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This episode of 'Straight White American Jesus' explores recent major political scandals, specifically the SignalGate scandal involving members of the Trump administration inadvertently adding journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat containing sensitive military information.
Brad and Dan analyze the implications of this incident on national security, foreign policy, and Trump's leadership. They also discuss how this reflects broader issues of competence and loyalty within the administration.
Additionally, they draw connections between this scandal and themes of Christian masculinity and governance models. The episode concludes with updates on related deportation scandals and reflections on sources of hope amidst current events.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus, good to be with you this week in light of some major scandals happening in American politics.
Here, as always, with my co-host.
Ann Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Good to be with you, Brad.
As you say, like another, I guess there's always a week of scandals, but this week is even more interesting than most.
It is, and, you know, we're going to get to it.
Before we do that, we got to start with one minute of levity and life.
So if you're not into levity or life, just hit the fast forward button here and we won't be offended.
So Dan, you've been playing dodge.
I just want to go over the kind of glow up that you're really, the midlife renaissance you have going on.
Like you're working out regularly.
You're on a dodgeball team playing at an intermediate level.
You go to metal concerts all the time.
An elite, intermediate level.
Yes, that's me.
And you've got new earrings this week.
Tell me about the earrings.
Well, yeah, so people know I wear earrings.
But the other day I was looking in the mirror and I was missing...
I have no idea how long I've been missing an earring.
It could have been months.
It could have been a week.
I don't know.
And I realized that I don't think I had any others.
And I was like, I don't know how long it's been since I actually changed.
I got new earrings and wearing...
And then I was like...
Who's going to notice?
My daughter, of course, noticed in like three seconds that I had new earrings in and accused me of accessorizing.
So I was like, fine, I'll own it.
I'll lean into it.
Like me in the cargo shorts and accessorizing with the earrings.
And then I had a student, like one random student who was like, you got new earrings.
Dude can't remember what we're supposed to read or like what we're talking about in class or anything like that.
But he noticed that.
Yeah, I'm blowing up the middle-aged renaissance thing, as you say.
You give me hope, because your kids are old enough now that there's obviously all these challenges that come with having a teenager and a tween, and I'm not making this out to sound like any stage of parenting is easy, but you've got a little bit more time to do stuff like that, and as somebody who's got tiny children, I'm like, okay, someday I'll be...
In a place where I can play dodgeball and go to metal concerts and be cool like Dan Miller.
I mean, I've still got my own limitations.
I went to a metal concert a couple weeks ago, and it was a really small venue, and so I could get really close to the band, which was cool, but there was this huge mosh pit that kind of took up the whole place.
My back is to it, but people kept slamming in to those of us standing there.
Yeah, I'm sore for like four days.
Was I moshing?
Nope, nope.
I'm just standing there.
I'm just the middle-aged guy standing there getting hit by, you know.
I would have been sore just watching.
I don't even know how you go into an environment like that.
I don't even know how you exist in that environment.
I... Anyway, we'll talk about it later.
I kind of want someday to go to like a heavy metal show with Brad Onishi and just like...
No, I mean...
Part of it is...
There's a longer thing here of like...
Neurodivergence and me not being able to process sound and noise well at all.
So the idea at age 40, whatever, going into this thing, I can't even imagine.
All right, here we go, folks.
Let's turn the page.
We are here, of course, to talk about SignalGate, the revelations that Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic was added to a signal chat that included...
top brass from the Trump cabinet and administration spy chiefs, including Tulsi Gabbard, head of the director of national intelligence, and John Radcliffe, the CIA director, I want to talk through that.
I feel like, Dan, I just want to say a couple things up front here.
We're recording a day earlier than normal.
It's actually Thursday because of a travel schedule and issue I have on Friday.
And this is all happening in real time.
And it's one of those moments where I feel like if we had had another day, I would have put together some really extensive notes in ways that I usually do.
So I'm hoping this is one of those weeks where you go to class.
You ever have this happen, Dan, where you teach class and you're like, I'm not that prepared.
I don't know what's going to happen.
And it ends up being the best class you had all semester because for some reason...
You're like, why do I ever bother preparing?
If only that would magically happen every time.
Yeah. Yep.
I know it.
So I'm not saying I'm not prepared.
I have read voluminous amount and was, as Dan will tell you, emailing him things at like 1 a.m. last night.
So it's not like we haven't done our homework.
But nonetheless, I'm hoping we'll see more analysis perhaps today and more kind of high-level reflection on this than normal.
Real quick, as you say, like the voluminous, we've just seen like the volume of stuff on this just keeps expanding.
And you talk about it being real-time.
It's like no matter what we say right now or what we would say tomorrow, within two days, it's just like...
It keeps blowing up.
And one of the dynamics we'll talk about, right, is the White House and spokespeople.
Oh, it's a hoax.
It's made up.
So then The Atlantic just releases more.
It's like, oh, hey, look, here's the part we hadn't released yet, but you called us liars.
And so here it is.
So, yeah, who knows where this goes?
But it's, yeah, evolving and ongoing.
So no matter how many notes you prepare, it's already kind of passe by the time we get a chance to actually sit down and talk about it.
So, yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
Walk us through it.
Well, no, no, no.
You're right.
And so the gist of this that I think everyone listening will know, hopefully, is that the National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, who's really like, you know, Dan, he's just trying to live up to the Mike Flynn legacy, I think.
I mean, you know, I mean, Mike Flynn, big legacy as NS.
So now we got Mike Waltz, who used to be a congressperson in Florida.
He adds Jeff Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to the chat.
Goldberg releases this early this week, and it's a bombshell.
It's the scoop of the year, perhaps.
And everybody loses their mind.
The White House and others said no classified...
Well, Gabbard and Ratcliffe said there was no classified information here.
Pete Hegseth, in a yelling rant on a tarmac, said that Jeffrey Goldberg was peddling hoaxes like he has his whole career.
So in light of all that, Goldberg released...
Even more of the text chain and a lot of the sensitive information that he had withheld previously.
Gabbard and Radcliffe have been on the Hill testifying in hearings all week.
There's been just very confrontational moments from Democratic congresspeople who have asked about the safety of American troops, about classified information being leaked.
