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A month or so ago, I opened an edition of this newsletter by noting that the office of Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned defense secretary, had issued a memo announcing a crackdown on leaks, including by using polygraphs if necessary; the exact impetus for the memo wasn’t clear, but it followed on the heels of a New York Times story claiming that Elon Musk was set to receive a top-secret briefing about war plans with China. I led with the memo to highlight the stunning hypocrisy of what happened a few days later, when Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, revealed that Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, had accidentally added him to a group chat on Signal, a privately owned messaging app, in which Hegseth shared highly sensitive plans for an in-progress strike on Yemen.
In recent days, history has seemed to repeat itself. Late last week, we learned that the Pentagon had fired three senior officials—at least two of whom were long-term colleagues of Hegseth’s—who had reportedly been suspended and marched out of the building as part of the leak investigation, which focused not only on the Musk-China story but disclosures about other matters from Ukraine to the Red Sea; the firings came amid broader personnel chaos at the Pentagon, with Joe Kasper, the chief of staff who had signed the original leaks memo, moving roles, and John Ullyot—who, as acting spokesperson, had executed a move to lever mainstream news organizations out of Pentagon office space in favor of mostly right-wing outlets—leaving altogether, reportedly after being sidelined. Then, a few days later, the Times reported, citing four sources with knowledge of the matter, that Hegseth had also shared the sensitive Yemen plans in a different Signal group—this one, for some reason, containing his wife, who is a former Fox producer, as well as his brother and his lawyer, who work at the Pentagon but not, the Times suggested, in roles typically privy to real-time attack plans.
This time around, however, a second bombshell dropped soon after the first: Ullyot spoke out—not only on the record, but by writing an entire op-ed for Politico—to decry the “total chaos” engulfing the Pentagon. Ullyot suggested that the fired officials hadn’t actually leaked anything, and certainly hadn’t been subjected to polygraphs, but had been accused as a pretext by members of Hegseth’s team. (The officials, for their part, have also denied leaking and said they don’t even know if a real leak probe was ever underway.) He also blasted Hegseth for his response to the initial Signal scandal, accusing him of serving up “a vague, Clinton-esque non-denial denial” that only gave the story more oxygen, and claimed that “there are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.” Ultimately, he concluded, it’s hard to see Hegseth keeping his job. “One reason the American people gave Trump a conclusive victory last November is that he’s not a go-along, get-along creature of the Beltway like many of his recent predecessors, but rather a shrewd businessman who expects results and holds his team accountable for serious mistakes that occur on their watch,” Ullyot wrote. He then ticked through a list of officials who were fired in Trump’s first term.
Public statements out of the White House yesterday suggested that someone may have forgotten to remind Trump of this; indeed, the administration’s response to Signalgate 2.0 very much mirrored its response to Signalgate 1.0, when it rallied around blundering officials and shot the messenger instead. In the morning, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, insisted on Fox that Trump is strongly behind Hegseth and characterized him as a victim of an entrenched bureaucracy trying to thwart the “monumental change” he is bringing to the Pentagon; later, after somberly paying tribute to Pope Francis while standing next to a giant Easter bunny, Trump himself backed Hegseth in remarks to reporters, dismissing the Times’ reporting as “a waste of time.” According to the Times, Trump wanted to see Hegseth “fight back,” and at the same Easter event, he did just that, staring down the barrel of a news camera like, well, a host on Fox and blasting media “hoaxsters” for trying to destroy people. “This is why we’re fighting the fake news media,” he said, gesturing to his children behind him. And with that, he was off to roll some Easter eggs.
