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March 30, 2025
Key Developments and What We're Discussing Today:
1) It's been 541 days since October 7, 2023. The Hamas-led attack on Simchat Torah was one of the largest terror attacks in history, resulting in 1,182 fatalities (including 44 Americans) and over 4,000 wounded. 251 hostages (210 alive, 41 dead bodies) were taken during a day of brutal savagery and sexual violence. It was the largest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, with just over one in every 10,000 Israelis killed, and the third overall deadliest terrorist attack in the world to date.
2) Trump has not secured the release of any hostages since the last hostages under the agreement Biden negotiated were returned on February 27, despite warning Hamas several times that there would be "all Hell to pay" unless they released the hostages. The 59 remaining hostages include five Americans. Edan Alexander is the only remaining American believed to be alive. Hamas holds the bodies of Omer Neutra, Itay Chen, Judi Weinstein Haggai, and Gad Haggai. We cannot rest until all the hostages are released
3) It was as if Trump's national security team decided to prove their incompetence beyond a reasonable doubt. What better way to do it than by using an app the Department of Defense warned against using and including a journalist in a military strategy text group on that app?
4) The information shared on Signal included sensitive information provided by Israel. Everyone in that text group (except the journalist) should have resigned or been fired by now. But this is the Trump administration.
5) Remember the Benghazi hearings? When do you think Republicans will hold hearings on the deaths of four American troops in Lithuania that Trump, our Commander-in-Chief, knew nothing about?
6) Trump is using antisemitism as an excuse to attack universities and implement an authoritarian agenda. His actions will not make Jews on campus safer; they will endanger us all.
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Hi Steve,
I cannot believe anyone who voted for Trump voted for the incompetence and disregard for our safety that we witnessed last week. Using an app not approved for sharing classified information, top members of Trump's security team, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, discussed and shared plans to attack Houthis in Yemen.
How do we know? Because they accidentally included The Atlantic's Editor in Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in their group chat.
Goldberg wrote about it on Monday. He shared more information on Thursday The New York Times annotated the text chain. According to the Wall Street Journal, the information shared in the Signal chat included "sensitive intelligence" provided by Israel to the U.S.
A former senior Mossad official said, "This should serve as a major warning sign about how much we can trust U.S. intelligence during President Donald Trump's second term. [This] is one of the most amateur incidents I've ever encountered."
The group chat occurred one week after the Department of Defense issued a warning that a vulnerability was detected in the Signal app.
Read this one-page memorandum from VoteVets for the key takeaways.
As VoteVets said in a separate email, "It’s not just that they accidentally added a reporter to the chat. It’s not just that they discussed sensitive information on unsecured channels. It’s not just that each of the people on this group chat knew better.
"It is that, knowing all this, having been briefed on it, expecting subordinates to live up to a standard each of these individuals didn’t — they went ahead and did it anyway.
"And beyond that, there is no telling what else these idiots discussed on unsecured channels. It is virtually certain that bad actors were monitoring their devices. There’s no telling what other sensitive or classified information they have now."
This is a major scandal even by Trump standards. If you don't understand why, read this thread from Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI). Slotkin is a former CIA analyst who also worked in national security roles at the Pentagon and White House under President Bush and President Obama.
Watch Captain (now Senator) Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) spell out the implications of this scandal.
Dana Milbank writes about the emojis in the chat, concluding that "the contents of the Signal chat make it plain for the world to see what our allies feared and our foes hoped: The United States is being run by a bunch of clownish amateurs."
If you've heard the administration's laughable attempts to explain this away, you owe it to yourself to read Tom Nichols's analysis.
If we lived in an era when shame meant anything, every administration official in that chat group would have tendered their resignation by now, whether voluntarily or at the behest of the president.
Then again, if we lived in an era where normal codes of conduct were respected, Trump would have been impeached and convicted during this first term. The House would have impeached Trump again by now, and we'd be glued to the TV watching the Senate convict him. Instead, it's just another day of recklessness and incompetence on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) said in a statement, “We are now seeing the consequences of what happens when inexperienced and unqualified individuals are put in charge of our national security. Starting an unsecured group chat on potentially unsecured personal devices to discuss strategy and timing of a US military operation is in itself a scandal. To do so while also adding unknown people to the group is a mark of incompetence and sloppiness that is disqualifying for a junior officer, much less Cabinet officials. To then lie to Congress under oath about the nature of those disclosures shows the contempt that these individuals hold for our democracy itself.
“Those actions would be a fireable offense if committed by any junior employee at the Departments of State, Defense, CIA, NSA, or Vice President’s office. If the leaders are not held to the same standard, the rot will spread."