There are Now a war of words.
Gabbard, the White House, saying no sources, methods, locations were shared.
And then Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, coming back and saying, well, here's the things that they added me to.
Here's what it says.
You decide for yourself.
And there's been a back and forth.
If you look at rules from the ODNI and its own guidance.
It says, information providing indication or advance warning that the U.S. or its allies are preparing an attack should be classified as top secret.
Well, this to me was preparing for an attack in Yemen on the Houthis.
I don't know what else you say about that.
I'm going to summarize this using a piece by Garrett Graff, who just, I think, really did a great job at the doomsday scenario, which is his outlet, his substack.
He says this, there's five scandals, okay?
And I'll just say these quickly, because Dan, I don't want to get bogged down in the info, and I just feel like most people know this stuff, but it's hard to summarize these things sometimes when they're happening so quickly.
There's a massive leak of sensitive information.
That is scandal number one.
If you are going to release the update on the time, the targets, the location of the U.S. and its military operations, that is a leak of sensitive information.
That should be top secret.
It should be in a skiff.
It should be in a place that only those with the highest levels of security clearance have access, not a journalist who was added to a group chat unwittingly.
The other scandal.
Number two, perjury to Congress.
Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe seem to have perjured themselves by saying no classified information was released.
Number three, a clear violation of the Federal Records Act.
There is a clear violation of an act that says you can't be using something like Signal to conduct business on.
That is not how these things work, and it's actually against the law, especially if these texts are destroyed or deleted, etc.
Number four, a government IT scandal.
This, of course, brings back the ghost of Hillary Clinton's emails, which everyone has been pointing out this week.
And here's what Graff says.
A major part of the conversation I've had with former government officials over the last 48 hours is focused on what might be called the second order scandal inside SignalGate.
What devices exactly were these group chats being conducted on?
There are two options, both troublesome.
The cabinet members are either chatting away on their personal devices, or they've installed Signal, a commercial app, on their government cell phones or desktop computers.
Both of those are compromising and worrisome in different ways.
And Graf lays that else.
It raises the questions.
Who else was reading the signal group chat and who else had access to them?
Number five, war crimes.
J.D. Vance seems to be happy that a building that was full of civilians, including children, was targeted and collapsed.
So that seems like a war crime in terms of targeting civilians.
The last part of what Graf says.
Is this?
The answer to all of this is shocking, but perhaps not surprising.
Donald Trump isn't that engaged in the policy of his administration.
J.D. Vance is weak and powerless.
And the only one that matters is Stephen Miller.
There's this sense you get from reading these chats, Dan, that Trump is nowhere near any of this.
Vance is a little bit of someone trying to assert power and not being able to.
And the rest of the team is using signal.
For a number of reasons.
One would seem to be to avoid accountability.
One would seem to be for immediacy and convenience.
There's so much to say about this, and I have about a thousand thoughts.
Defense Secretary, former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says that the Warplan group chat exposed classified info, period.
Okay? Others have talked about this is classified information, no doubt.
Anything else seems to be a kind of complete fabrication.
I got a ton to say.
What do you want to say to start?
I don't even know where to start.
But, I mean, in case anybody, you know, hasn't been paying attention or they've kind of seen, like, snippets of this.
I mean, this is the thing.
If somebody said to me, like, signal, wait, like, the same signal I have on my phone?
Like, yeah, like, that's the app that we're talking about.
And I think, as you say, the question of why...
Signal. And I've read things that Waltz might have had it set up so that the messages auto-delete after a week or something like that, which brings up the whole violation of the Federal Records Act, as you're talking about, and so forth.
But you know that maybe that's the point, is sidestepping these things and so forth.
I don't know which is worse, the option that that's the effort to hide this, or if it's just that this is still an administration that's that inept.
And that's just not concerned about this, that they're just using a commercial app, as you say, maybe on their private devices, to communicate highly sensitive material.
It's like there's no good option in that.
You're either working to not have a record of this, or you're just that daft.
And for people to be like, well, they can't possibly have just done this because they just didn't care or weren't paying enough.
It's the same administration.
The president, as you say, Donald Trump seems pretty, you know, not involved in this.
And I don't mean that like in an innocent way.
I mean in a detached, I don't know what's going on in my own administration way.
It's the same dude that had a bunch of classified documents like in storage closets and bathrooms and things like that.
I mean, that's this administration.
It's an administration that doesn't believe that policies apply to it, that it can make them up as they go.
Executive authority means that we do whatever we want and so forth.
And so I guess that's maybe one of the first ones is you don't know whether to, like, shake your head because they seriously don't seem to know any better.
Like, you're like, really?
Like, that was your high-level, secure platform, a signal?
Like, really?
Or that you're trying to not have a record of.
And even then, you're like, there's got to be a better way than, like...
It's just the ineptitude, but I think you dig down below the ineptitude to like, what does that tell us about the administration based on, God, everything we know about Donald Trump for the better part of a decade now, everything we've known about this term and this administration and everything about it, it's just really, really sort of mind-blowing that this is a thing.
And I guess the last point of this is that it's such a self-inflicted...
It's just so, and we'll talk about this as we go.
I believe it's been compounded by the administration's response to it and so on.
We can get into that.
But I think there's just the part of it, like just the signal, really, like that response to it that still just sort of stands out here as just one of the most bizarre pieces of this.
So it got worse yesterday when Wired reported that Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, Left his Venmo friends list public, so you could find his Venmo friends, which all kinds of vulnerabilities there.
Der Spiegel was able to locate private data and passwords of senior U.S. security officials online.
This is after the whole signal issue.
So let me just read a little bit about that.
Private contact details of the most important security advisors to U.S. President Donald Trump can be found on the Internet.
Der Spiegel reporters were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses, and even some passwords belonging to top officials.
We're talking about folks like Hegseth and Mike Walls.
Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use, so some of them link to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn.
They were used to create Dropbox accounts and profiles and apps that track running data.
This is, of course, as Der Spiegel says, an additional grave unknown security breach at the high levels in Washington.
If you can find this info, Dan, can you find their login info to Signal?
I mean, you know, the questions abound.
