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The White House has spent the week trying to downplay the revelation that top national security officials discussed plans for U.S. strikes in Yemen on Houthi militants over Signal, a commercial messaging app.
In a stunning breach of national security, the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, disclosed specific operational details before the attacks in the group chat — which inadvertently included The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. Michael Waltz, the national security adviser who added Mr. Goldberg to the chat, said he took “full responsibility” for the leak.
Several Democrats called for Mr. Hegseth to step down. But the Trump administration has tried to divert or sidestep the issues. (Mr. Trump said the scandal was a “witch hunt.”)
As part of a regular check-in over the course of Mr. Trump’s first 100 days back in office, The New York Times asked five voters what they thought of the administration’s response.
Dave Abdallah wasn’t happy with the way Mr. Trump and those around him kept downplaying the Signal chat security breach.
They “are totally wrong,” Mr. Adballah said.
The breach, he added, could have cost U.S. soldiers their lives. “This is a serious, serious mistake,” he said of the entire affair.
Mr. Abdallah, a real estate broker who immigrated to the United States from Lebanon as a child, voted for the Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the 2024 election. It was a protest over the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza and concerns that Mr. Trump would not help the situation. Still, Mr. Abdallah hoped Mr. Trump’s foreign policy might bring peace and stability to the region.
So far, he has been disappointed.
Fighting recently resumed between Israel and Hamas. Now, Mr. Abdallah believes that Mr. Trump, his administration and backers are proving to be hypocritical as they face backlash for the Signal affair.
He recalled seeing a recent TikTok video that showed old clips of Republicans criticizing Hillary Clinton for using a private computer server when she was the secretary of state during the Obama administration. The video then showed images of the same critics, now backers of Mr. Trump, shrugging off the Signal chat as no big deal and making excuses.
Such excuses struck Mr. Abdallah as insincere. “I just can’t comprehend it,” he said of the Signal chat. “So it definitely should be on the table to get rid of somebody.”
— Kurt Streeter
‘I don’t think anybody should be fired over this because it’s not as serious as a lot of people think.’
Perry Hunter, 55, from Sellersburg, Ind.
When Perry Hunter first heard that Trump officials accidentally included a journalist in the Signal chat, he thought it was a significant error by the administration and that there needed to be consequences.
But, just as he had done in response to many Trump-related news events since the inauguration, Mr. Hunter said he took time to learn the details before deciding what he thought of the situation. This time, he ended up thinking that the scandal was not much of a scandal at all, saying that the chat included no specific war plans, echoing the White House’s description. That rendered the messages benign to his eye. (Defense experts have been shocked by the level of detail in the chat.)
“Somebody made a mistake, for sure,” he said, adding, “I don’t think anybody should be fired over this because it’s not as serious as a lot of people think that it is.”
Mr. Hunter, a high school teacher, would have thought differently, he said, if Americans had been killed because of information shared in the chat. In that case, he said, “then, yes, somebody should lose their job and somebody should go to jail.” He added, “I think it’s one of those things that they got lucky and they better learn from it.”
Hearing Democrats criticize the administration over the breach, he said it was hypocritical of them to be so upset. He compared the breach to mistakes made by officials involved in the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, or in Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server for official communications.
“No one that we know of was held accountable in those situations,” Mr. Hunter said. “And there was failure, big-time failure, in all of those situations.”
— Juliet Macur
‘If it happens again, even in one or two or three years, then no one learned anything.’
Tali Jackont, 57, from Los Angeles
“I have to tell you, I was in shock,” said Tali Jackont, an educator. “There is stuff that cannot happen, and it happened.”
Ms. Jackont compared it with how closely military secrets are kept in Israel, her home country. When Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, conducts an operation, no one claims responsibility even if it seems obvious, she said. “No one will tell you, until they tell you,” she said.
She was not eager for anyone involved to be fired at this point, “but there has to be better attention,” she said.
Has the administration learned its lesson? “Time will tell,” Ms. Jackont said. For now it looked as though they were mostly brushing this under the rug, she said, but mused about what conversations might be going on behind closed doors.
“If it happens again, even in one or two or three years, then no one learned anything,” she said. “And it will be, I don’t want to use the word disaster, but a big shame.”
— Campbell Robertson
‘Imagine somebody from another country with malicious intentions, they take that information and hurt us and our military.’
Jaime Escobar Jr., 46, from Roma, Texas
As the mayor of a small border town, Jaime Escobar Jr., knew how important it was to protect sensitive government information. So when he read the news about the Signal chat, he worried that the officials in question were trying to brush off the matter too quickly.
“That’s just very, it’s a hard pill to swallow,” he said of the issue. “There has to be a strong message. We can’t allow this to happen. Imagine somebody from another country with malicious intentions, they take that information and hurt us and our military.”
Mr. Escobar, who voted for Mr. Trump after years as a Democrat, remained troubled that the officials failed to check something as simple as who was receiving the information, like a journalist.
“That is a big mistake, and they just have to be extra careful about it,” he said. “It’s a lesson that needs to be learned very quickly and just cannot be repeated.”
At the same time, he felt satisfied that Mr. Waltz, who admitted to creating the group chat, accepted responsibility.
“He took it on, whether it was his fault or not, he’s like, ‘Well, I’m the guy in charge of national security,’” he said. As for further consequences? “Well, that’s going to have to be up to the president.”
— Edgar Sandoval
‘The left hasn’t had much to fight with or defend themselves with. It would seem like this could give them a foothold.’
Isaiah Thompson, 22, from Washington, D.C.
When Isaiah Thompson learned that Trump senior officials shared sensitive war details on Signal, he immediately wondered how any member of the federal government could make such a mistake. Then he wondered how Democrats — rather than Republicans — would react.
“The left hasn’t had much to fight with or defend themselves with. It would seem like this could give them a foothold or something to push back on,” he said. “I don’t know how the federal government could have gotten something like this so wrong.”
Mr. Thompson, a college student who voted for Kamala Harris but supports the Green Party, said the Signal chat was just another example of the lack of accountability or checks and balances in the Trump administration. Still, he hesitates to support the firing of Mr. Hegseth or Mr. Waltz over their roles in the Signal scandal — at least not yet.
“There needs to be a deep investigation before anybody is fired or asked to resign,” said Mr. Thompson. “But the president is not treating this seriously enough. This was a national security breach.”
— Audra D. S. Burch
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