Trump National Security Adviser’s Latest Signal Defense Makes No Sense

National security adviser Mike Waltz is grasping at straws to defend the fact that he invited The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group chat about bombing Yemen.

During an interview on Fox News last week, Waltz attempted to explain away the enormous bluster by claiming that the editor’s number had simply been “sucked in” to his phone.

“I’m sure everybody out there has had a contact where you, it was, it said one person, and then a different phone number,” Waltz told the network.

“But you never talked to him before, so how is the number on your phone?” pressed Fox’s Laura Ingraham.

“Well, if you have somebody else’s contact, and then somehow it gets sucked in. It gets sucked in,” Waltz said.

That response—which comes from an individual who is supposed to be the pinnacle of American expertise on national security matters—completely misunderstands how cell phones work. Lest it need explanation, cell phones do not “suck in” phone numbers; instead, numbers are inserted by the people who use the device.

“This isn’t The Matrix,” Goldberg told NBC News Sunday, responding to Waltz’s comments. “Phone numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones. I don’t know what he’s talking about there.

“My phone number was in his phone because my phone number is in his phone,” Goldberg continued. “He’s telling everyone that he’s never met me or spoken to me. That’s simply not true.”

Democratic Representative Sean Casten was a little more blunt, branding Waltz as “full of shit.”

“If what he says is true, then he is choosing to discuss classified information on a platform where—in his own telling—he has no control over who is listening in,” Casten tweeted Sunday afternoon, reposting a clip of Goldberg’s interview. “Either he’s a liar or a traitor. Pick one.”

Waltz was the singular admin for a group chat created earlier this month on the retail app Signal in which over a dozen senior Trump administration officials discussed seemingly classified information regarding an imminent attack on Yemen. To make matters worse, Waltz blindly added Goldberg, who reported on the exchange last week. Donald Trump has continued to back Waltz publicly, but in private, the president was reportedly “mad” and “suspicious” that Waltz had Greenberg’s contact in his phone to begin with.

Former intelligence officials have warned that America’s adversaries “undoubtedly” already have the chat records, largely thanks to the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff’s physical presence in Russia when he was added to the chat.

In an interview with MeidasTouch Tuesday, former national security adviser Susan Rice said that Witkoff’s use of Signal while in Russia basically hand-delivered news of the attack to the Kremlin hours before it took place.

“Russians have whatever Witkoff was doing or saying on his personal cell phone,” Rice told the podcast.

The Signal fiasco also angered U.S. military pilots, who claimed that such a careless leak had blatantly put the lives of service members at risk. Dozens of interviewed Navy and Air Force pilots told The New York Times that the Trump administration’s operational security blunder had not only upended decades of military doctrine but had also shattered pilots’ trust that the Pentagon would prioritize their safety.

“The whole point about aviation safety is that you have to have the humility to understand that you are imperfect, because everybody screws up. Everybody makes mistakes,” Lieutenant John Gadzinski, a retired Navy F-14 pilot who flew combat missions from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, told the Times. “But ultimately, if you can’t admit when you’re wrong, you’re going to kill somebody because your ego is too big.”

President Trump continues to pivot endlessly on tariffs, badly destabilizing the very market he claims he’s trying to balance.

“On the tariffs that you’re planning … you’re expected to hit something like 10 to 15 countries, is that right?” a reporter asked Trump on Sunday, referring to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s description of the countries with the largest trade deficits with the U.S. as the “Dirty 15.”

“I don’t know who told you 10 or 15 countries,” Trump replied.

“Well we heard that.”

“But you didn’t hear it from me.”

“How many countries will be in that initial chunk?” the reporter pressed.

“You start with all countries, so let’s see what happens,” Trump said, dramatically expanding his threat.

“There are many countries.… If you look at the history, and you look at what’s happened to us.… Go to Asia, and you take a look at every single country in Asia, what they’ve done to the United States in trade,” Trump continued vaguely. “I wouldn’t say anybody has treated us fair, or nicely.”

Trump plans to drop these reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday, which he is framing as “Liberation Day.” But this spiteful trade war will only hurt American consumers and manufacturers already dealing with inflation, potentially leading the country into a recession. But Trump has already admitted he doesn’t care.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has revealed that the prerequisites for deporting Venezuelan migrants to Nayib Bukele’s Salvadoran mega-prison are extremely arbitrary. 

Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union on Sunday showed that the tattoos ICE is using to identify these men as Tren de Aragua gang members are images like the Jordan “Jumpman” logo, a crown, a train, and a clock, among other things. 

