THE SIGNAL FROM SIGNALGATE

SIGNALGATE sounds pointedly scandalous. But does it have the cachet of the earlier 'gates'? Here are some consequential ones—Watergate, Murdochgate, Abu Ghraibgate, Bibigate, Cablegate, Gaetzgate, Contragate, Choppergate and Coalgate (the last two from India). Wikipedia has a dynamic list of 286 events that are -gate suffixed, ranging from political shockers to frivolous hijinks.

- KAJAL BASU

For liberals, Signalgate—in which 18 US government topliners admitted the editor of an anti-Trump magazine, The Atlantic, into a high-security group chat on the Signal messaging app about impending US airstrikes on Yemen—is a determinant of the fundamental incompetence of the Trump administration. For Trumpistas, the event is not a scandal, much less a breach of security. But the administration is swimming against the tide on this. In an opinion poll, 76 percent of Americans, including 56 percent of Republicans, said that using Signal to discuss military plans was inappropriate.

The entire Trump team involved in the group chat and other Trump officials who circled the wagons around them joined in spinning the major leak into a storm in a teacup. They also began shooting the messenger, Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, as if he had trespassed by being a silent spectator in a group that he had been erroneously added to by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz.

This event is more than about a leak. It is about the stunning maladroitness of the topmost echelon of the Trump administration, that "emblematic array of knuckleheads and butterfingers", as David Remnick described them in The New Yorker.