Mike Waltz’s Skills Issue

“Signalgate”—nobody wanted to bite on the visually appealing but cumbersome to pronounce “Sighnalzi”—may sink into the dark waters of political memory without much of a ripple. The president is standing by his man; the Republican-held Congress will be disinclined to go investigating; that’s that. Yet the press circus is continuing unabated, and the midterms and a possible change of ruling party in Congress are not so very far off. We are only a day or two away from the media event being upgraded from a “blunder” to a “distraction.”

The mainstream press has apparently decided that the real question is whether Signal is “secure.” It’s a worthwhile question; I don’t have the technical knowledge to say just how risky it might be, and the reporting on it seems to vary a bit, with hostile journos breaking out various sorts of experts to deplore the idea and administration-friendly journos digging up complimentary accounts of the late, great Joe Biden’s staff using Signal as a matter of course. As an old paranoiac myself (not to mention a practitioner of the dark arts of media), I am prejudiced against putting things in writing that you don’t want your name next to in the papers. It is plausible to me that this was in fact not a display of cutting-edge operational security, as evidenced by the fact that we are talking about this at all.

Yet efforts to lay the blame on other members of the groupchat, whether Hegseth or anyone else, are not particularly persuasive. If the U.S. National Security Advisor communicates with you by a particular channel, it is not unreasonable to assume he has cleared his process with White House counsel; the entire point of the position is to act as the president’s personal emissary and coordinator in the security apparatus. An outlet for which I harbor a soft spot recently said that “isolationists,” particularly those who write for this magazine, are trying to “pin the blame” on Waltz for the flub. Well, I don’t know—he is the one who started the chat and added a hostile journalist. To my admittedly unenlightened thinking, that seems an awful lot like being actually at fault.

The administration and its friendly journos, specifically Waltz-friendly journos, have tried to make flippy-floppy of the fact that what was shared wasn’t technically classified, although the semantic games about what the term “war plan” means seems like a rhetorical loser. (To the civilian public, do you really think a list of planes, times, and stuff to bomb is meaningfully different from a “war plan”?) While this line is worth considering, its force is undercut a bit by the Wall Street Journal report that Israeli intelligence isn’t happy about the way Waltz was splashing around their own humint findings. More importantly, it doesn’t touch the fact that Waltz added a hostile journalist to “bomb yemen chat 1 (extra secret).” 

I have the misfortune of having worked (briefly, unhappily) in the private sector. In that vale of tears, if you mess up badly, you get fired. The punishment is not necessarily proportionate to the damage caused by the mess-up but to what the mess-up indicates about your competence and judgment. Can you say, with a straight face, that adding Jeffrey Goldberg to “bomb yemen chat 1 (extra secret)” in the heat of the moment doesn’t reflect poorly on Waltz’s competence and judgment?

This is worth reiterating. The anti-Waltz line asking why he had a journalist’s number saved to his contacts is unpersuasive (albeit slightly less unpersuasive than Waltz’s own insistence that the contact was mysteriously “sucked in” to his address book). The nature of working in politics is that you build a rolodex full of all sorts of people. The observation that Waltz has never donated to a Trump campaign while having donated relatively lavishly to other, more hawkish candidates is also beside the point, although it might be interesting for other reasons. This is a purely non-ideological matter: Do you want the guy who accidentally added the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic to the secret working group anywhere near your other operations? I have my policy differences with Waltz, as I do with innumerable politicos in this fine land. (Real Russoism has yet to be tried.) I don’t think that’s disqualifying. I think acting like a bozo is disqualifying.

The playbill for the second Trump term touted the image of a leaner, more professional administration without the opera buffa antics of ’17–’21. Much of the chaos of the first term was from the revolving door approach to staffing, so it’s only fair that Don and the gang don’t want to be perceived returning to form, and giving the Atlantic a scalp to boot. But at some point, the distraction—and the mere question of whether Waltz is, in purely practical terms, up to the job—must begin to tip the scale.

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