“All it takes to be sent to rot in prison in El Salvador is 1) having a tattoo an ICE officer says is a ‘gang tattoo’ and 2) displaying ‘logos,’ ‘symbols,’ or clothes an ICE officer says are gang signs,” American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote on X. “In order for ICE to declare someone an ‘Alien Enemy,’ ICE must first determine they are a Venezuelan over age 14, and then second find 8 points on a scoring guide they made up… This checklist is shocking. A person can be declared an ‘Alien Enemy’ based ONLY on communications with someone ICE says is a member, and nothing more.”

These flimsy requirements have already led to multiple innocent men being detained and deported. Frengel Reyes Mota, who was awaiting an asylum appointment and had no criminal record in Venezuela or the U.S., was snatched up over multiple administrative errors in his file. And last Tuesday Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, openly bragged that ICE had been picking up multiple innocent migrants in their raids, calling them “collateral arrests.”

These phony deportations have become a defining action of the early days of the second Trump administration, reinforcing the contempt and disregard that they hold for the basic tenets of our legal system, such as due process. 

Elon Musk couldn’t help but complain about the immense personal cost of being the shadow president during a rally Sunday ahead of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election.

“The radical left are saying somehow we’re stealing Social Security—like, first of all, like [stammers] I don’t need the money, OK?” he said.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has recently arrived at the Social Security Administration, where Musk claims they are seeking to root out alleged fraud. But what Musk claims is waste is more often not, and DOGE’s plans to rewrite the agency’s code could take months and risk collapsing the system on which millions of Americans rely. In any case, Musk was far more worried about his own money.

“In fact, it’s costing me a lot to be in this job,” Musk said. “You had Tim Walz dancing onstage showing a chart on Tesla stock, which is a really awful thing for him to do.”

On his tour of Republican districts, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz had trotted out Tesla’s tanking stock, saying that watching Musk’s value plummet gave him “a little boost” during the day.

Musk seems to have taken Walz’s jab as fighting words, and claimed that people were trying to put “massive pressure” on him and Tesla, in an attempt to get him to stop DOGE. The billionaire bureaucrat added that it was a “big deal” that his Tesla stock “went roughly in half.”

“So, not only is it—I’m not getting paid, I’m definitely not stealing money and would never get away with it, but the value of my Tesla stock is in half! So this is a very expensive job, is what I’m saying,” Musk said.

Musk had previously whined about Walz’s Tesla teasing Thursday night, during an exclusive interview on Fox News, calling the vice presidential former candidate “a big jerk.”

“He was overjoyed,” Musk said. “What an evil thing to do. What a creep, what a jerk. Who derives joy from that?”

Walz responded to Musk’s moaning in a post on X Sunday.

“Elon, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stop making fun of your stock when you take your hands off social security,” Walz said.

Musk seems increasingly concerned with painting his critics as evil and unsympathetic to his plight as DOGE czar—but wasn’t his problem that everyone was too sensitive these days? Does he actually expect sympathy as he runs around waving a chainsaw and laughing about cutting essential services and putting thousands of people out of work? Who derives joy from that?

The rally Sunday was Musk’s latest attempt to interfere with Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election. The billionaire bureaucrat has already poured millions of dollars behind the conservative candidate, hoping to establish a conservative majority on the court set to decide questions about abortion, voting rights, congressional maps, and his own lawsuit about opening Tesla dealerships in the state. Musk did a so-called million-dollar giveaway at the rally to spokespeople for his petition against activist judges.

Donald Trump is “not joking” about running for a third term.

In a Sunday morning phone call with NBC News’s Kristin Welker, the president insisted that he was very serious about potentially circumventing the Constitution in order to lead the country for another four years after his second term ends.

“I know you’re joking about this, but I’ve been talking to a lot of your allies. They say they’re very serious,” Welker said, referring to Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon. “He says he’s really seriously looking at potential plans that would allow you to serve a third term.”

Trump replied that he could seek another term on the basis of his popularity alone, claiming to have the “highest poll numbers of any Republican for the last 100 years,” though that’s blatantly untrue.

Welker then pressed if Trump had been presented with the possibility of staying in office, since he wasn’t ruling it out.

“Well, there are plans. There are—not plans,” Trump said. “There are, there are methods which you could do it, as you know.”

Welker said that one method she had heard discussed among Trump allies would be for Vice President JD Vance to run at the top of the ticket in 2028 with Trump as his number two, before passing the torch to Trump once they’d won.

“Well, that’s one. But there are others too. There are others,” Trump said.

“There are others? Can you tell me another?” Welker pressed.

“No,” Trump replied.

“OK. So, but, but, sir, I’m hearing—you don’t sound like you’re joking. I’ve heard you joke about this a number of times,” Welker said.

“No, no I’m not joking. I’m not joking,” the president said, adding that it’s “far too early” for him to discuss such a move.

But while speaking to reporters on Air Force One over the weekend, Trump again raised the idea that “people” were prompting him to run again.

