Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Leigh Ann Caldwell, coming at you via email. If you prefer, you can find me on Signal, too. I’m LAC.89. Today, news and notes on the group chat heard ’round the world, and the administration’s increasingly tortured defense of its national security team coordinating missile strikes on a consumer messaging app with Jeff Goldberg, and their ongoing refusal to admit any wrongdoing, etcetera. This dance is not only prolonging an embarrassing news cycle—it’s also causing some Republicans to worry about the lasting damage. More on all that, below the fold.

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But first…

Thune’s unruly Republicans: Senate Majority Leader John Thune has a bigger majority than House Speaker Mike Johnson, but is having his own difficulty corralling all his members behind a single budget framework. Republicans, of course, all have their own red lines. For instance, Senator Ron Johnson wants more spending cuts than the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion that the House proposed, and told me earlier this week he wants spending at pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, other fiscal hawks, including Senator Rand Paul, are opposed to adding a measure that would lift the nation’s borrowing limit, which they argue would be an open invitation to spend more money. Still other Republicans, including leadership, say making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent is a requirement for them—something hard-liners oppose on account of the multitrillion-dollar cost.And things may really get ugly when the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, decides how to interpret the Senate rules for the budget reconciliation bill. Republican leadership wants her to rule that permanently extending the 2017 tax cuts—which cost $4.5 trillion over 10 years—would actually cost zero dollars, because the tax cuts are currently in place. (The argument is that the extension should be treated not as a new “cut,” but as simply the new baseline.) If she does indeed rule that way, it would break institutional and budgetary precedent, one Senate rules expert said. If she doesn’t, a lobbyist told me, Senate Republicans will likely vote to overrule her—which would itself massively change the Senate as an institution. In Sunday’s edition, however, I reported that Senate leadership was already having conversations with the White House to set expectations over the parliamentarian ruling so that Trump doesn’t pressure them to “go nuclear”—all of which suggests that Republicans don’t want to overrule the parliamentarian. I’ll continue to dig into this.

Lunagate: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is single-handedly challenging Republican leadership for refusing to put forward her bill to allow new parents to vote by proxy for 12 weeks after birth. Luna, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, missed weeks of work last Congress because of the difficult birth of her first child. Johnson says her measure is unconstitutional, and is trying to dissuade her from forcing a vote on her privileged resolution—which she can bring up at any time, now that she has the support of at least 218 members, most of them Democrats. According to Punchbowl, Johnson tried to discourage members from helping Luna, telling the conference that her procedural tactic was for the minority rather than the majority. Luna says she tried to work with Johnson, but he wouldn’t bring the bill up, and she’s not backing down. (She won’t force the vote today because many Democrats are in Arizona for the funeral of Rep. Raúl Grijalva.)

Now, for the main event…

Barbarians at Signalgate

As the Trump group chat debacle stretches into its third day, the White House is ostensibly standing by its men, and Republicans are standing by the administration. In private, of course, some national security–minded Republicans are worried, aggrieved, disappointed, and vexed.

Leigh Ann Caldwell

As with pretty much everything in Trump 2.0, most Republicans are publicly standing by the administration (or at least staying silent) over its latest scandal—you know, the one where the president’s top national security team swapped sensitive and possibly classified information about upcoming military operations over a Signal group chat in which they accidentally included The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg. But while most are following Trump’s standard deny-dismiss-excuse-deflect playbook, a faction of national security–type Hill Republicans are privately expressing discomfort with the episode. During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on “worldwide threats” on Tuesday, Republicans didn’t broach the Signal chat with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe. The two offered obfuscation and plausible deniability when Democrats asked them repeatedly about it, saying they did “not recall” whether the chat included any operational details. (This was before The Atlantic published the full contents of the chat this morning, operational details and all.) In the classified session later that day, however, Senate Republicans expressed concern, with Senators Todd Young and Mike Rounds quizzing Gabbard and Ratcliffe about the chat. They and others said the testimony eroded public trust in the intelligence community, even as both stuck to their talking points and offered no additional explanation, according to sources.

