National Review Editor Calls on Trump to Fire Pete Hegseth Over ‘Clownish’ Signal Scandal: ‘Does the Buck Stop Nowhere?’
(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
National Review executive editor Mark Wright called on President Donald Trump to fire Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth over his divulgement of “operational details” regarding the American strikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels over Signal earlier this month.
“The whole story is a tale so clownish, so stunning, so outlandish that it would seem to better fit into a gonzo satire of government ineptitude such as Burn After Reading or Veep,” observed Wright regarding National Security Adviser Mike Waltz’s adding of The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal group chat in which top officials — including Hegseth, Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance — were discussing the plan for the strikes.
“It goes without saying that Trump won’t fire everyone involved in this debacle, which would include most of his senior national-security staff,” continued Wright before laying out his case for giving Hegseth the axe:
In my view, the most egregious behavior was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s. (The stupidest was National Security Adviser Mike Waltz’s adding of Goldberg to the conversation in the first place.)
Pete Hegseth — the top civilian in the Department of the Defense and a man who has command authority over U.S. military operations worldwide — texted information, over an unsecured channel, that “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.” That’s shocking, egregious, and totally outrageous.
President Trump should demand Pete Hegseth’s resignation. Today.
A question now hangs over this administration: Will there be accountability under Trump — or does the buck stop nowhere, as it did for the previous four years?
Wright isn’t the only one at the conservative magazine to say that heads deserve to roll, even if he didn’t go so far as to call for them.
“This morning, the president has plenty of good reasons to fire his entire national-security team,” wrote senior political correspondent Jim Geraghty in his morning newsletter. “He won’t do this, of course, but this means the president must shrug off half his cabinet discussing classified information — details about an impending U.S. military strike! — on an insecure system.”
“Maybe we don’t need to get rid of Waltz or Hegseth. But it would have been nice if either man had notified the president immediately and taken responsibility for the screwup,” added Geraghty. “At this point, there’s no sign that happened; instead of taking responsibility, Hegseth seems to think he can get out of this by blaming Goldberg.”
