Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
There are some big new developments here. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered an incredibly weak defense of this travesty. The Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg revealed most of the text chain he’d been admitted to, and it contained a ton of operational detail. And importantly, Trump is reportedly frustrated over this story, and his top allies are deeply exasperated by his team’s handling of it. Today, we’re talking about all this with Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, who has a new piece digging into the underlying meanings of this whole scandal. Good to have you back on, Zack.
Sargent: Sure is. Well, let’s start with some of the dark factual stuff. Goldberg released most of the text chain, and it contained a whole lot of incredibly specific stuff about the coming operation against Yemen’s Houthis. Yet here’s what Hegseth had to say about all this on Wednesday afternoon.
Sargent: Zack, Trump’s propagandists are now insisting on this weird distinction between war plans and attack plans. Hegseth is saying there that The Atlantic used the term “attack plans”—not “war plans”—on its new story revealing the text chain, and this is supposed to show that the info wasn’t all that sensitive. But it was sensitive and it was shared in an unsecured setting. Now, I don’t claim expertise on this matters, but Hegseth is clearly leading the core point here. What do you think?
All of these things—nature of the target, timing of the target—are necessarily classified, the kind of thing that you cannot discuss on an unsecured private app like Signal. [The app] is secure for private use but not for government use, for top-level officials talking about really sensitive details. It’s just not good enough to be viewed as safe for actors likely to be targeted by foreign intelligence. So nothing in what Hegseth just said makes the slightest amount of sense as a defense of what he had done. And he’s the one who shared all that information, by the way. Of the two people who deserve the most blame on the chat, it’s Mike Waltz for creating and inviting Jeffrey Goldberg, and Pete Hegseth for sharing all of these details that would never be anywhere near something like this.
Beauchamp: Recall that Trump said at one point during the various controversies surrounding his legal cases before he was president again that information being released by Trump or just decided even privately by Trump to be declassified was necessarily declassified. This is a novel legal theory, one that I do not think would have held up very well in court if it had been tested. But it’s possible they’ve come up with some weird justification like that for why it is no longer classified. Bottom line, to say that this was not classified at the time that Hegseth shared it is just crazy.
Beauchamp: When they said yesterday that there weren’t going to be any war plans, they had to know that Goldberg was in the chat—that he had all the records of the chat and had these sensitive details and he could just publish them. So they’re relying on these dodgy distinctions and perversions of logic to get around the fact that their position was untenable to begin with and counting on the ability to insist that reality isn’t what it is to a significant portion of the American population to get away with it.
Sargent: Yes, and that gets me to where I really want to go with this. I want to go big picture. What we’re seeing here, in some ways, is a stark illustration of why right-wing populist governance and autocracy are undesirable. You’ve got the inability to admit error, the refusal to accept or internalize constructive criticism from the opposition, the ministering above all to the cult-like defense of the leader. This is the kind of thing you see among some partisans on both parties maybe, but they’re really hallmarks of authoritarian populism.
Beauchamp: Greg, that’s a great point. Thank you for connecting this to what are the ultimate stakes here. One thing that is a tendency across authoritarian movements—and to differing degrees, but it’s generally consistent not just in authoritarian governments as your theme but also in political movements that are themselves dedicated to authoritarian ideas, that take on internal trappings of a general authoritarian system—is a tendency to select for loyalty over competence. And if you look at the people who are in that chat, a lot of them are not people who one would have trusted with sensitive information in the past. Waltz maybe as a former representative, but Hegseth here is the really clear example.
And Trump talks about people being from “central casting” a lot; he likes when people look the way that they’re supposed to in his mind for a particular job. And Hegseth had demonstrated, in addition to looking the part, that he was able to play the part Trump wants, which is someone who will defer to him at all costs and do whatever the president wants done, specifically what he wants done related to trying to bring the institution that he’s leading in line with political objectives. That’s what a lot of these people have been selected for: their willingness to try and clean house of elements of a political opposition or a nonpartisan civil service. And the kinds of people who will do that are very rarely the kinds of people who are the best people for the job.