“I have had more people ask me to have a third term, which in a way is a fourth term because the other election—the 2020 election—was totally rigged,” Trump said. “I just don’t want the credit for the second because Biden was so bad, did such a bad job, and I think that’s one of the reasons that I’m popular.… I think we’ve had the best almost hundred days of any president.”

The seemingly far-fetched and unconstitutional idea would require the consent of most of the country—if Trump attempted to formally run for president again.

As outlined in Article 5 of the Constitution, any such change requires at least two-thirds of the Senate and the House to agree on the modification, with that change then requiring ratification by a minimum of three-quarters of states in the nation.

A second approach to repealing the term-limiting amendment could be via a Constitutional Convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

Trump has repeatedly pitched the idea that he could stay in office after 2028.

The MAGA leader would be 82 years old in 2028—the same age that President Joe Biden was when he left office—and that’s unlikely to play well with an American public that is increasingly tired of being led by the elderly.

Still, that hasn’t kept conservatives from trying to keep Trump in power. Republican lawmakers have already started to pave the way for the unconstitutional takeover. In January, Representative Andy Ogles filed a joint resolution to amend the Constitution’s Twenty-Second Amendment so that the executive branch leader could serve “for up to but no more than three terms.”

Donald Trump has successfully bullied yet another big law firm into doing his bidding—but this time, Trump didn’t even have to threaten them.

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom agreed to a slate of major concessions to Trump Friday, after the president targeted two other majors firms with executive orders in retaliation for their alleged “obvious partisan representations,” use of DEI hiring practices, and affiliation with lawyers who had investigated Trump in the past.  

Trump announced on Truth Social that the firm has offered $100 million worth of pro bono services and agreed to “not engage in illegal DEI discrimination and preferences.” 

Skadden, Arps’s decision to preemptively fold to Trump follows two lawsuits from WilmerHale and Jenner & Block earlier Friday challenging the Trump administration over a pair of retaliatory executive orders threatening to suspend the firms’ security clearances, end their federal contracts, and bar federal employees from engaging with firm members.

Trump hadn’t actually issued an executive order targeting Skadden, Arps, but last week, Elon Musk mentioned it in a post on X, saying the firm needed to “stop” litigation against conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. 

According to Trump, the firm said it would “not deny representation to clients, such as members of politically disenfranchised groups,” including in pro bono work, due to the “personal political views of individual lawyers.” The firm also agreed to fund no fewer than five fellows to projects related to “Assisting Veterans; ensuring fairness in our Justice System; combatting Antisemitism, and other similar types of projects.” 

In a statement shared by Trump, Skadden, Arps executive partner Jeremy London said that his firm had “engaged proactively” with the Trump administration. 

A statement from Skadden, Arps ironically “declared the Firm’s strong commitment to ending the Weaponization of the Justice System and the Legal Profession.” It seems clear that Trump’s blatant attempts to bully law firms for defending clients and causes he dislikes or employing lawyers he’s deemed as enemies is definitionally the weaponization of the justice system and legal profession. 

An open letter to the legal community, organized by Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings and signed by 21 state attorneys general, urged firms to “refuse to bow to illegal and unconstitutional threats of retribution for having the temerity to represent clients and cases opposing the administration.” 

“Lawyers are not spectators to the Constitution; we are its agents. We cannot allow the President to scare law firms and lawyers into silence,” the letter, which was released Friday, read. 

Last week, Skadden, Arps associate Rachel Cohen submitted a conditional resignation in a scathing letter urging her firm to stand against Trump’s attempts to intimidate major law firms. Her letter came after another firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, caved to the administration and offered $40 million in free legal services, revoked their own DEI practices, and sold one of their own lawyers down the river, simply because he’d once investigated Trump for alleged financial crimes. The Trump administration rescinded its order against the firm, and in light of the huge pro bono commitment from Skadden, Arps, it appears Paul, Weiss made away like bandits. 

Another law firm, Perkins Coie, which was targeted for representing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, challenged a similar order earlier this month and was granted a temporary injunction against the Trump administration’s threat to revoke clearances and access. 

A federal judge in Massachusetts has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting people to third countries.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy issued a temporary restraining order Friday requiring the government to provide written notice and an opportunity for detainees to apply for protection before deporting them to a third country.

The ruling is a clear rebuke of the Trump administration’s deal with El Salvador, the recent deportation of Venezuelans to the megaprison there, as well as previous cases where the government has deported immigrants to countries where they had no connection, with no advance notice or ability to raise a legal challenge.

Assuming the administration abides by the ruling, it should at least slow down the mass deportations, which are now beginning to target legal immigrants who have had their visas revoked. The government has also swept up hosts of immigrants and sent them to El Savador for flimsy reasons, claiming that having tattoos reflected gang affiliation.

