The Trump administration has tried to downplay its group chat scandal, but a swath of Republicans do not appear to be on board.
The Atlantic revealed Monday that top Trump administration officials—including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—had inadvertently included Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a Signal chat discussing plans to bomb Yemen.
Instead of conceding the mistake, Hegseth has since characterized the story as a “hoax,” while President Donald Trump described it as a “witch hunt.”
But the security breach may be too big even for Republicans to ignore. In a YouGov poll published Tuesday, 60 percent of Republicans said they felt the blunder was a “serious problem.”
While Trump’s allies have largely steered clear of trashing those in the administration directly, even the staunchest MAGA stalwarts have conceded that giving away national security secrets on a messaging app is a big deal.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called the leak “incredibly sloppy” in an interview with reporters on Wednesday.
Republican Sen. John Cornyn said there was “no other way” to describe the scandal other than being a “huge screwup.”
Fellow Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy put it even more bluntly: “Somebody f---ed up.”
Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, called the incident “inconceivable” and “an extremely troubling and serious matter.”
“This is what happens when you don’t really have your act together,” added Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska.
Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican who chairs the armed services committee, went as far as calling for the defense department’s inspector general to investigate the incident.
Wicker sent a letter Thursday requesting an inquiry into the “facts and circumstances surrounding the above referenced Signal chat incident, including an accounting of what was communicated and any remedial actions taken as a result.”
The right-wing commentator Tomi Lahren had an ingenious idea for Team Trump on Wednesday—acknowledge the error and take the air out of the scandal.
“Trying to wordsmith the hell outta this signal debacle is making it worse,” she wrote on X. “It was bad. And I’m honestly getting sick of the whataboutisms from my own side. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Admit the F up and move on.”