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For his part, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz took responsibility for creating the group chat at issue, but told Fox News that he had no idea how Goldberg had manifested in his phone’s contacts. (He hinted at some nefarious explanation.) For what it’s worth, during his time in the House, Waltz was known as the sort of member who didn’t need to be coddled by his staff, required little policy prep, and often communicated directly with reporters. The National Security Council—which Waltz leads—will undertake its own investigation, and no one expects it to produce any insights. Meanwhile, with the scandal rolling into its third day, scrutiny is turning toward Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Of course, the SecDef was a weak civilian leader of the military from day one: Most members of Congress, including many Republicans, thought the Fox News weekend host with an alleged drinking problem was unqualified and unfit for the role. Now, top Democrats are calling for him to resign or be fired, and some Republicans are sighing in disbelief. Trump is standing by his men—admitting no wrong, blaming someone else, confusing matters, and rallying the base in a show of support. He’s even dusted off his own defense from his classified documents case. As you’ll recall, he said he could declassify documents just by thinking about doing so. Likewise, the administration and participants in the chat are now insisting that the Signal discussion of timing, relevant weapons systems, and targeting information pertaining to an attack on Yemen was not actually classified. One Republican intelligence expert said this was an effort to protect the chat participants from legal ramifications. But this person added that declassifying the kind of information in the chat—or just never labeling it classified, if that’s what actually happened—raises questions about military judgment, which is why Hegseth is coming under fire. Congress is unlikely to probe the episode extensively, especially now that the watchdog group American Oversight has filed a lawsuit against Hegseth and others for allegedly violating federal records law by using Signal. Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, the chair of the Armed Services Committee, said he will send a letter with his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Jack Reed, to the Defense Department Inspector General (one of many acting inspectors general, since Trump fired at least 17 of them in his first week) asking for an expedited review. (The apoplectic but largely powerless Democrats could open their own investigations with limited tools to compel testimony or receive information.) Anyway, don’t expect House Republicans to do anything. In a way, Speaker Mike Johnson prepared for a scenario like this months ago, when he removed Rep. Mike Turner as chair of the House Intelligence Committee and replaced him with a MAGA-aligned member, Rick Crawford, minimizing any chance that his conference could buck Trump on national security matters. Turner, a centrist Republican institutionalist with deep reverence for the intelligence community, forbade the use of Signal among committee members when he ran Intelligence—he assumed that, given his access to the most classified briefings, his phone was compromised. And when a phone is compromised, Signal is not protected. (Chinese hackers targeted Trump’s and Vance’s phones last year.)

The New Normal

All of this has placed Republicans in an awkward spot, to put it mildly, given that they’ve spent much of the past decade attacking Democrats for intelligence breaches and failures. Hegseth, as The New York Times pointed out, was a vociferous critic of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct some official business, telling Fox News in 2016 that “any national security official … would be fired on the spot … and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information.” Republicans spent years attacking Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, then a member of the Intelligence Committee, for hiring a campaign aide with ties to Chinese intelligence. (Swalwell severed ties with Christine Fang after the government briefed him on the situation.)

When the Abbey Gate bombing killed 13 service members during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, then-President Biden never admitted any intelligence failure to anticipate the attack. He never fired anyone in its aftermath, either. That moment became a turning point in his popularity, and a key reference for Republicans attacking his competence. Of course, Republicans mostly didn’t apply the same standards when Trump was accused of mishandling classified documents, reams of which he stashed at Mar-a-Lago during his post-presidency. “It used to be where people who had positions of high public responsibility, when you screwed up, the captain went down with the ship, apologized. There was a certain respect for that,” one Republican senator said. “We’ve lost all that.” Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally outside the White House on January 6, 2021, told me he didn’t yet know the details of Signalgate, but that “if you talk about any disclosure, intentional or unintentional, [of] classified information, it’s a serious issue.” He then pivoted his attention to his Democratic colleague Rep. Eugene Vindman, who served on the National Security Council staff with his brother Alex Vindman during the first Trump administration, when the two played a role in the president’s first impeachment over Ukraine. Van Orden said Rep. Vindman should be “thrown out of Congress on his ass and his brother should be in jail” for, he said, “intentionally” conspiring to release classified information. (Alex Vindman has denied disclosing classified information, and counter-accused the White House of leaking classified information against him.) Van Orden said he refuses to shake Rep. Vindman’s hand.

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