The Times also reported yesterday that Trump “has been adamant, in private, about not giving the ‘fake news’ media the satisfaction of seeing him fire one of his top officials in a scandal”—and that this constitutes “a marked change from his first term.” This wasn’t the first time we’ve heard about this strategy; indeed, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman wrote about it last week before the latest Hegseth claims even dropped, with reference to Waltz’s role in the initial Signal scandal and Trump’s refusal to repatriate Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador. Under the headline “How a ‘No-Scalps Policy’ Is Shaping Trump’s Consequence-Free Second Term,” Sherman wrote that where accountability journalism has traditionally served as a check on the president, “negative news reports are motivating Trump to double down rather than moderate.” Trump “seems to be using Abrego Garcia’s case to send a bigger message: The mainstream media will never influence what he does,” Sherman continued. “Or rather: The intensity of reporting on Trump’s breaking of a rule or norm dictates his instinct to continue doing so.”
As regular readers of this newsletter will likely have noticed, I’ve been thinking a lot, in these early days of the second Trump era, about ways in which the press does and doesn’t have power, amid claims of our growing spinelessness and obsolescence. Trump’s “no scalps” policy would seem to be another example of the latter—a profound rupture with the post-Watergate norm that when journalists catch politicians doing bad things, they tend to resign or be fired. There’s truth to this, and the press is, in many ways, vulnerable right now, as I’ve written. But I’ve increasingly concluded that our work still does have impact in this tumultuous time, even if this is often subtler than compelling a president to resign in disgrace. I see the latest Hegseth imbroglio as further evidence for this idea, in three ways.
First, it’s not clear that Hegseth actually will survive the current mess at the Pentagon. NPR reported yesterday afternoon that the White House has started looking for a replacement. Leavitt blasted that article as “total FAKE NEWS,” but other outlets have since published stories that are directionally similar, without going quite as far; The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire, for example, wrote last night that while he appears to be safe for now, “some in the White House and the Pentagon have begun speculating about Hegseth’s shelf life and have even begun circulating the names of possible replacements.” (Interestingly, Lemire quoted an outside Trump adviser as saying that the president’s inner circle wants to avoid high-profile firings in the administration’s first hundred days, a milestone that is nearly upon us.) And, if firing people was a first-term Trump habit, so was publicly expressing confidence in them right beforehand, as the Washington Post’s Benjy Sarlin pointed out yesterday. It seems premature, at least, to conclude that he has totally snapped out of both tendencies.
Second, if Trump is reportedly trying to avoid being seen to cave to mainstream media pressure, it seems that people in and around his administration are still trying to use the mainstream media to put pressure on him. As The Atlantic’s David Graham pointed out overnight, perhaps the most “quietly stunning” line in the Times’ Hegseth Signal story had to do with its sourcing: according to four people with knowledge of the chat. For Graham, “the fact that four separate people were willing to speak about this to the Trump-detested New York Times is an indication of dysfunction.” I agree, but would add that people in Trump’s orbit have long been solicitous of reporters privately while slamming the media publicly, in a variety of contexts. A line in Ullyot’s op-ed stood out to me as well: the idea that key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources about stories yet to come (an inversion of the expected dynamic); Ullyot also crowed, in the op-ed, about “bringing new, largely more conservative, media outlets into the Pentagon press space,” then went on to cite Hegseth-dysfunction stories that appeared in mainstream publications. To my mind, all of this mirrors a long-standing tension in Trump’s own behavior—bashing the media, while clearly caring very much about what it says.
Which brings me to my third point: that refusing to fire a scandal-plagued official because you don’t want to be seen as caving to media influence clearly represents a form of media influence if you’d otherwise fire the person. (I’m reminded of the Wall Street Journal reporting, in the wake of Signalgate 1.0, that Trump would have fired Waltz if the story had broken in Breitbart rather than The Atlantic.) This, clearly, is not the classic standard of media-enforced accountability—if anything, it’s the opposite—but it still involves the media influencing your behavior. And however you view it, such obstinacy is surely not “consequence free.” Keeping a terrible administrator in their post purely because you don’t want to give a win to a publication you hate is the definition of biting your nose off to spite your face. And doing so seems likely, to me, to have an impact in the court of public opinion; sure, Trump’s base might like the idea of keeping Hegseth in a job to own the Times, but not everyone who voted for Trump thinks like this. I think Ullyot was basically right to claim that at least some Trump voters picked him, rightly or wrongly, to take a no-nonsense, businesslike approach to governing. What happens when the You’re Fired! guy becomes the Please Stay! guy?
