It looks like Team Trump has decided to try to whistle right past the “Operation Overshare” fiasco, and may well pull it off — but not cost-free.
President Donald Trump is standing up for National Security Adviser Mike Waltz after he (or maybe his staff) mistakenly added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat on Signal into which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth later dropped sensitive details of the anti-Houthi bombing campaign.
The stunning security breach had “no impact at all,” the prez announced Tuesday morning, and “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson.”
Uh . . . what lesson is that?
Hegseth, meanwhile, opted for denial: “Nobody was texting war plans.”
Actually, Pete, Goldberg has the screenshots to prove they were, and the National Security Council has authenticated them.
Never mind the desperate efforts of social-media warriors to pretend they’re fake (in a pathetic echo of how the left defended Hunter on his laptop), or the even more sad “seven-dimensional chess” fans who argue the leak was somehow deliberate.
The White House, and Waltz especially, handed the left a loaded bazooka.
Now of all times, as the admin faces major fights on everything from the border to campus Jew-hate to the economy.
We get it: Trump went through too many national-security advisers in his first term, he still has the team he wants and a shakeup would bring its own costs right now.
But you can only play the “diminish, deny and delay” game so many times before it becomes your new brand.
Look: Trump was elected in good part because Americans were sick to death of the last administration’s endless cavalcade of lame, easily disproved lies.
Joe Biden is sharp as a tack. The border is secure. Inflation is transitory. The US exit from Afghanistan was a huge success.
Yes, we get that stepping up to own failures is hard. But it just got that much harder for Americans to trust the administration on national-security issues going forward.
At the very least, we pray the prez is privately knocking hard on every head involved in this mess — and warning that heads will roll if there’s anything like a next time.
The American people need to know Trump is still fighting for them, not lying to them.
