The Fallout From SignalGate Now Involves Elon Musk and Karoline Leavitt’s Awful Grammar

A lot’s happened since Monday! I’ll try to get you up to speed.

By Kylie Cheung  |  March 26, 2025 | 8:03pm
Photos: Getty Images Politics
The Fallout From SignalGate Now Involves Elon Musk and Karoline Leavitt’s Awful Grammar

On Monday, we learned President Trump’s national security adviser Michael Waltz inadvertently added The Atlantic‘s Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a Signal chat where Waltz, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, and others discussed plans to bomb Yemen. No one ever noticed Goldberg was in the chat, and he had to remove himself. (Why, exactly, he removed himself, I am still trying to understand!) In the aftermath, members of the Trump administration have predictably struggled to get their story straight, beyond being united in their wholly irrelevant attacks on The Atlantic.

In any case, a lot’s happened since Monday, so I’ll try to get you up to speed. Over the last 48 hours, different mouthpieces of the administration initially tried to write the entire story off as fabrication, but finally, backed into a corner, they landed on the lie that yes, this happened, but no classified “war plans” were shared in the Signal chat. So, on Wednesday morning, Goldberg published additional texts from the chat that fly directly in the face of those lies. The new texts show Hegseth sending extensive, classified details on precise weapons packages, targets, and the timing of the attack.

Throughout Wednesday morning, the Trump administration, through Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, continued to try and downplay everything. Leavitt even emailed The Atlantic a statement riddled with grammatical errors, doubling down on the lie that the chat contained no classified information, but adding, “that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation.” Later, at a press conference, Leavitt also doubled down on attacking The Atlantic and tried to weaponize semantics by spouting confusing lies about whether the details in the chat were “war plans” or “battle plans.” It’s head-spinning, irrelevant, and a waste of your time and mine, so I’m not even going to get further into it. 

On Tuesday, Gabbard testified before the U.S. Senate that “there were no sources, methods, locations, or war plans that were shared. This was a standard update to the national security cabinet that was provided alongside updates that were given to foreign partners in the region.” On Wednesday, she said she merely “misremembered” what was discussed. Cool!

Before Goldberg published the second batch of texts on Wednesday, Waltz suggested on Tuesday night that he’d been hacked, or that some higher power—not him!—just randomly threw a journalist into the chat. “I just talked to Elon [Musk] on the way here. We’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened,” he said on Fox News on Tuesday night. (Leavitt issued a similar assurance about Musk’s team analyzing what occurred on Wednesday morning.)

WALTZ: “I just talked to Elon on the way here. We’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened.”

[image or embed]

— Eric Columbus (@ericcolumbus.bsky.social) March 25, 2025 at 4:21 PM

We really are a failed state, aren’t we? Not only is Waltz recreating the “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” meme in real time, but I wouldn’t trust Musk (who, FWIW, is not an engineer, just a guy who was born rich and bought a few businesses) with restarting my MacBook. Yet, this is the guy the Trump administration is invoking as a magical, cure-all genius who will investigate this supposedly highly complicated breach, which is actually not that complicated at all! All of it boils down to the members of the chat being morons who violated federal laws to communicate highly sensitive information on an unauthorized communication platform, and Waltz is, perhaps, the biggest moron of all for inadvertently adding a private citizen-slash-reporter to the chat.

It’s clear that, at a certain point, even from an administration that thrives off of never accepting fault for anything, someone is going to have to fall on their sword for this. Early Wednesday, conservative darling Dave Portnoy, the CEO of Barstool Sports, even weighed in, railing against Waltz’s clumsiness and questioning why the administration is acting like they did nothing wrong. “Somebody has to go down,” Portnoy said. Trump has thus far publicly stood by Waltz: “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” he said in a Tuesday phone interview with NBC News. But privately, his closest allies are reportedly closing in on Waltz to be the fall guy. Waltz is certainly the most obvious person at fault—but everyone in that chat is still responsible for communicating classified details on an unauthorized platform, particularly our esteemed defense secretary.

An unnamed Defense Department official told CNN that, “it is safe to say that anybody in uniform would be court martialed for this. We don’t provide that level of information on unclassified systems, in order to protect the lives and safety of the servicemembers carrying out these strikes. … My most junior analysts know not to do this.”

Trump has decidedly been trying to wash his hands of the scandal, insisting he doesn’t know anything about what transpired. (I’m inclined to believe him, since he hasn’t yet fired Vance for essentially calling him an idiot in the chat.) But this, still, isn’t exactly a great look for the president to have no idea where and how his staff are convening to discuss highly sensitive military and foreign policy matters. That said, if you’re waiting for Trump to ever take responsibility or accountability for anything in 2025, I don’t know what to tell you.

From top to bottom, all of this is a fucking dumpster fire. It would all almost be funny if these weren’t the people running the government, with massive power over who lives and who dies. The March 15 strike that was being discussed in the Signal chat killed at least 53 Yemeni people, including five children.

 
Join the discussion...