Yesterday, the Democratic Party’s social media accounts shared an image of Hegseth next to a lettuce with googly eyes—a meme imported from the UK, where, in 2022, the Daily Star, an irreverent tabloid, famously set up a livestream of a lettuce to see if it would last longer than Liz Truss, the embattled prime minister. (One can only hope that the Democrats paid Trump’s new meme tariff.) The fact that the lettuce actually did outlast Truss spoke, perhaps, to the UK’s fickler, more vicious press, and a more robust climate of accountability for negative stories; in the UK, Trump would likely have had to resign about a thousand times over by now. In the US, he has survived, and so may Hegseth. But that’s not to say the Signal reporting has had no impact. In addition to noting the Hegseth-initiated leak probe at the top of my prior Signalgate newsletter, I quoted something that he told reporters in the Oval Office the same day the probe was launched: “Under the previous administration, we looked like fools. Not anymore.” It’s safe to say that this statement didn’t age well, either. And that looking foolish can be its own form of accountability.
Other notable stories:
- Last week, an Israeli strike on Gaza killed Fatima Hassouna, a photojournalist who had covered the war in the territory, including for a wide following on social media. The Palestinian Journalists’ Protection Center said that the strike targeted Hassouna’s home, and killed ten members of her family as well. (Israel said that it was targeting a “terrorist.”) “If I die, I want a resounding death,” Hassouna wrote on Instagram last year. “I want a death that the world hears, an effect that remains for the extent of the ages, and immortal images that neither time nor space buries.” Shortly before she was killed, it was announced that a documentary in which she features will be screened at a festival adjacent to Cannes next month. “My last image of her is a smile,” the film’s director said. “I cling to it today.”
- For CJR, Peter Schwartzstein explores how climate change can foil climate reporting. “Climate change is replete with brutal ironies,” he writes. “To those must be added the ways in which climate is increasingly sabotaging journalists’ attempts to cover it. Places are being rendered inaccessible by extreme weather events. Gear is failing or breaking or simply proving unfit for purpose in tougher conditions. In this sometimes literal morass of mud and mind-boggling temperatures, this all-important story is getting harder to tell.” A journalist who has covered climate crises in Africa told Schwartzstein that she’d fainted on assignment. A photographer who chronicled fires in Greece last year had to deal with her camera equipment overheating.
- Ryan Lizza—the star political journalist who became embroiled in a bizarre and messy episode involving Olivia Nuzzi, his ex-fiancée, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last year—announced this week that he is leaving Politico and starting a Substack called Telos (which means “purpose” in Greek). Politico’s “style of political coverage is not meeting the unprecedented moment of democratic peril we are facing,” Lizza wrote, calling Telos “my modest attempt to do things better.” Meanwhile, Adam Klasfeld, a legal journalist, and Tim Mak, a war reporter in Ukraine, are also launching a Substack, All Rise News, in the name of covering this dangerous moment better.
- Bloomberg’s Sarah Frier profiled John Shahidi, the cofounder of the Shots Podcast Network, who played a key role in connecting Trump to the so-called podcast “manosphere” during the presidential campaign. “Outlets including the Wall Street Journal credited Barron Trump for his father’s entrée to this world—and Barron indeed advises on his demographic’s interests—but it’s John Shahidi who’s actually making the calls to arrange the appearances or finding out who can,” Frier writes. Shahidi, another Trump adviser said, “helped turn viewers into voters.”
- And Politico’s Ben Leonard reports on how Trump’s recent mixed messages on daylight saving time, which he has variously called to scrap and make permanent, have set off a lobbying scramble on both sides of the issue. Among those opposed to making daylight saving time permanent are the MAGA podcaster Jack Posobiec, who has referred to standard time as “God’s time,” and Christian radio broadcasters who fear the change would give AM stations “less time at full distribution range and therefore reduced revenue opportunities” under federal rules.
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