It gets worse. On Thursday, private data and passwords for Waltz, Gabbard, and Hegseth were found online.
Remember Benghazi? Republicans were so concerned about getting to the bottom of why four Americans died that they held 10 hearings. On Wednesday, Trump had no clue that four American troops died in Lithuania.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) asks a good question: Did Secretary of Defense Hegseth know? Why didn't he brief the president?
Does anyone in the Trump administration know what they are doing? Don't worry. I'm sure that by the time you read this, Republicans will be all over the news demanding an investigation.
Are you concerned about antisemitism on campus? Instead of buying a bag of popcorn and seeing a movie about it, consider expert opinion on what we should do about it.
On Thursday, Ken Stern and David Saperstein testified at a Senate committee hearing on campus antisemitism. If you want to discuss this issue intelligently, read their testimony.
Catherine Rampbell writes that Trump's actions against Columbia and other universities are making Jews less safe and that "it takes a lot of chutzpah to claim to be combating antisemitism while coddling avowed antisemites."
Rep. Laura Friedman (D-CA) explains that Trump's revoking grants from Columbia University is the wrong way to fight antisemitism and that she is not seeing a good-faith effort by the Trump administration to fight antisemitism.
Amir Goldberg and Barbara J. Risman summed it up: "Trump doesn't give a damn about Jews."
We cannot trust the Trump administration to protect the United States or Israel. The events of last week make it impossible to conclude otherwise. I refuse to believe that this is what Trump voters wanted. I will never understand how they could have been so blind to reality.
The good news is that some Trump voters are coming to their senses, and when they do, we should welcome them. We will only get through this together. Last week, a Democrat won a state senate seat in a Pennsylvania district that overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in November.
Rather than risk losing a special congressional election, Trump withdrew his nomination of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) for U.S. ambassador to the UN even though she won in 2024 by 24 points.
On Tuesday, a crucial Wisconsin Supreme Court seat is up for grabs. You can help.
We cannot count on Republicans in Congress to grow a spine. They will not stand up to Trump no matter what Trump does, regardless of the oath they swore when they took office.
But some Republicans in Congress might place one value above their fealty to Trump: their desire to keep their job. If they see that Trump is unpopular and that they risk defeat by continuing to bow to him, they might change their tune. We only need a few who are willing to put loyalty to America over loyalty to Trump.
Keep spreading the word. Keep speaking out. You might be surprised. Those right-wing friends and relatives you swore you'd never talk to again about politics (or anything) might be ready to listen.
Corrections. I'm entitled to my own opinions but not to my own facts, so I appreciate it when readers bring errors to my attention. No one pointed out any substantive errors in last week's newsletter. There was one spelling mistake that did not change the meaning.
In Case You Missed It:
1) Hillary Clinton: This is just dumb.
2) Frank Bruni: Trump's crackerjack cabinet is a fiasco foretold.
3) Ilan Goldenberg explains why he's joining J Street as its Senior Vice President and Chief Policy Officer.
4) Thousands of Gazans protested against Hamas. To those saying it's about time: When have you risked your life or the lives of your family to protest against anything? Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: Think every Palestinian in Gaza is Hamas? This week’s protests prove you’re wrong.
5) Jasmine Mooney: "I’m the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped."
6) The Trump administration targeted yet another foreign-born student. I could have sworn that someone once wrote a poem about this. Read this statement from the Nexus Project.
7) Trump and Musk have created the worst Social Security crisis since its creation. Robert Reich tells us what to tell our senators and representatives.
8) Who knew that JD Vance read Jewish Insider?
9) The time Jeffrey Goldberg featured me in The Atlantic.
Social Posts of the Week. Signalgate is no laughing matter. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot or should not laugh at the people involved: Alex Edelman, Gov. Tim Walz, pourmecoffee, and of course, Donald Trump.
Thread of the Week. Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL).
Video Clip of the Week. People on the Signal chat who criticized Hillary Clinton's emails.
New Music Clips of the Week. You Were Not Supposed to Message it Through (a Signalgate parody) and I Put Up Tariffs.
Vintage Music Clip of the Week. Lola.
For those new to this newsletter. This is the newsletter even Republicans have to read and the original home of the viral and beloved Top Ten Signs You're At a Republican Seder (yes, I wrote it). If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, why not subscribe and get it in your inbox every Sunday? Just click here--it's free.
I periodically update my posts on the IHRA definition of antisemitism and on why Democrats are better than Republicans on Israel and antisemitism. My definition of "pro-Israel" is here (it's a work in progress, as am I).
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