still remember the old phone in the farmhouse hall of my childhood, with its wind-up handle. It chirruped constantly, like a big chicken begging for attention.
After the Second World War, farming districts in New Zealand had ‘party lines’, a telephone system which connected several telephone subscribers on the same land line. This worked fine, as long as neighbours answered as soon as they heard their ring code, didn’t hog the line or listen to other people’s conversations.
My grandfather grew irritated with one notoriously nosey neighbour known for eavesdropping. After a loud click, mid-conversation, would come her distinctively heavy breathing, her cat yowling in the background.
Grandad was a calm sort of bloke, but one day, he snapped.
“Mrs Snodgrass, will you stop listening to my calls!!”
“Oooh, I am not!” she spluttered, before hanging up indignantly.
Dear old Snodders’ grasp of OPSEC (Operations security) was not high, comparable, perhaps, to that of a Trump hire US national security adviser. ‘Signal-gate’, the second to last scandal of the Trump administration, must be the most revealingly imbecilic security blunder ever.
In case the state of your Kiwisaver has driven these events from your mind, a reminder. US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz accidentally invited a journalist to join a White House group chat debating whether or not to bomb Yemen. And it wasn’t just any journalist, but the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. The group also included White House big-wigs like Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Goldberg, who thought he was being pranked, watched the man calling himself Pete Hegseth declare the group to be ‘clean on OPSEC’, before sharing excruciatingly secret details of the launch timings of F-18 aircraft, MQ-9 drones and Tomahawk missiles. (‘Clean on OPSEC’ t-shirts are available from a range of online retailers, if you are interested.)
As a still skeptical Goldberg sat in his car at a grocery store, he heard news reports of bombs exploding precisely when ‘Hegseth’ said they would.
“That [was] pretty good proof that, you know, if somebody is spoofing this, then it’s not some media-gadfly organization,” he told Atlantic podcaster Hanna Rosin. “It’s a foreign intelligence service that had knowledge of the US strikes – seems implausible. But then the part that really struck me as very Trump administration was the sharing of all these emojis: flag emojis, muscle emojis, fire emojis.”
Goldberg withdrew from the groupchat, was surprised when nobody asked who he was, and published his story.
Title: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.
Some admired the way Goldberg handled the scoop, which had, after all, fallen onto his lap like a dim-witted cat.
“Jeff was very, very careful the first time about not revealing anything that might be sensitive,” a former colleague told The Washington Post admiringly. “And then when sort of faced with what appears to have been an avalanche of lies from administration officials, he brought out the actual text and was in a position to say, ‘Well, actually,’ and, to prove it.”
Thoughtful observers pointed out that Goldberg seemed disinterested in the human cost of the raid. According to Yemen’s health ministry, US bombs had blown 53 people to smithereens, including five children; UNICEF confirmed the deaths of at least two children.
There are so many layers to this scandal. There’s the jaw-dropping approach to basic security protocols – “should we ban [mobile phones] for US national security advisers under the age of 60?’, asked The Guardian’s Marina Hyde. When Hillary Clinton posted “You have got to be kidding me,” you couldn’t blame her.
You don’t have to be a lawyer or historian to question the use of an auto-deleting mobile messaging app while blowing people up under the banner of the US state (aren’t there record-retention laws or something?) Then there’s the shockingly puerile celebration of a raid which killed children, with fist, fire and flag emojis. When you hit a home run, that’s a win, my dude-bros. When you blow up an apartment building to kill one guy using millions of dollars’ worth of advanced weaponry, I’d call it something else.
Signal-gate was two long weeks ago. Yes, I know, it already seems like old news.
Trump is throwing bombs again, this time into the foundations of global trade. The world has, he foams, been ripping America off, and the world must pay. He’s looking at you, me, Ukrainian soldiers, Richie Rich Lesotho garment workers and those blood sucking subantarctic penguins. (Has anyone heard of Heard Island?)
Amid claims that a chatbot devised his nutty tariff-generating equations, the president is playing golf, as I write this, hosting the first US event of 2025 on the Saudi-owned LIV Golf tour. “No doubt it’ll be fun,” notes Marina Hyde waspishly, “discussing falling oil prices with whoever is over from Riyadh for the event.”
• Jenny Nicholls
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