Let's just stop and say this, okay?
Last week, so I just want to stop and, you know, if you need more info on this scandal...
I'm going to encourage you to go read about it in the places you trust, because I want to stop and do some analysis now.
And I want to say this.
We literally talked last week in the Weekly Roundup about Pete Hexeth as a DEI hire.
Like, you made the great point, Dan.
Stephen A. Smith, Jackie Robinson, and this whole idea that if you are Pete Hexeth, you're a DEI hire because you do not have the credentials to be in your job, and yet you went from a Fox News host to somebody who's in charge of Three and a half million people in the country's largest bureaucracy.
You have people like Tulsi Gabbard who have no business being in this position and who are credibly suspected of having ties to people like Vladimir Putin and so on.
You have others that seem completely out of their depth, and that includes the president.
And I want to make a couple of points about this.
Number one, I've been reading, I've gone back to Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.
And there's a famous quote from that book that many of you will be familiar with.
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
About DEI hires, and I think Pete Hexeth is the emblem of this.
He's hired for his loyalty.
He's hired because he will do and carry out the agenda that Trump and others want.
These are not top-rate talents.
The point was never to get the top-rate talent.
You don't put RFK Jr. in charge of HHS if you want top-rate talent.
You don't get rid of the top brass in the military Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Because they're black and you don't want their talent around.
You don't get rid of the talented specialists because you want an effective administration.
You do it because people with talent and rigor are not loyal.
They're loyal to the ideas, the principles, and the job.
Okay? So I just want to point out, and I'll throw this to you in a second, but there are two groups I'm thinking of right now who must be absolutely losing their minds this week.
Seeing this inept.
Moronic signal gate play out.
The absolute top brass of our country, the spy chiefs, the DOD heads, the vice president in a group chat talking about American foreign policy and attack plans like low level, you know, dudes talking about their fantasy football teams or who they chose to win the March Madness bracket.
Like that's what this discussion seems like.
Here's two groups, Dan, and I'll throw it to you.
One is every federal worker who's been laid off by an email from Elon Musk.
If you're a federal worker who has given their career to serving in the State Department, the EPA, the National Parks, if you are somebody who's been attendant to programs that provide relief for underprivileged folks in this country, Helping to prevent diseases like HIV or tuberculosis in other countries.
If you're a scientist working on things that could change people's lives and you have been fired with an email and you see these morons doing this, you think about what they said about you.
You are a waste in our government.
You are the product of fraud or abuse in our government.
You are the problem.
And here is these people doing this.
We can find their internet passwords online.
And they're talking about this over an app that most of us have on our phone?
Are you serious?
The other is everybody who's been labeled a DEI hire.
Dan, how long ago was it that a plane crashed in Washington, D.C., and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance got up and said, this was DEI.
We had a failure when it came to our...
Flight safety due to DEI.
There was no proof.
There was no reason to think that whoever was flying the plane was hired because of their gender or their sexuality or their race.
And yet that's what they said.
They have fired top brass in the military.
The black top brass in the military.
If you remember the LA fires a couple of months ago.
There was a complete discourse on the American right about how the leaders of the LA fire departments were women, were lesbians, and thus, by nature, inept.
Here we have those who claim that anyone who's not a white man, who's a person of color, who's black, woman, gay, etc., a non-straight white Christian man, or a woman who's upholding that innocent Christian American white virtue.
That Sarah Mosliner talks all about, like Kristi Noem.
Unless you're that, you're DEI.
You're inept.
And here we are, the people that fired you with an email saying you're a waste.
And the people who said you only got hired because of your gender or you fill a box.
We're going to text the war plans on Signal and we're going to add a journalist unwittingly because we just Don't know what we're doing and we're just that bad at our jobs.
What do you think?
I think that point about the lack of capacity and returning to that claim, you know, that was made that it was a DEI hire that ties in with a rents point.
That notion that the only qualification, and put qualification in quotes if you want, of these folks is that...
That loyalty, loyalty to Trump.
Not even like loyalty to America, not even loyalty to an ideology, loyalty to Trump.
And the ineptitude of this, and people can't be misled by all the deflection and stuff.
So Trump and others have come out and said, well, I think that there's something wrong with the app.
Sure, it just randomly added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
I guess the app did that.
What a weird thing that was.
Never mind the fact you're not supposed to use the app to start with.
Probably everybody listening has been involved in one of those awkward email exchanges when, I don't know, maybe you're emailing with colleagues about a boss, and you get the wrong reply all or something, or somebody's name gets CC'd and it blows up into this thing.
That's a big deal, and people have real repercussions for this.
Waltz here revealed real information, real-time information, that endangered, among other things, U.S. troops.
There's also, God, there's the stuff about the way that they talked about European allies and, like, a bunch of other stuff and the just general tenor of it.
I mean, just on and on and on and on.
And he accidentally adds, like, not just anybody, but again, the editor-in-chief of, within MAGA World, a reviled, you know, media outlet in the Atlantic.
And what do they do?
They blame the app, or they call it a hoax, or they call it fake news, or, you know, whatever.
Again, ineptitude is here, or Hegseth trying to convince us that no specifics were given.
And as you say, lots of people pointed to the text and said, nope, here's a specific thing, or here's a description of a method that's going to be used, or whatever.
And The Atlantic released more of the text to show that that, in fact, is what has happened.
I think it's worth also noting the coordinated language.
Everybody who was busy denying that anything sensitive was given used all the same language to give it.
Which means they all sat around in a room being like, how do we try to spin this as not being sensitive material?
The level of ineptitude is that, and if people say, well, you know, gosh, what in the world is he doing surrounding himself with these people?
Again, we've talked about this in the past.
That's a feature, not a bug, if you're in an autocratic regime.
Loyalty is the test, and this is why Trump has not threatened to fire, you know, Hegseth or Waltz or whomever else.
is because of loyalty.
And as long as they remain loyal to him, and we'll see, another piece we can get to here in a while are the cracks that are emerging even within the GOP edifice about this and around this and with the Trump regime's response to this.
But I think what you're highlighting is that these people were hired because they're loyalists, not because they're competent, just generally speaking, not because they have expertise in the areas they're overseeing.
