The epitome of dishonorable

Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush must be rolling in their graves so consistently – horrified by that to which their party’s national security apparatus has been reduced – that the shades of the former presidents must resemble perpetual motion machines at this point. Maybe that’s Donald Trump’s secret plan to revive the economy, tapping the free centripetal energy from the troubled souls of leaders past.

If any Democratic administration had shared critical intelligence information via a commercially available app, the calls for impeachment as well as termination of senior officials would be deafening from the GOP leadership. After all, the emails that were downloaded onto Hillary Clinton’s personal computer constituted such a national security scandal in Trump‘s mind that she deserved “to go to prison.”

Now, Trump will not even fire National Security Advisor Mike Waltz for including The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in the group chat discussing the nation’s secrets on an unsecured text chain. Fortunately, Goldberg displayed more patriotism by refusing to release information which could endanger American lives or security concerns when he published his article about the Signal leak. The Atlantic editor-in-chief exercised far more foresight than Pete Hegseth.

The Secretary of Defense’s decision to share sensitive details about a pending military strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen over Signal, a commercial app, would have been an unimaginable breach to any of his predecessors. It is impossible to imagine former Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Jim Mattis making a similar “mistake” (as Senate Majority Leader John Thune referred to Hegseth’s security breach.)

Of course, the most clear intelligence damage probably came from Steve Witkoff who flew from Doha, Qatar, to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin. The billionaire U.S. developer with no diplomacy experience has nevertheless been tasked with brokering between Israel and Hamas – and also to serve as Trump’s personal envoy to Putin and to try to help negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, according to The New York Times. Sharing sensitive war strategy on a commercial app mere blocks from the Russian security service, the FSB, which is supplying the very terrorists which the U.S. sought to bomb ranks as sheer idiocy. The Signal conversation included “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing,” Goldberg later wrote, describing the use of the open-source app to map out military strikes as “shocking recklessness.”

Former Republican presidents were venerated because of their and their party’s previous commitment to national defense, and not only protecting the security of the American people, but our troops going into harm’s way above all. This leak signals to our enemies that such probity has been trumped by laziness.

This article originally published in the March 31, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.