Turns out the US secretary of defense, the US secretary of state, the vice president, the director of national intelligence, the CIA director and some other of the country’s highest national security officials “accidentally texted” their war plans to the editor of The Atlantic.

The Post’s Philip Bump does a good job of summing up the righteous man’s reaction to the news: “That this was information offered on a nongovernmental platform to users wherever they happened to be — and whoever was around — was one staggering failure to ensure security for an operation that put American forces in harm’s way.”

Bump goes on to talk about the story in light of “but her emails” – the 2016 scandal over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state and the appropriate handling of government secrets. Clinton was found to have done nothing wrong, but the uproar created by Trump, the press corps and James Comey, along with Russian operatives, almost certainly led to her defeat. 

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Bump’s argument is this new scandal is orders of magnitude different from “but her emails,” overshadowing also Donald Trump’s theft (my word) of government secrets after leaving the White House in 2021. 

Bump said it is “an indifference to security that is more obvious and more immediate than anything Clinton was ever accused of doing, with a demonstrable failure to preserve the security of the operation.”

“What’s more,” Philip Bump said, “there’s every reason to think that no one in the administration will face any consequences for the inclusion of [Atlantic editor Jeffrey] Goldberg or for the sharing of war plans over Signal or for the possibility that [Michael] Waltz established the chat — which included an auto-delete mechanism — specifically to avoid preserving public records. By now, what we should expect from the Trump administration is for nothing to happen to anyone involved.”

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Correct. Nothing is going to happen. 

Here’s what will happen, though.

Members of the Washington press corps are going to ask, in as many ways as possible, if the president is prepared to hold his own people to the same legal and moral standards that he holds his enemies to. And liberals and Democrats, especially those on MSNBC, are going to make a show of getting upset over the hypocrisy of Trump’s people getting away with crimes that Trump has accused his enemies of committing.

Another prediction: I’m going to laugh.

Not because this is funny, none of this is funny, it’s tragic, but because what else can you do in the face of a press corps that’s too timid and weak to ask hard questions – example, “when is Pete Hegseth going to resign in the wake of this criminal breach of national security,” not if, but when? What else can you do in the face of a liberal opposition so wedded to rules and norms that it can’t believe how unfair things are?

The press corps and the opposition keep acting like it’s possible to hold criminals accountable, even though the criminals are in charge.

Trump has only just taken office, so we are likely to see many more such “scandals,” others of greater importance, but in the wake of each event, we ought to ask ourselves: what does “scandal” even mean?

A scandal like “but her emails” requires someone in power to try to hide something, or at least appear to try to hide something, while at the same time giving respect to the authority of fact, reason and law. Those conditions make it possible for the press corps to hound powerful people as new details come to light, which in turn gives the impression of public pressure, which in turn leads to some kind of event, like a resignation, which in turn is taken as democratic accountability.

A scandal would, moreover, require someone in power, or someone who is seeking power, to at least pay lip service to the principle that they are playing by the same rules everyone else is, that they are liable, morally and perhaps legally, when they fail to live by that principle, and that power itself does not confer immunity from consequences. 

It seems to me a necessary precondition to a scandal is broad consensus on the idea that saying one thing and doing another – hypocrisy – is not only shameful but politically harmful to those in power, and that the only way to right that wrong is a neutral inquiry whose outcome satisfies all parties or, if not that, someone’s head rolls.

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Need I remind you that Trump does not defer to the authority of fact, reason and law? He has destroyed whatever sense of shared reality we once had. With his campaign, he set democracy against the rule of law, and democracy won, to the shame and detriment of democracy. He institutionalized the J6 insurrection: that his goons were breaking laws on Signal like they were breaking piñatas is merely one case in point. 

For a scandal to be a scandal, the person in power must be able to say in good faith that his accusers may have a point, before giving neutral observers a chance to sort things out. But in this regime’s view, there are no neutral observers – you are a friend or an enemy. And neither Trump nor his goons will ever say their enemies may have a point. 

And lo, as of this morning, the president dismissed the story as merely a glitch in the regime’s otherwise perfect record of accomplishment. His cabinet is lying to the Congress, even saying falsely that the classified information contained in the group chat was not really classified. Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth is attacking The Atlantic. 

They are not subject to the law. 

The law is subject to them.

I think Philip Bump is right in saying that this story – which some are calling Signalgate – puts the last nail in the coffin of “but her emails.”

I think there’s another angle, though.

“But her emails” might be the last scandal.