But because they're loyal to Trump, and that is the measure, which is why you get, again, the ineptitude of using a platform like Signal, the completely fallacious reasons that are given about what this means or the significance of it, the blaming of the media.
Somehow it's the media's fault that this is happening, and not the fact that the people added this person to the chat, what have you.
I think it highlights that point, and I just want to keep hammering on that.
That's not...
A bug.
That's a feature.
For an autocratic regime, competence and expertise are not valued.
And we've been talking about that for years at this point.
It's just another really vivid example of this.
Let's take a break, come back and keep talking about this and go into some foreign policy implications.
But also, Dan, I want to tie this to Christian masculinity and the book of Genesis, which nobody's expected.
What other podcast are you going to get that on?
Signalgate and the book of Genesis.
Nowhere, I think, people.
So stick around.
Be right back.
Okay, so Dan, I just want to talk about one thing you mentioned there is if incompetence is the point, if that's part of your system, then what's the goal?
And I think we need to go back to what we said eight weeks ago, which is they are trimming the federal government to the point.
There's only going to be a skeleton crew left.
And the claim is by Elon Musk and Donald Trump, oh, we'll make the decisions.
We have common sense.
There's this trope of common sense.
Get rid of the specialists at FAA, the specialists here, the specialists there.
Put in lackeys and fire 80% of the people.
And what they're going to do is break the government.
And it's already breaking.
We have war plans being sent over signal.
This is an expression of the government being broken.
Okay? And the goal is not...
And you're like, well...
Why would they want that?
Aren't people going to get mad?
Yes, people are already mad.
Aren't Republicans in deep red districts going to get mad?
They already are.
Aren't ex-military people who are conservative going to get mad?
Yep, they already are.
They don't care.
The goal is not to help people, and the goal is not to think that there's any reason that helping people so that they like you is the goal.
It's not.
The goal is grift.
The goal is power.
The goal is money.
We've said that consistently.
But I want to point something out from Zach Beauchamp at Vox, and I think he makes a great point here, that the signal chat points out the incoherence of Trump's foreign policy.
And this is going to come into relief in the next few weeks when we talk about tariffs, when we talk about foreign relationships with allies, with war plans, with Greenland, with Canada, with all of it.
The Trump team is trying to pursue two contradictory visions at the same time.
They want to maintain America's status as the world's leading power while also trying to scale down its international commitments.
So everyone hang with me for a minute.
That's what Zach Beauchamp says at Vox.
They want to maintain America's status as the world's leading power.
And you see that if you read the SignalGate chat.
Pete Hegseth wants to open up the shipping lanes in the Suez Canal because we're the only ones that can do it militarily.
And while that has some implications for the American economy, it really has a huge effect on the European economy.
And J.D. Vance jumps in the chat and is like, well, that's great, but people at home won't care about this.
They won't get it.
And we're helping Europe again.
Why do we want to help Europe?
They're freeloaders.
And everyone's like, everyone jumps in the chat.
They're like, yeah, they're freeloaders.
Makes me sick.
But I want you guys to think about the two contradictory visions.
We want to be, we are America.
We are so great, so powerful, so untouchable.
We are supreme.
We are ultra.
We are MAGA.
We are mega.
We are the bully that you can't even think about messing with.
And we are completely isolating ourselves from the rest of the world.
Canada no longer sees us as an ally or someone to even think of as friendly.
All of our European allies are like, we've got to get together and exclude them from our group chats because there's no way we're talking about them when it comes to Ukraine, Russia, shipping, environmental regulation, Paris climate, none of that.
We all know about the relationship with China.
Don't even need to mention that there.
Dan, we are completely, I don't think most Americans understand, we are completely isolated from the world.
Like, we are completely cut off.
Like, I don't know what kind of stories we're going to get this summer of Americans visiting London and Paris and the way they're going to get harassed and yelled at.
My parents live in a kind of retirement community, and there's a lot of snowbirds, people who come down from Canada when it's cold, Dan, for six months a year, and the Canadians are all selling their houses.
Here's my point.
You cannot be a world superpower who's like, we're untouchable.
You all have to come to us.
We're the best.
put tariffs on the rest of the world such that your economy now turns into a mercantilist trade war and then say, yeah, we're not doing jack squat for anyone anywhere ever because Dan, I don't think people see the incoherency here.
You can't just put tariffs on European wine and foreign cars and think that, like, we're just going to maintain this power over the world.
You can't go into hiding.
Complete isolation.
And then say, but I still have control over the entire schoolyard.
I still have control over the entire territory.
That's what Beauchamp's pointing out.
Do you have thoughts on this before we go to Adam and Christian masculinity in that?
No, I just, I agree with that.
And we've talked about this before, the notion that, you know, everybody has to pay their way and the U.S. has been supporting people for too long, you know, all that Trump rhetoric.
And we've talked about this, you know, we talked about during the first Trump presidency.
We've talked about it since then.
You've talked about it extensively.
That's how you got influence.
If you want to be really crass about it, that's what the U.S. has been purchasing, if you want to put it in those terms, for decades, ever since World War II, was, yeah, we're going to lead on these things.
We're going to foot the bill.
We're going to do all this.
Why? Because that's how you gain influence and hold this position and play the role in NATO that you have and be this kind of global center of gravity and so forth.
It's a really, really, really obvious point to me.
But not to Trump world.
And so they want to take the legacy that has come from that, stop doing all of that, and then have this assumption that what got you there, once you stop doing that, you're going to stay there?
You're not.
And that's exactly what we're seeing is a lot of the rest of the world that was, I think, you know, didn't know what to do after the first Trump presidency.
It was hoping there wouldn't be a second one or whatever.
But this time around, they're like, okay, we know what this is.
So we're going to, he wants to play this game, we'll play this game.
And it sucks and it's too bad or whatever, but all right, America, you're like, you're on your own and we'll go do our own thing.
And it is this weird, as you say, incoherence.
It's not the incoherence of what it gets me, it's the just inability to see it.
Because it seems so apparent to me.
Why does everybody for decades pay so much attention?
