically you just have an office that is on fire and disassociated from reality, and someone leaked or disclosed to The New York Times that there was a second set of Signal conversations.

Sargent: Speaking of these purges at the Pentagon, John Ullyot, a former chief Pentagon spokesperson, just published a piece in Politico that was crushing for Hegseth. It went through all of his failures, including the first round of stories about sharing classified info on a Signal chat and then the absurd efforts to cover that one up. I want to highlight, though, a particular line from Ullyot’s piece. It said this, “There are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.” Juliette, this is the thing I keep coming back to. Is there any planet on which this doesn’t get worse, much worse politically for Trump over time?