What The Hell America!

One story and one story only is dominating American media attention this week: President Donald Trump’s national security team accidentally adding Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat in which they planned the recent air strikes on the Houthis, who govern Yemen. It’s easy to see why. This is a scandal that is unprecedented in terms of the incompetence and irresponsibility on display from top officials, especially given that it concerns the most traditionally sensitive of sensitive topics: war and national security.

But there is so much media fixation on Trump officials’ recklessness in potentially broadcasting classified information to prying eyes that a lot is being lost in the mix.

For one, there’s almost no discussion about the actual nature of the US strikes on Yemen, which were celebrated by Trump officials in the group chat as a great success. It does seem that some Houthi leaders were killed by the strikes. But they also destroyed a cancer hospital and killed at least twenty-five civilians in the first week — more than Joe Biden’s own yearlong bombing of the Houthis had managed to kill— with at least four children among the dead and another two injured.

At one point in the chat, Trump officials cheered that the Houthis’ “top missile guy” had been identified “walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed” (“Excellent”; “A good start,” others responded). Yet there were presumably other people in that building, too, and it’s hard to believe they weren’t some of the civilian corpses later found amid the smoking debris left by the bombings. If this is proven correct, it would bring up the question of whether Trump officials had admitted in writing to carrying out a war crime.

All this has barely registered in most of the coverage of the group chat, with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) one of the few to point out the comparative lack of outcry over dozens of innocent people being slaughtered. It’s hard to believe the US public would be comfortable with their tax dollars being used to kill random women and children. (The fact that members of the group chat stressed the importance of “messaging” for the strikes because “nobody knows who the Houthis are” suggests as much.)

Another question we might ask is: Are these strikes actually legal? As I wrote a little over a year ago when Biden first started bombing Yemen directly, the Constitution is famously pretty clear about who can actually declare war — namely, Congress.

Historically, the president has only been permitted to unilaterally order US forces to wage war in self-defense — if, say, US troops or civilians come under attack somewhere. But just as with Biden’s own Yemen strikes, that’s not what has happened here. Trump ordered these strikes in response to the Houthis threatening to resume attacks on Israeli shipping. It’s worth noting, too, that the Houthis’ stated reason for restarting this blockade is as a response to Israel breaking the terms of the Gaza cease-fire and once more blocking humanitarian aid from entering the territory.

While the cease-fire was in place, there were no Houthi attacks. As the Institute for the Study of War stated on March 12, the day after the Houthis’ announcement, “the Houthis have conducted no attacks since November 2024,” citing research from the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, a typically hawkish think tank founded by the pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). A different analysis from the International Institute for Strategic Studies found that there were a handful of attacks in November and December 2024, but nonetheless that “there were no Houthi attacks on ships in January or February” of 2025.

In other words, there was no Houthi attack on US forces or Americans more generally that would legally justify carrying out these air strikes without going through Congress.

And in fact, the chat logs make that clear, with defense secretary Pete Hegseth bluntly writing: “This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered.”

Unfortunately, the Constitution’s warmaking clause doesn’t have a special carve-out that lets the president act like a monarch as long as it’s for restoring deterrence or reopening shipping lanes.

Ironically, the only Houthi attacks on US ships have come after and in response to Trump’s air strikes (“If they continue their aggression, we will continue the escalation,” Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi said in a speech). Which brings up another question: Do these attacks actually enhance US security?

Given that they directly resulted in seaborne US servicemembers being fired on with Houthi missiles and drones, the opposite is the case: the US government, first under Biden and now under Trump, is not defending US lives here but putting them at risk for Israel’s sake — specifically, to defend the Israeli government’s determination to bomb and starve innocent civilians in Gaza. This is the opposite of America First.

In fact, in the long term, this bombing campaign may end up further endangering ordinary Americans, who will bear the brunt of any future act of terrorism that serves as a reprisal for the deaths of innocent Yemenis in air strikes. Chillingly, the strikes have already rallied tens of thousands of protesters in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, who were heard angrily yelling “Death to America, death to Israel!” and “We defy the Americans, we defy the Zionists!”

Even if we accept the Trump administration’s reasoning — that this is all worth doing because protecting freedom of navigation in the Red Sea is a core US interest— it is still hard to justify the wisdom of these attacks. (It should be noted that Vice President J. D. Vance didn’t agree with this reasoning, based on the chat logs: “I think we are making a mistake. … 3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does,” he wrote.) So far, there has been only one period where the Houthis have definitively had their attacks in the Red Sea successfully stopped, and it wasn’t while they were being bombed.

Instead, it was after Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff leaned on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu before Trump’s inauguration, forcing him to accept a Gaza cease-fire. The Houthis responded to this by releasing ship crewmembers they had taken captive, pledging to limit their attacks on ships, and vowing to end all threats to even Israeli ships “upon the full implementation of all phases” of the cease-fire deal, a deal that Netanyahu then purposefully broke.

All of which leads to the last question not being asked: What has been accomplished by these strikes, and will they actually work? The answer is plainly a negative one. The air strikes may have killed some Houthi leaders, but there is no shortage of others who will take their place, just as a year of decimating Hamas ended with the group simply having recruited the same number of fighters it lost, according to former secretary of state Antony Blinken, and still posing a threat to Israel’s security, according to the most recent US intelligence assessment.

More than a year of strikes by Biden didn’t end the Houthis’ attacks on shipping — as the former president famously commented, “Are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes” — and so far, Trump’s bombing has only driven the Houthis to escalate their attacks and take the fight directly to US vessels. Before that, the Houthis withstood half a decade of much more brutal warfare at the hands of Saudi Arabia, which similarly failed to dislodge them despite creating a famine in the country and killing hundreds of thousands of Yemenis. It’s hard to believe it will work this time.

It seems, then, that Trump’s air strikes are the worst of every possible world: they have a dreadful human cost, they’re unconstitutional, they’re putting Americans in danger, and they are unlikely to even accomplish their ostensible goal. It’s not surprising all these facts have taken a back seat so far in reactions to the story. But if the press continues to ignore them in its discussion of the scandal, it is failing the American public.