Because America pays the money, because America has the big military, because it does all of this stuff, because America has the foreign aid, and all those things can be good, not the military, but the foreign aid.
There are humanitarian purposes.
I don't mean to diminish any of that, but I just mean from the perspective of realpolitik and the most cynical perspective.
If somebody says, why should we spend all this money and time and effort doing this?
American influence has been the answer for decades.
And they still have this weird notion that they're going to remain the center of global gravity, that they're going to have this influence if they curtail and do away with all of that.
We've already seen this fading.
This event and the response of the Trump team to it is simply just exacerbating and speeding that up.
Beauchamp says they want to simultaneously dominate the world and withdraw from it.
And if you think about the Soviet Union and Russia, the Soviet Union collapses, Dan.
And Russia becomes this entity that is, in essence, withdrawn from the world.
It's not really, I mean, there are Russian entanglements with gas and other businesses, but Russia's withdrawn.
Okay, great.
But is Russia dominating the world in those years from 1995 to 2025?
No. You cannot be isolationist and say, I'm not playing, I'm taking my ball and going home, and then saying, I'm the greatest at this game, you guys will never beat me.
Like, okay, you're not playing.
You're not part of this whole community.
And yet you still somehow think that you're the best at the game.
We're just going to go play without you and forget you.
And we're actually going to work against you because you are an obstacle in our way.
And we're going to try to tear down you and your empire and your interests at every turn.
That is where the world is now.
And very quickly...
After the first Trump term and Biden got in office, I think Europe and the rest of the world was like, well, we'll give them a chance.
Seem like they messed up, but Biden's here and he's Biden.
We can have a whole conversation about Biden, but he's not Trump and he's not whatever.
There's no going back.
You can tell me that 2026 is a blue wave.
2028, we actually have a real election and we elect whoever you want, Pete Buttigieg or whoever it is.
There's no going back.
The world is never going to be like, oh, great.
Glad that's over, guys.
Let's just go back to normal.
Let's go back to how it was.
That's one.
Let's shift and go to Donald Trump.
Donald Trump, when asked about this at a press conference, SignalGate, was like, I have no idea what you're talking about.
He seemed to learn about it in real time.
He seemed to have no idea what was going on with this.
No clue at what happened.
There's a clip of Donald Trump Talking to a reporter about Signal, and he says, yeah, who knows what happened?
But let me just start with that piece of it.
Out of a country of over 300 million people, how is it that Jeffrey Goldberg, who hates you, ends up on this Signal chat?
Isn't that bizarre?
It is bizarre.
He's a, you know, sleazebag, but at the highest level.
Yeah. His magazine is failing.
It's going to be out of business soon, in my opinion.
It's bad.
It's really, it's too bad we give it a little boost like this.
But somebody in my group either up or it's a bad signal.
You know, it's a bad signal, happens too.
As you said earlier, Dan, maybe it was a glitch.
And he says, maybe it was a bad signal.
Like, Dan, I'm pretty convinced.
And I'm being completely honest and I'm not making fun and joking.
I don't think Donald Trump understands what signal is.
I don't think he understands what an app is or how this works.
Last week, somebody asked him, what should Barron Trump do as a...
As a, as a job when he grows up and he was at computers, you know, I see Baron and he's on a computer and I say, turn that thing off.
And he turns it off.
And five minutes later, I come back in the room and the computer's back on.
He's a whiz kid.
And it's like, you're talking to your great grandfather about computers and it's like, well, Gramps just doesn't, he just doesn't get it.
So I'm not going to explain my computer to him, much less the apps or Snapchat or.
Why people are dancing on TikTok or any of that.
Additionally, we have reports that yesterday four American troops went missing in Lithuania and died.
Have you been briefed about the soldiers in Lithuania who are missing?
Dan, there are four American service people.
Who seem to have lost their lives yesterday.
Their reports are coming out of Poland and Donald Trump was asked about this yesterday and he said, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Number one, if that were Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, anyone else, we all know the response.
This is what Benghazi was in some way, shape or form.
And that led to what for Hillary Clinton in terms of a scandal?
Here's where the Christian masculinity comes in.
I'm going to do it in two minutes, Dan.
I'll throw it to you and I'll shut up.
Whenever Christian men or people who are supposed to represent a kind of masculinity that is dominant and aggressive and all of this kind of MAGA approach to manhood, whenever they get called out for stuff, it is a clear failure.
Signalgate is a clear failure.
Not knowing that four troops died in Lithuania is an overwhelming failure by the executive branch and the commander-in-chief.
When they get called on this stuff, it's like, I didn't know about it.
What are you talking about?
I don't know.
And y'all are waiting for the book of Genesis.
When you listen to Christian nationalist toxic masculine preachers tell you about the book of Genesis, you know what they say?
You know, Adam was just hanging out, Dan.
He was just hanging out in the back.
He was eating some fruit.
Some, like, some hors d'oeuvres.
You know, having a little snack.
Having a snack.
Yeah. Amuse-bouche.
Why not?
And then, like, Eve's over here talking to a snake and gets everyone in trouble.
And, like, when God comes and is like, what'd you do?
Adam's like, I didn't know anything about it.
I didn't do anything.
Leave me alone.
And there's this really weird way that these folks read Genesis where they're like, yeah, men?
Have authority over women.
Men pulled the rib out of Eve's body, or Eve was created from Adam's rib, and so on.
Men are the authority in church and society and home.
But when it came to that original sin, where was the man?
He's not even in the scene.
He doesn't even have a speaking part.
He's a passive bit player who's like, oh, I'm just over here eating my snack.
I don't know what happened.
It's amazing how these men...
Go from, I am King David.
I am the alpha male.
I am the extension of Yahweh's power on earth.
Respect me, woman, and everyone else, to, you clearly screwed up.
You are incompetent.
It's like, I didn't know what happened.
Don't blame me.
I was just over here eating a snack.
I'm Donald Trump.
I don't, what?
I didn't know there was a group chat.
I don't know what a group chat was.
Troops died in Lithuania?
I don't have any idea about that.
What? What do you mean?
