There are few feelings quite like the heart-stopping adrenaline rush of realizing you have, in a split-second, touchscreen-misstep, sent an incriminating text to the wrong person (or worse, group). Long before the time of the “unsend message” feature on iPhones, it happened to me. In classic college fashion, my two friends and I were having some pretty big disagreements about our housing arrangements for the coming school year — two of us in favor of one apartment building, one in favor of a different one. The odd roommate out was blowing up our collective group chat, pulling out all sorts of ridiculous stops to get her way, and I’d had enough of it. So, I opened my phone to text the friend who was on my side and penned a short and sweet message: “What the f*ck is she talking about?” In my hasty anger, I failed to realize that iMessage had auto-suggested our collective group chat, and not my individual text chain with my one friend, meaning I had sent this clear sh*t-talk about my roommate… to the group containing said roommate. Not my best work.
There’s a brief moment after something like this occurs when you survey all your options. I could lie, say it was about a different conversation, and continue to deny, deny, deny. Or, I could come clean and hold myself responsible for such a blunder. I ended up doing the latter. Not that it solved the whole debacle, but it put out the small fire I’d inadvertently started.
As it turns out, as a 20-year-old college student, I was showing more professionalism and accountability than our current U.S. Secretary of Defense.
In case you missed it, on March 24, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg published a story titled “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans” detailing how he was mistakenly added to a group message chain with U.S. government officials on the messaging app Signal. Goldberg’s piece gave a few small glimpses of the conversation, but didn’t actually disclose the contents of the chat or the strike plan specifics (this will be important later). Not only was the group chat full of high-profile officials like Vice President JD Vance, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, but also, it was reportedly discussing *in detail* the logistics and timing of planned U.S. military strikes in Yemen.
Goldberg said in his piece that he was initially skeptical of the validity of the messages, until hours later, when reports of the U.S. bombs dropping came out that matched the contents of the chat. “I didn’t think it could be real,” Goldberg wrote. “Then the bombs started falling.” Yep, war plans shared as casually as coordinating when everyone’s free for happy hour.
“From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of f*ck-up imaginable,” said former Secretary of Transportation and intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Pete Buttigieg in a post on X, one of many posts criticizing the blunder.
So you mean the president, the vice president, and the cabinet (oh and an accidentally added reporter) were discussing war and other national security matters over signal. The same app that married men use to cheat on their wives. I just- pic.twitter.com/CadYvQxPDm
— Grip Skylark 💕✨ (@talleyberrybaby) March 24, 2025
Waltz, the one who added Goldberg to the group initially, appeared on Fox News on March 25, taking responsibility for the mishap and explaining it rather confusingly, saying, “Well, if you have somebody else’s contact, then somehow it … gets sucked in. It gets sucked in.” Look, I’ve helped my 62-year-old father with plenty of boomer iPhone conundrums — but accidentally adding the EIC of a major news publication to a group chat talking about things he’s not supposed to know about? That was never one of them.
While Waltz took a little accountability for his part in the group chat fiasco, Hegseth and others went the deny-deny-deny route that I considered during my own group chat scandal — with Hegseth telling a reporter on March 25 that “nobody was texting war plans,” and the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (who was also in the group message) saying in a Senate hearing on March 26 that “there was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group.” This led Goldberg and The Atlantic staff to publish another piece on March 26, titled “Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal,” which showed all of the specific plans of attack (down to times and locations) shared in the chat — information that Goldberg didn’t initially reveal in his first story, but decided to in his follow-up piece in order to call out the way members of the chat seemed to be downplaying its contents. As a girl in college who’s been in a catfight or two, I can respect that he came prepped with receipts.
Amid calls for Hegseth to step down (or be removed) from his position as Defense Secretary, President Donald Trump sided with Hegseth when speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on March 26. “He had nothing to do with it,” he said. “Look, look — it’s all a witch hunt.”
While there are still new developments coming out about this (and so much to unpack on a national security level), this scandal will certainly go down as one of the most outrageous fiascos in presidential history. So, thank you, Hegseth and company, for making me feel less alone in my big group chat f*ck-up. At least mine didn’t compromise the entire country’s security — or contain any embarrassing emojis.