The Yemen chat group scandal shows how inept his inner circle is

All of which calls to mind Hillary Clinton. In 2016, I worked on her presidential campaign and had a front-row seat to the scandal that her email server caused. I remember the nonstop firestorm of commentary and critique about how careless she was. This commentary came from some of the very people who discussed state secrets in a Signal group chat.

With Clinton, there was documentation, an investigation, and clear due process. In this scenario, we have no idea how many of these kinds of group chats have previously or still exist among White House staff. We don’t know what level of information has been discussed and put at risk, or what has already been deleted. We may never know, and that’s the point.

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Trump himself doesn’t seem to care, which feels in line considering his own previous hoarding of classified documents (and for which he was federally indicted). Under this administration, forget lobbying a foreign adversary to hack emails – you just need someone careless enough to add you to the group chat.

For any other government, this would be a crisis. For Trump’s, it’s barely a blip on the radar. They defy court orders and Congress every day. They believe that they’re all the brightest people in the room, and that no one will ever outsmart them. They take unconstitutional actions in a way that’s both callous and hilariously stupid, belying their own assumption that they’re too clever to be caught.

Trump and his administration have spent years warning us all about our safety, from gangs and terrorists and immigrants. But it turns out that the greatest threats seem to be the idiots who can’t even figure out who’s in their own group chat.

Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris administration.

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