And I guess for me, Dan, for those of us who grew up in high-control religion, especially those who grew up with this form of masculinity in church, there's just a lot of echoes of like the men who are supposed to be the ultimate accountability and drivers and the final authority in every domain of human life.
And then you call them on stuff and they're like, Or it was just an honest mistake.
What are you going to blame me now?
Who hasn't made that mistake?
I'm like you.
What's the big...
No, I'm going to fix it.
Of course, I'm the fixer.
But yeah, no.
I wasn't around.
I just didn't see that text message.
All right, Dan.
Is this a reach?
Am I just reaching into Genesis 1?
No. In fact, I'm thinking about this because...
It's in the code next episode.
It's going to get into what I see as sort of toxic doctrines at the heart of high-control religion.
But, like, if you go back and you look at a lot of Bible translations of that first thing, and, you know, God's going to eat a garden, and he calls out Adam.
He's like, did you eat from that tree I told you not to eat from?
Adam doesn't just say no.
He, like, throws Eve under the bus.
He's like, this woman that you put here with me gave me this fruit.
Like, it's this immediate...
Pass-off, evasion of responsibility.
It's so ridiculous.
Guess what the high-control Christians do with God all the time?
The ultimate masculine authority.
It's always that.
Every time something shitty happens in your life, it's your fault.
You're sinful.
You're fallen.
You fell short.
Anytime anything good happens, God gets the credit.
And you're like, well, I thought God was in control of everything.
So maybe if these really terrible things are happening, like...
Boy, don't we have some hard decisions to make?
Like maybe God doesn't make everything happen, or if God does, then maybe God kind of sucks as a person.
No, no, no, no, no.
It's never God's fault.
It's never the man's fault.
It wasn't Adam's fault.
So this evasion of responsibility, it's written into the code of a lot of Western masculinity, Western conceptions of masculinity, Western Christianity, all these things that tie together.
It's a deep and pervasive theme.
And I think another piece of this...
That ties in with that vision?
Because you talk about that vision of masculinity.
We talk about this all the time.
It's not about masculinity.
It's about a certain understanding of it.
You call it dominant and aggressive and so forth.
One of the things you see in the Trumps of the world, and one of the things that I think is often elevated as manly or masculine within that.
Chris and Dumais will call it militant masculinity.
We can call it toxic masculinity.
You can call it whatever you want.
You know, when people are stressed and they have different responses, it's always the fight response.
Real men are fighters.
They come out swinging, and Trump prides himself on coming out swinging and never apologizing, and everybody's taking their notes from this on this response.
We're just going to deny.
We're going to be angry.
We're going to get indignant.
We're going to, you know, whatever.
But if I want to put my, you know, trauma coach hat on, or I want to put my, hey, I've actually been to counseling and had people help me work through stuff hat on, one of the things people will tell you is that anger is a secondary emotion.
Anger masks deeper emotions.
And you cannot, in my view, help but see that as insecurity, as I'm shocked and appalled, if I'm Donald Trump, that I don't understand what you're talking about, actually, and that I am the oldest president ever inaugurated, and I don't understand what signal is.
That, for whatever reason, my daily briefings don't include the fact that Forest Service people have gone missing, or I don't remember that, or whatever.
Or, if you're Pete Hegseth, you can't just say, Man, we blew it.
We used a platform that we should not have, and we potentially compromised information.
Or whatever these things are, you can't do that.
Those are the deeper things that are under there.
And I think to anybody who is willing to look at that, or anybody who's ever had to look at themselves, you had that person in your life that confronts you and is like, you seem really mad right now, but actually I just wish you would apologize for what you did.
And you realize that that's what you're masking?
It's there, and it's real, and you see it, and it is at the heart of that model of masculinity.
The masculinity is about anger.
It's about violence.
It's about, you know, you never deny, you never apologize.
Try to tie these together.
That's written into high-control religion.
It's written into the model of masculinity that comes from that, that pervades a lot of American culture, and certainly a lot of American culture on the right.
And you see it.
In Trump, you see it in Vance, you see it in all of these people who cannot, I mean, in a literal sense, pathologically, cannot just say, we made a mistake.
If this had happened days ago, and they had said, wow, we really blew it, we're going to put this under a full review and find out why we were using this app, and we'll now, like, whatever, it'd be done.
It'd be a little bit embarrassing, they would have had to be a little red-faced for a while, but it would be done, and instead it has blown up into a colossal...
Scandal because there is this model of masculinity that includes anger and vitriol and denial and always passes the blame to someone else.
Again, Adam in Genesis is like, the woman you put here with me did it.
He's blaming not just her.
He's blaming God.
You're the one who put this woman here who tempted me.
I don't know.
Maybe it's a glitch in the thing.
Oh, how dare you, Atlantic?
Talk about this.
It's a hoax.
It's the same thing.
And so I think there are real connections to be drawn there, and we see them all the time.
And, you know, there's a great montage of CNN showing the people involved in this whole scandal discussing how we have been in embarrassment because of the ways that our officials have been inept and cowardly and stupid.
If there was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now.
Nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton, even though she thinks she is.
Mishandling classified information is still a violation of the espionage act.
When you have the Clinton emails, on top of the fact that the sitting president of the United States admitted he had documents in his garage, they didn't prosecute, they didn't go after these folks.
And so, I just agree.
I mean, the transition from...
Passive, I'm eating a snack, Adam, to like, I can't believe you, God, and I can't believe you, Eve.
You guys are the worst.
You're so dumb.
I'm so angry at you.
You're the problem, not me, Adam, is like three verses.
And I just, I think that's really something.
There's more to say, but let's take a break.
We'll come back and go through a couple of other things.
Be right back.
All right.
I think, Dan, I mean, there's more to say about all of this.
I don't think we could cover it all in the time we have today, much less three more episodes.
But I think we'll leave it there.
We may come back to this next week, depending on what happens.
We'll see if this has any effect in the kind of people who are not political junkies kind of discourse.
Are people going to learn about this?
Are they going to understand it?
Fox News has not really been talking about it in any real way.
And that's a good sign of the fact that many on the right will just call this another liberal hoax because Fox didn't talk about it.
So we'll see what happens there.
I don't expect anyone to get fired.
I don't.
