Killing civilians. Endangering pilots. Gross negligence. Breaking the law. Take your pick which Signal group chat calamity is worse for the Trump administration. Listing all the scandals is almost as challenging as finding an explanation for them. But at its heart sits a familiar, dangerous, flawed peril of political psychology: groupthink.
In March, Trump administration officials, including Vice President J.D. Vance, messaged over the cellphone chat app Signal their plans and rationale for bombing Yemen. They unintentionally included the editor of the Atlantic in this phone chat, and shared timing, details and targets of the bombing with him. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denied that the classified plans had been shared, but the Atlantic released the transcript of the chat, proving him wrong. A subsequent Senate hearing further confirmed that the leak had happened. A federal judge has now ordered the preservation of these records, which seem destined to be part of a court case that will keep the scandal in the news.
The political psychology of the cabinet members’ decision to bomb Yemen fits a familiar pattern. In the initial March 11 chat, Vance argued the bombing was inconsistent with Trump’s messaging on letting Europe fight its own wars. But those objections were quickly shut down by presidential adviser Stephen Miller saying “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light,” ending any foreign policy debate or consideration of the objections. “Agree,” said Hegseth. His next message came a day later, tabulating the F-18s, “Strike Drones” and timing of the attacks.
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“First of all, this conversation should not be happening by Signal chat,” says Colgate University’s Danielle Lupton, author of Reputation for Resolve: How Leaders Signal Determination in International Politics, an expert on civilian-military communications. “In political psychology, what we are seeing here is most often described as groupthink,” says Lupton. First described by Yale psychologist Irving Janis in 1972, groupthink leads to premature decisions, often bad ones, spurred by conformity within groups where any one person feels that disagreement is impossible.
Most famously in the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, groupthink led advisors to suppress private doubts that might have stopped the botched CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba that nearly capsized the Kennedy administration. Similar group dynamics were seen in failures by presidential advisors in the Watergate scandal in 1972, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Groupthink likewise explains why the recollection of presidential consigliere Miller was enough to make a decision and end debate in the Signal chat scandal. Dissent simply isn’t permitted when groupthink is operating.
Groupthink might also explain why no one thought to ask why “J.G.,” the initials of Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, were in their conversation. Or why a “principals” group—which normally holds war planning in a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility,” where personal cellphones are banned—violated basic security rules by chatting about attack details on their phones. That’s despite many of the people in the chat, including Vance, Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, having military backgrounds that would have included yearly secrecy training. The Pentagon this month posted an advisory against using Signal, NPR reported.
The White House sees this differently, with President Donald Trump claiming the bombing plans were “not classified,” and calling complaints over the Signal chat screwup a “witch hunt.” (Fair to say, this is wrong: “It’s dumbfounding to even contemplate an argument that this would not be classified,” national security attorney Mark Zaid told Task & Purpose in response to the leak. Leaking drone warfare details, not even battle plans, to a journalist netted one defense analyst 45 months in prison in 2021.)
More recent scholarship has emphasized the political psychology at work in groupthink failures in government, rather than personal psychology, where appealing to voters or avoiding political losses explains group dynamics. That fits the Signal chat discussion, more focused on political messaging of the Yemen bombing than its wisdom. “Let’s make sure our messaging is tight here,” said Vance at one point. Hegseth says, “this leaks, and we look indecisive,” at another, to justify the decision.
Was it a wise decision? Trump’s team called it “highly successful.” But it’s unlikely that Yemen’s Houthi militia will stop firing missiles at ships in the Red Sea over the bombing, says Dartmouth’s Jason Lyall, author of Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War. The U.S. has only bombed Yemen more since the Signal chat attacks. “These strikes serve very little purpose other than signaling that the administration is ‘doing something’; it’s mostly theater, a privileging of kinetic action over meaningful diplomacy that might resolve the issue,” Lyall says, by e-mail.
Trust is the deeper psychological question at play in the Signal chat scandal, added Lupton, the international politics scholar. “Trust is really fragile. And it can take just one event to really erode,” she says. On the trust front, the released Signal chat should alarm the European allies of the U.S., as it is filled with attacks on their reliability and capabilities. “I just hate bailing out Europe again,” says Vance at one point. “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC,” says Hegseth, a few minutes later.
Such language explains why Europe is now planning for military self-sufficiency in five years, undermining U.S. efforts since the end of World War II to prevent militarization there. The U.S. famously heads a global “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing organization with Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. It’s unclear why these nations would share any intelligence with a nation whose leadership invites random reporters into bombing meetings, setting a new watchword for “sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior,” in the words of Senator Mark Warner of Virginia.
Domestically, there’s already a recruiting crisis in the U.S. military, with nearly one quarter of soldiers leaving after their first two-year enlistment. How will those soldiers, and their families, react to learning that secrecy rules might apply to them but not to political figures? Or to news that those politicians might mistakenly endanger their lives without paying any price? The attorney general has indicated the Signal chat would not be investigated as an Espionage Act violation, and the administration has wishfully declared “case closed” on the scandal.
Accountability is the only way to restore trust after such a fiasco, said Lupton. Otherwise, the geopolitical and domestic repercussions of the Signal chat scandal will only worsen over time, she says. “Everyone on that group text should be fired, or resign, and that’s clearly not happening.”
A dubious decision made after truncated debate on an insecure platform: It isn’t groupthink to look over the scandal and agree with Lupton’s indictment.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
