The Best of the Worst Contest winner: "The Signal chat’s big takeaway? Trump has built an effective team.”
This week’s contest for “The Best of the Worst” op-ed columns or news stories is hardly a contest, as Marc A. Thiessen–the winner of the last contest–has done it again with a mind-boggling example of how blind ideology can blind a columnist or analyst to the most obvious facts, the truth right in front of them screaming to be acknowledged.
See Marc A. Thiessen, “The Signal chat’s big takeaway? Trump has built an effective team. Americans got a fly-on-the-wall view of a group working together to execute the president’s policy,” New York Times, April 2, 2025 (6:52 p.m.EDT).
Signalgate, the chat on the commercial platform Signal regarding the imminent bombing of targets in Yemen, was perhaps the greatest breach not only of operational security but also of national security information and communication systems in memory.
See Malcolm Nance, “Breach: The Great Trump Signal Screw-up!; SignalGate May Be the Greatest Breach in History – I Put on my NSA Hat to Tell You Why,” Special Intelligence, March 26, 2025.
Thiessen’s takeaway:
Amid the outrage over Signalgate, one thing should matter most: The text exchanges have given Americans a window into the inner workings of a highly competent national security team carrying out a successful military operation on the orders of a decisive U.S. president.
…
Nothing embarrassing was revealed, no military operations were compromised, and no Americans were killed. Trump’s team executed a successful military operation. There was no “Team Pete” or “Team Mike” or any daylight between them. There was only “Team Trump.”
Team Trump indeed! Conducting the greatest security breach in recent memory. It turns out that at least 20 other chats on Signal had dealt with sensitive national security information.
The protestation of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other national security officials that no classified information had been discussed in the Yemen or other chats was so ludicrous that one had to wonder about the basic intelligence of those making the claim.
As to whether anyone should be fired or disciplined for this massive security breach, Thiessen concludes:
The idea that anyone on Trump’s team should be fired for this minor incident is absurd. And it’s clear that the inadvertent disclosure was also a blessing in disguise, because it showed the world what a well-oiled national security team faithfully executing the president’s policies looks like.
For the implications of this “minor incident”, this “blessing in disguise”, see and listen to Malcolm Nance, above. Nance, a former intelligence officer, describes in chilling detail the devastating damage done to U.S. national security by the Signalgate breach.
Thiessen is the hands-down winner of this week’s contest, and with this week’s entry he has become the leading contender for the Best of the Worst Award for 2025.
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James Rowles is a former Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and professor of international law at other universities.
He studied the history of Nazi Germany at Stanford, and has studied and worked on human rights, judicial reform, and access to justice projects in many countries in Latin , Africa, the Middle East, and in Afghanistan and Russia. At Harvard Law School, he taught a course on “Law, Human Rights, and the Struggle for Democracy in Latin America”.
At the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS)OAS, he worked on human rights cases involving forced disappearances, executions, and torture in a number of authoritarian countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Recent Books by the Author
James P. Rowles, The Rape of American Democracy: Republican Actions and Democratic Failures, 2016-2021 (2024). Available on Amazon, and from IngramSpark by clicking on a link here.
James P. Rowles, Don’t Be Stupid. Pay Attention, Damn It! Advice for Undecided Voters and Voters Leaning Toward Trump (2024). Available on Amazon,and from IngramSpark by clicking on a link here.
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