I don't think Waltz.
I don't think Hegseth.
I don't think Gabbard.
I don't think anyone will get fired because that would be an admission of guilt by Trump.
Last thing I'll say, and I may come back to this next week, is...
I think we need to consider that Elon Musk is the shadow president in the sense that he has control of destroying the federal government piece by piece.
I think the mastermind, though, is Stephen Miller.
I think we need to start viewing the Trump presidency as being controlled behind the scenes by Stephen Miller and Russ Vogt.
I think for 10 years, those guys have been masterminding every move that they want to make.
And so what happened, Dan, when this scandal broke?
You saw executive orders about voting.
You saw executive orders about immigration.
You saw executive orders about education.
It was all like, this scandal is bad.
Look over there.
Was Trump involved in some of that?
I'm sure he was.
Is that a Trumpian strategy?
Totally. There is nothing indicating from Trump that he has any of the wherewithal to know that, hey, this is bad.
All right, guys, I want you to pivot to...
Right? These executive orders and this and this.
I really don't think that Trump is there anymore.
I think it's Miller.
I think it, I mean, I think vote has always been this guy.
We will see.
I'll leave it there.
All right.
Take us through some things related to El Salvador, to deportation of Venezuelans, and some things we talked about last week that are coming to the fore this week.
Yeah, so a couple of things, you know, there were other things that happened this week and other bits of news that came out.
And one of the things that came out was we talked about the deportation flights, ongoing legal back and forth about that and judges' orders not to fly.
And a divided appeals court just upheld the injunction against using the act in question to fly migrants to other places and things like that.
All of that's going on.
But a piece of news that came out this week was, I don't know, I thought noteworthy.
That a piece that came out is that the U.S. actually dropped charges against an alleged MS-13 gang leader.
So MS-13 is a real danger, a real threat.
We'll remember that the Trump administration argued in favor of these deportations and these flights, that they were getting rid of criminals and dangerous gang members and so forth.
So it seems like exactly the kind of person you would maybe want to target legally, a leader of MS-13.
They dropped the charges and returned that person to El Salvador.
Why? Well, it turns out that it is widely believed that he had information that could implicate Salvadoran government officials.
And it probably was going to use that to try to get leverage, you know, or something like that to, you know, have a lighter sentence and so forth.
So what did Trump do?
They deported this person, gives him back to El Salvador.
Helping the Salvadoran president then to avoid the possibility of criminal accusations or accusations of corruption and so forth.
And more and more and more, this looks like yet another kind of Trump and MAGA world quid pro quo that I'll tell you what, El Salvador president, we'll give you this dude back if you take all these other people and let us do the kinds of things we want.
And it just shows again the level to which...
The Trump administration, you know, you have these debates with people, and sometimes they're well-meaning, I think, and they hear the rhetoric.
They hear the rhetoric that Trump just wants to get rid of, you know, the bad immigrants or people who are a threat.
It's not about xenophobia.
It's not about racism.
It's not about these things.
You, you know, libtards are all too soft on this or whatever.
And you find this out, no.
For this administration, you say it's all about the grift.
It is all about power all the time.
It is always about what can you give me that I want?
And then what can I give you in return?
And it comes out as we continue to learn more about these flights that it was not just about—it wasn't even just about getting rid of migrants.
It was about essentially paying off a foreign official with something that they want so that they will receive these migrants and allow you to do what you want to do.
And the levels of corruption in this just go deeper and deeper and deeper.
So that was a story that came out this week with everything else.
And for reasons that are easy to understand, I think it was largely overlooked.
But a really, really significant revelation, in my view, about what was really going on, what's continuing to go on as the Trump administration tries to purge America of...
I think what it views is simply undesirables.
It's not about whether they're dangerous or not.
It's just that they're not white Americans, and so they need to leave.
Well, and this goes back to something that a lot of people have noticed last week, which is...
And we're getting more and more reports coming out every day.
There was a man, Dan, caught up in the Venezuelan deportation arrests and captivity last week who has a tattoo supporting autism awareness.
And it's because his nephew is autistic.
And it's hard not to get emotional thinking about that man.
Here's a man doing his job.
I believe he works at a salon, I believe, like as a hairstylist.
Has a tattoo supporting his nephew.
Not a criminal.
Not hurting anyone.
Human being.
Contributing to society.
Arrested and put in a labor camp for no other reason except for, as you just said, we have a regime that considers him undesirable.
Like, is he going to stay there the rest of his life?
Is he going to be subject to hard labor in one of the worst prisons in the world?
For how long?
For nothing.
We have all the stories this week, too, and we haven't got to them, and we may get to them next week, of students being arrested by ICE because of their support for Palestine.
There's a high-profile one coming out of Tufts University just yesterday.
People being disappeared on the street by ICE.
And the last point I'll make about what you just said, Dan, about El Salvador is last night, Kristi Noem released a video.
Of her standing in front of prisoners in the El Salvadoran jail.
And Dan, it looked, and I'm not going to lie, it's hard to get shocked these days.
There was a really weird, uncanny feeling I had watching it of like someone standing outside of prisoners at Auschwitz, people in a concentration camp, and someone saying to the masses, oh, we had to put these terrorist thug Unhuman people here to keep you safe.
You're safe because we're doing this.
And here's this woman wearing a $60,000 Rolex, cosplaying as a kind of military Barbie, standing in front of people who are locked up for life and saying the El Salvadoran government is so great because they're taking our terrorists, who include a barber or salon hairstylist in his 30s with a tattoo supporting autism awareness.
We're headed, folks, to something that is really, really, really, really not good.
And I don't know how else to say that.
But they are priming the masses to accept this treatment of other humans as necessary for their safety and hoping they'll go along with it.
And so the quid pro quo you're talking about is only worse in my eyes because of all of these facets.
I think one last point about this is, you know, when people are confronted in the Trump administration with the innocence.
Who are wrapped up in this.
It's one of the fundamental differences you get.
I don't know that it automatically maps on left and right or whatever, but you've got two models that you can have.
You have the model of presumed guilty and the model that says we are going to punish everybody who might be guilty.
And you know what?
If a few innocent people get swept up in it, then so be it.
