Time to shut up about ‘Signalgate’

Watergate 2.0 it ain’t.
But no one denies that the texting leak in a group chat about an air attack on the Houthi terrorists was an embarrassing screw-up for the Trump administration.
N one seems to know yet exactly how Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg ended up being included in a secret Defense Department discussion about the pending military strike in Yemen.
Eighteen government officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and VP JD Vance were in on the group conversation, which was being held on Signal, an encrypted Internet communications network that government and media people rely on all the time.
The president was not on the chat, so he can’t be blamed by the liberal media for inadvertently adding the name of a prominent Trump-hating journalist to the list of participants.
Secretary Hegseth didn’t make the mistake, either. But national security adviser Mike Waltz did, and though he said he doesn’t know how it happened, he has taken responsibility for the goof up.
But owning up to the mistake was not good enough for the desperate Democrats in Congress and their pals in the media.
They’ve tried to blow up the accidental leak of unclassified but sensitive material to Goldberg into a major political scandal.
From all the political and media noise it has generated, you’d think Goldberg had been given privy to the details of General Eisenhower’s plans for D-Day or that he was learning how we were going to invade Iran in two days.
The chat was only about an air attack on Houthi missile sites in Yemen, like many others before it. But Democrats immediately called for heads to roll on Trump’s security team because of their incompetence – something they know a lot about.
At this point in SignalGate, or whatever the liberal media is calling it, Trump needs to take a cue from Ronald Reagan.

During the time my father was going through Iran-Contra, when the liberal press was calling for his impeachment, he handled it the smart way.
He decided to take full responsibility for the arms trafficking scandal. “It’s on me,” he basically said. He took the political heat – but then he and his administration stopped talking about it.
The Iran-Contra headlines faded away quickly after that and the liberal New York-DC media machine went on to find other things to criticize him for.
If President Trump and his people keep talking about Signal-gate, the media will keep talking about it. And keeping the issue alive in the media just opens the door to more questions – and new troubles.
SignalGate is nothing even close to Iran-Contra. It’s a 100% U.S. Prime Nothingburger.
President Trump called it “a minor glitch” – which it was — and said it won’t happen again. That should have been the end of it. “No harm, no foul,” as they say.
But we know the Democrats and the media will keep what President Trump called “a witch hunt” and a “distraction” in the news as long as possible.
That’s why the best thing Trump and everyone who works for him can do now is simply shut up about SignalGate.
If they are asked another question about the Houthi group chat by an enemy reporter or friendly one, they should just say, “Asked and answered. Next question?”

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.