In one case, a paperwork error led to a Venezuelan national being deported to El Salvador, and in another, a tattoo of a soccer ball was enough to justify a deportation. For now, cases like these will at least be slowed pending a legal appeal, and MAGA officials like Kristi Noem won’t be using El Salvador as a propaganda backdrop again, at least for the near future. Is a more definitive, permanent rebuke of the Trump administration’s legally questionable immigration policy coming?

Vice President JD Vance spent his time in Greenland doubling down on the Trump administration’s threats to take the territory from Denmark.

“Our message to Denmark is very simple,” Vance said at a press conference in Greenland on Friday. “You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland, you have underinvested in the people of Greenland, and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful land mass filled with incredible people. That has to change.

“The president said we have to have Greenland, and I think that we do have to be more serious about the security of Greenland,” Vance continued. “We respect the self-determination of the people of Greenland, but my argument to them is: I think that you’d be a lot better coming under the United States’ security umbrella than you have been under Denmark’s security umbrella. Because what Denmark’s security umbrella has meant is effectively they’ve passed it all off to brave Americans and hoped that we would pick up the tab.”

Vance traveled to Greenland—a Danish-controlled territory—with his wife, Usha, and national security adviser and Signalgate catalyst Mike Waltz, among others. No one in Greenland wanted to meet the group, forcing them to cancel all their events with locals, including a historic tour and a dogsled race.

Vance’s animosity highlights the Trump administration’s policy of “What have you done for me lately?” toward European allies, abandoning them on issues like Ukraine and challenging them on issues like Greenland, on the grounds that they have not committed equally to stopping the perceived threats of Russia and China.

In honor of Women’s History Month, Donald Trump weighed in Friday on an extremely inane question that plagues conservatives. 

During a press conference in the Oval Office, one reporter tried to lob Trump a softball question, asking, “What is a woman, and why is it important that we understand the difference between men and women?”

“Well it’s sort of easy to answer for me because a woman is someone who can have a baby under certain circumstances,” Trump replied. 

“A woman is a person who is much smarter than a man, I’ve always had … a woman is a person that doesn’t give a man even a chance of success,” Trump said, to some laughter.

“A woman is a person that in many cases has been treated very badly,” Trump added, referring to women who sometimes had transgender women on their sports teams. Trump banned trans women from playing women’s sports in an executive order.  

When it comes to treating women “very badly,” Trump is clearly speaking from experience. 

Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, battery, and defamation of author E. Jean Carroll in 2023. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan even went so far as to specifically clarify that the president did indeed “rape” Carroll based on the common definition of the word. In December, a federal appeals court shut down Trump’s request for a new trial. 

At least 27 other women have accused the president of sexual misconduct, according to Axios. Suddenly, his comment about the “certain circumstances” surrounding pregnancy reads as far more sinister than folksy. 

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order establishing the definition of “women” as adult human females and the definition of females as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” 

It is widely acknowledged that women can possess a range of reproductive organs and sex characteristics that don’t fit neatly into a binary, and that a person’s gender is not contingent on their sex. 

Despite Trump’s insistence that he was protecting women and children with his repeated attacks on transgender athletes, the issue he purports to address doesn’t actually exist. His administration is simply targeting the transgender community to score culture-war points, and provide a useful scapegoat from the criticism mounting against it. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s emphasis on transgender women has only made life less safe for all women by empowering violent transphobes intent on infringing on women’s right to privacy.

Elon Musk deleted an X post made early Friday morning offering two $1 million checks to Wisconsin voters attending a “talk” that he is giving in the state on Sunday amid a special election for a seat on the state’s Supreme Court.

The post is a reminder that Musk pushed a similar scheme ahead of the 2024 presidential election in battleground states, where he gave away $1 million each day to registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, from early October until Election Day in November. The plan was met with a legal challenge in Pennsylvania but was ultimately allowed to continue.

This time around, after facing criticism that his post may have violated election laws against paying people to vote, Musk deleted it. In a follow-up post, he sought to backtrack, saying he is offering two $1 million checks to two people attending the talk to be “spokesmen” for a petition against activist judges that he is touting. Only people who have signed the petition are allowed to attend the event.

The petition sparked legal controversy when Musk announced it last week, as signatories in Wisconsin are being paid $100 each to sign it and effectively hand over their personal information to Musk. The tech oligarch and fascism enthusiast has already spent $20 million to back conservative candidate Brad Schimel in the election.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court is set to weigh in on several issues with national implications, including the use of voter drop boxes in elections, abortion access, and redrawing congressional maps, and a Republican majority on the court would strengthen Trump and the MAGA agenda. Musk’s cash handouts are another brazen attempt by the billionaire to buy an election, and his deep pockets will probably insulate him from the possibility of any consequences.