But that's the price we just have to pay.
So that's too bad that this guy is there, but you know, what are you going to do?
The other model is the model that we have had or that we have in principle is you're presumed innocent and due process and all of that.
And I think this bleeds out into so many things.
If you have a social safety net, are there people who will abuse it?
Of course there are.
Are there going to be people who commit fraud?
Yep, there will.
But if you're going to serve all the people who don't and who need it, yeah, you're going to have to err on the side of some people are going to get lost.
If you have a system that says, We value innocence and fairness and justice, and does that mean that some people who commit crimes will be found not guilty?
Yeah, it does, but that's better than locking up people who didn't do anything wrong.
That's one model.
The model of MAGA Nation, the model of Christian nationalism, and we go into the theology of this as well, is no.
It is so important to try to go after the people we think are bad and dangerous that you're presumed guilty.
And if innocents have to die for that, if innocents have to be punished for that, if kids who need SNAP, if kids who need health care and cannot get it without a social safety net, if the elderly need it, if they're going to lose it, they're not going to get their social security check, and yeah, your grandma might need it, but that person over there, that one in a hundred or less who built the system, it's so important to go after them that we should threaten the other 99?
That's the model we have, and that's what we see, and that's inhumane.
And, you know, we could go into a hole, you know, the Christian nationalists and Jesus talking about, you know, risking everything for the one and the exact opposite of that.
Threatening everybody for the sake of going after the one bad person or whatever.
That's what MAGA Nation's about.
And so they don't care.
When people say, well, maybe they don't.
No, they know.
But they don't care.
It is so important to them to get...
Brown people out of America that it doesn't matter if they're innocent bystanders or not.
It's such a poignant way of putting it, Dan.
There's just great insight there because it comes back to what kind of society do you want to live in?
And what are your assumptions about human beings?
And what are your assumptions about your system?
And if you say, Hey, our system is built to take care of people's basic needs, their human needs, their health, right?
Their safety, their ability to eat, their ability to be housed, their ability to move about safely.
And yeah, somebody might not pay the fare on the subway.
Somebody might not, you know, they might be claiming disability or something else when they could really work or whatever.
But that's probably one out of not even a hundred.
It's probably one out of like 100,000, 10,000, 50,000.
And what's better is that those other, you know, 49,999 have food safety shelter that their elderly are taken care of, that the young kids go to school every day, not thinking, I'm so hungry, I can't listen, but, oh, I just ate breakfast.
Let's do math.
Let's do reading.
Okay. That you had a system where those basic needs are met.
Despite a little bit of waste, it's just a poignant way to look at it, Dan.
Jesus did everything he could to make sure that the one was taken care of.
Maga's like, hey, if we have to scoop up innocence, fine.
There's no more presumed innocent in this country.
The theology of this is just a deep belief in original sin and the...
Evil of human beings and the way that every human being is guilty anyway, so you might as well punish them.
Sorry if you got caught up in a raid, but whatever.
We're just doing our best.
You know, we're not going to apologize for our mistake, just like we talked about for the last hour.
All right.
Thank you for that insight.
It really is pretty astounding.
What's your reason for hope?
Reason for hope?
It was an article in Politico, just a headline that captured it, going back to all of this was SignalGate.
And this was their headline, and it said...
The country's most powerful institutions are bowing to Trump.
The Atlantic just backed him into a corner.
And, yeah, at a time when companies and media organizations and colleges and law firms and everybody is just constantly caving to Trump, it has been a sign of real hope this week to see real, you know, the story kind of fell in their lap.
But real investigative and hard-nosed journalists saying, no, we're going to put this out there and we're going to respond to this.
And when you push, we're going to push back because we really do have the power to do that.
I think that that's been really, really hopeful in a time when we have seen, we've just talked endlessly about preemptive compliance and just, you know, all these organizations that were they all to stand up to the Trump administration would have a real social weight behind them.
Refuse to do that.
It's been really hopeful to see something different this week.
I found hope in the fact that Bernie Sanders and AOC are on tour and they were in Arizona.
They expected 3,000 people.
They got, I believe, 23,000 people and it keeps happening.
So what does that mean?
I don't know.
I said last week that I thought we have the window for either development of a third party outside of the other.
The existing non-Republican, non-Democratic parties in our country, a third party that includes people like AOC and Bernie Sanders and others taking the lead and challenging the kind of two-party system, or what might be deemed as a kind of progressive shift or takeover of the Democratic Party.
I don't know what's going to happen here.
I think people are starting to see that someone like AOC is somebody who gets it and is a leader that they can...
Think of as one for the future.
I also think there's just a lot of people that are trying to find a home and a community and a movement to join and say, where do I find others who want to do this differently and fight back?
And we'll see if that bears out any fruit anywhere, anytime soon.
I want to thank you all for listening.
I want to thank you for your support.
If you're a subscriber, I cannot thank you enough.
You are what help us do this show three times a week, as we have done.
For the last four or five years, we've done nearly a thousand episodes and it's because you guys support us.
So if you're thinking about signing up, please know that it is really what makes this happen and helps us do what we do.
Be back next week with not only the last of my Empathy series on Monday, Dan's It's in the Code on Wednesday, Weekly Roundup on Friday, but also the debut of Red State Religions, a series about progressive religious communities in some of the most conservative parts of the country fighting for Reproductive rights, voting rights, gender-affirming care, and marriage equality.
So look for that in our feed on Thursday.
For now, we'll say thanks for listening.
Have a good day.
Thanks, Brad.
Thanks for listening to the "Captain" podcast.
The term Bible Belt conjures images of old-time religion and conservative Christianities.
But what if I told you that the Bible Belt is more than holy rollers and holy judgment?
What if I told you that like any other belt, the Bible Belt is filled with holes that lead to unexpected places?
Where pastors and deacons and volunteer ministers demand equality and representation for gay couples, single moms, and anyone trying to get to the ballot box.
My name is Dr. Gillian Frank, and my new limited series podcast, Red State Religions, explores the persistence of liberal religious values and progressive politics in so-called red states by telling the stories of faith leaders Lay people and congregations and how they put faith into action.
