Signalgate's classic "status" defense

It also works with dishwashers!

Oops! A Cabinet-level group planned an attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen using an app that…you know the rest. My rhetorical chimes rang afterward when various officials (what’s a collective noun for this group?) deployed a classic status defense.

I explained this 3,000-year-old theory in an earlier post about dishwasher loading. Ancient geniuses devised the status defense to get us all out of trouble.

The Trump administration and their allies used it in textbook fashion, deploying themselves successively to each of the four defensive trenches: Fact, Definition, Quality, and Relevance. The group started with…

1. Facts. If the facts work in your favor, push them hard. If the facts don’t work, Trump mentor Roy Cohn famously said, “Always deny.” The White House and their allies used the all-purpose denial word “hoax” everywhere they could. It’s a term you rarely hear outside of a scandal-ridden public office. What teenager ever terms a “hoax” the bag of weed a parent found under his mattress? If the facts don’t work—and it rapidly became clear that, yeah, the Signal group did invite a journalist to their when-and-how-we’re-going-to-bomb-the-Houthis chat—then the defendants must fall back to…

2. Definition. The Atlantic headline originally read, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and just about everybody else denied they were war plans. That lying, cheating invitee, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg! Sure, the chat happened to include the precise times of attacks along with detailed instruments of war like fighter jets and drones. But those aren’t war plans! In a later story, the Atlantic called them “Attack Plans,” and the White House declared definitional victory.

   

   Still, those high-level types were using an unsecured app that their own government had warned them against, and they did accidentally invite a journalist into that chat, so. War plans, attack plans, it still isn’t a great look, competence-wise. Time to fall back to the next trench…
   

3. Quality. This trench essentially offers the "it wasn’t that bad” argument. The accusation is true, the redefinition didn’t work, but the crime was a mere…mistake. And that’s the word that went out from the PR war room. Everybody makes mistakes! My favorite Trump avatar, Maria Elvira Salazar, dutifully repeated the word to CNN until the anchor insisted on followup questions. “I gave you that soundbite already!” she snapped. Oh, no, now we have to retreat to…

4. Relevance. In courtrooms, the relevance defense has to do with a claimant’s standing or the court’s jurisdiction. In politics, it comes down to “Who cares?” And that’s what most of the Trump soundbiters are doing now. It was a perfect attack! The bad guys got killed! And Americans aren’t interested in whether top officials texted war-plan (sorry attack-plan) emojis over their smartphones.

Fact, Definition, Quality, Relevance. Remember this, youngsters, when a parent finds that bag of weed.

1) “What makes you think that’s marijuana?”

2) “How do you define ‘drugs’? Isn’t your nightly cocktail a drug?”

3) “I haven’t smoked it, so no harm done!”

4) “What are you doing searching my room? That evidence should be thrown out! (But can I keep some?)”

Disclosure: I use this example for theoretical purposes and do not endorse juvenile pot smoking or hiding things. In any case, young people, you can always follow our leaders’ words: “Hoax! Witch hunt!” Then see if there’s an opening in the Doge team or National Security Council. They can use your emoji help.