Trump's Signalgate denials not impressing non-MAGA
By Ross Douthat / The New York Times
“It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up” is a horrible cliché of Washington, D.C., journalism, but nonetheless it fits the Signal scandal that engulfed the Trump administration this past week.
The apparently unwitting inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, in high-level national security preparations for a strike against the Houthis, is both a great story and a grave embarrassment. But it’s not nearly as fundamentally damaging as the wall-to-wall coverage might suggest.
The Trump White House’s reflexive attempt to attack the messenger, on the other hand, is an illustration of the new administration’s biggest political problem: its difficulty in speaking to anyone who isn’t already invested in its cause.
The scandal itself belongs to the world of Donald Trump’s first term, when an administration took power unprepared and stumbled through various chaotic episodes that yielded similarly stumblebum attempts to take the White House down. The artistic touchstone for these follies was the Coen brothers’ mordant comedy “Burn After Reading,” a Washington movie about hapless people blundering their way through an imagined world of international skulduggery.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/douthat-trumps-signalgate-denials-not-impressing-non-maga/