It doesn’t succeed always in those—no political system always elevates the best people at all time—but it has a better track record in ensuring that people from all different political persuasions, all walks of life can access and participate in collective decision-making. And that has led to historically high qualities of governments in democratic systems. When authoritarian movements inside of democracies take power, they try to make them more autocratic. And that brings these features of authoritarian politics into a democratic system so it ends up resembling in its functioning something that has generally, even setting aside the morality and the desirability of democracy as a normative goal, a much worse track record at things like national security over time.
Beauchamp: Yes. And we have seen it time and again. There’s a cost of living crisis in Hungary right now, brought on by incompetent economic management by the Orbán government for a long period of time. Look at an example from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, the disaster in Venezuela—the descent of what was a relatively successful, stable country into an autocratic hellhole—is primarily the result of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro’s mismanagement. And they’re not just that they adopted bad economic policies, but that those bad economic policies were unable to be course corrected because they were built in a charismatic authoritarian popular system.
Diversity really is, in a very literal sense, the U.S. military strength. There’s a great book by Jason Lyall, who’s a professor at Dartmouth, who studies military effectiveness, arguing and showing quantitatively that ethnically diverse militaries that encourage people from different backgrounds inside a society to participate and do more to make people from minorities feel like they’re treated equally actually tend to perform better on the battlefield than ones with more ethnic stratification. And I don’t like to make the instrumental case for democracy, to say democracy is good because it produces better outcomes, because that seems like too much territory. We should be insisting as a matter of principle that it is good for people to choose who gets to vote for them, and it is bad that we have a government right now that wants to undermine the ability to engage in popular self-governance. That’s bad, as a matter of moral principle.
Beauchamp: I figured you would. But I think sometimes it’s important to remind ourselves that democracy is something that’s valuable because we care about it. It’s valuable because it makes all of our lives better in very concrete and tangible senses. And the ways, and you’re exactly right to frame it this way, in which an authoritarian populist movement is making American government more authoritarian is damaging its capacity to deliver on outcomes that we care about.
Beauchamp: The emojis—I am hung up on those. Because some of them, like the fist and stuff.... If one of my editors had messaged me to say, Hey, look how well the story is doing, and that I get a lot of readers, I might respond with an explosion and a fist. But I feel like that would be appropriate because it’s not anyone’s lives at stake. There’s a fundamental unseriousness there that’s beneath people who should be making these decisions about life and death. By one report, I saw 53 people died in this airstrike, and who knows what percentage of them are civilians. That’s not something you just fist-bump about and treat as this semi-serious or “burp-privately” successful matter. It’s much graver than that.
But it also sometimes means America should be number one. When you listen to Trump talk about the U.S. military, he’s never the restrainer or “retrencher” who says, I want to shrink the defense budget and scale down America’s military might. What he says is we need to have the greatest military in the world, we always should, and I will make sure that we have the capacity to do that, and no country will come close to us best and most beautiful warships. Those are at odds with the other version of America First that’s embodied by Trump’s trade policies, approach to allies. You can’t have both of those things at once. You can’t be both the country that dominates the world and be the country that is pulling back from the world.
Sargent: I think you can loop this all back to why right-wing populism and autocracy are undesirable. These things turn heavily on a combination of very poorly thought-through ideas about what’s actually in the national interest, like Vance not wanting to “bail out Europe,” as he says. They also thrive on symbolic and empty displays of national strength. Everything is spectacle. It’s all unmoored from any effort to elaborate a deeper vision. I think we see this with Hegseth. Am I right?
We were just starting to have this really serious conversation after the Ukraine War broke out about how America’s defense industrial base was weakened and not producing enough weapons because [we were using a lot of it]. It was hard for us to produce enough weapons to supply ourselves and the Ukrainians at the same time after a certain point, so there’s a real rethinking going on in serious military corners about how to do that. But can you imagine Pete Hegseth saying the words “defense industrial base” and really knowing what they mean? He is the embodiment of this. He is spectacle. He’s a Fox News host. I’ve seen a picture of the man hovered in champagne. And setting aside his alcoholism, is this the level of seriousness that we’re bringing here to this really important topic?
Beauchamp: Hey, I love your show, Greg. Love being on. Thanks.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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