Why Trump voters love him more than ever. edit: And how the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic got on a Signal chat list during the planning for last weekend's attack on the Houthis
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Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with four Times Opinion columnists about the Trump administration’s popularity among Republicans and why so many in the party believe the country is heading in the right direction.
Patrick Healy: David, Bret, David, Ross: Donald Trump is the only president in our lifetimes who’s had a net-negative job approval rating in his first 100 days in office. Trump also has the largest gap in approval ratings in 80 years — 90 percent of Republicans like his performance, while only 4 percent of Democrats do. Those Trump supporters are really on board with him; more registered voters think America is on the right track than at any point since 2004, according to a new NBC News poll. To be clear, a majority still say America’s on the wrong track, and Trump’s polling on the economy is sagging. But I want to dig into why more voters feel better about America’s direction now than compared with under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Trump 1.0.
And I wanted to do so through the eyes of my more conservative colleagues. The four of you span the ideological spectrum on the right, and you’ve all written extensively about Trump. Why do so many Republicans like the direction Trump is taking the country in? Is it about his style, or his policies, or the mind-set and mood of the G.O.P., or something else?
Loved this:
Like Soviet diplomacy under Andrei Gromyko, Trump has a gift for creating crises so that he can take credit for solving them.
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This stood out:
As a matter of principle, Democrats should be screaming bloody murder about Trump’s threat to the Constitution. As a matter of political tactics, I think they’re better off emphasizing Trumpian incompetence. Determining the constitutionality of some act requires a law degree, but incompetence is something we all recognize — and there is a lot of it.
Let's start now:
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling. -
The reaction from Congress:
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/24/atlantic-yemen-signal-hegseth-jeffrey-goldberg
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Mike Waltz may end up being the fall guy.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/24/mike-waltz-signal-chat-resign-00246541
How many Scaramuccis would it be if he gets the ax?
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Hegseth denies Goldberg’s account of what happened. After the administration basically confirmed that it really did happen.
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/24/hegseth-trump-atlantic-yemen-houthis-text-war-plan
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@kluurs Yea, she posted "You've got to be kidding me!" on X with a link to Goldberg's Atlantic article.
CNN came up with a video montage of some of the folks who were in the Signal chat group and their past comments about her email server. The comments haven't aged well, to say the least.
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Valuable info for the Europeans.
If Europe wasn’t already on notice, the extraordinary leak of deliberations by JD Vance and other top-level Trump administration officials over a strike against the Houthis in Yemen was another sign that it has a target on its back.
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Ouch.
Several days after top national security officials accidentally included a reporter in a Signal chat about bombing Houthi sites in Yemen, a Pentagon-wide advisory warned against using the messaging app, even for unclassified information.
"A vulnerability has been identified in the Signal messenger application," begins the department-wide email, dated March 18, obtained by NPR.
The memo continues, "Russian professional hacking groups are employing the 'linked devices' features to spy on encrypted conversations." It notes that Google has identified Russian hacking groups who are "targeting Signal Messenger to spy on persons of interest."
Moreover there was a memo in 2023 obtained by NPR warning of using Signal for using any non-public official information.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/25/nx-s1-5339801/pentagon-email-signal-vulnerability
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But wait! There’s more!
President Trump's Ukraine and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, when he was included in a group chat with more than a dozen other top administration officials — and inadvertently, one journalist — on the messaging app Signal, a CBS News analysis of open-source flight information and Russian media reporting has revealed.
Russia has repeatedly tried to compromise Signal, a popular commercial messaging platform that many were shocked to learn senior Trump administration officials had used to discuss sensitive military planning.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-envoy-steve-witkoff-signal-text-group-chat-russia-putin/
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Goldberg has released the entire chat. Redacting one person's name even though technically Ratcliffe said that person is not undercover.
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Waltz takes responsibility. And gets some insults in for good measure.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/25/mike-waltz-signal-fox-interview-00249896
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Of course people are wondering why Waltz had Goldberg's number in his phone to begin with.
The editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, has nothing to say about his relationship with national security adviser Mike Waltz, who inadvertently added him to a group chat about the United States' highly sensitive plans to bomb Yemen days ago.
"I'm just not going to comment on my relationship with Mike Waltz," Goldberg told CBS News in an interview Wednesday.
Waltz claimed he has "never met" with Goldberg, wouldn't be able to pick him out of a police lineup and trashed his reputation, calling him "the bottom scum of journalists." But photos surfaced online earlier Wednesday of the two together at an event at the French Embassy in 2021.
"If your eyeballs see us together, then I guess your eyeballs are seeing us together," Goldberg said of the photos.
Waltz has also suggested that Goldberg somehow added himself to the Signal chat that also included Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — or that some other technical mishap that led to the breach. Goldberg called the claims "crazy."
"This is what happened on March 11," Goldberg continued. "I got a message request from Michael Waltz. I accepted the message request. That's what happened." Signal only allows users to add people to chat groups by phone number, QR code or username of the person they wish to add. The Atlantic story published Wednesday included a screenshot that showed Waltz as administrator and "JG" as a member of the group chat, named the "Houthi PC small group."
"If I'm such a nefarious character," Goldberg said, "why am I in Mike Waltz's phone? Why does he have my phone number? Why is he including me in this chat? And what do you expect a reporter to do when you learn interesting information about the way an administration is contemplating military action? What do they really think is going to happen?"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-goldberg-atlantic-mike-waltz-signal-group-chat-yemen/
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And the clown car rolls on…from Wired…
A Venmo account under the name “Michael Waltz,” carrying a profile photo of the national security adviser and connected to accounts bearing the names of people closely associated with him, was left open to the public until Wednesday afternoon. A WIRED analysis shows that the account revealed the names of hundreds of Waltz’s personal and professional associates, including journalists, military officers, lobbyists, and others—information a foreign intelligence service or other actors could exploit for any number of ends, experts say..
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