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There are plenty of reasons to be appalled by the wayward Signal messages sent to the “Houthi PC small group” just before a U.S. military strike on targets in Yemen. Of course there’s the fact that somehow, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was added to this group chat, in which obviously classified, very specific information about a military operation was shared on a nonsecure commercial app—a breach of operational security that would surely cost any real military officer his or her job.

There’s the fact, as was pointed out by Rep. Jim Himes in a hearing on Wednesday, that both the mission and the lives of the pilots were put at risk—that if these messages had been intercepted and publicized, the Houthis could, theoretically, have escaped or even counterattacked.

There’s the fact that, after a brief, seemingly sane initial response—in which the National Security Council acknowledged that indeed something had gone wrong—the administration has assumed a familiar deny-and-attack position, with a sweaty Waltz declaring he doesn’t even know who Goldberg is, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt asserting that the semantic difference between “war plans” and an “attack schedule” means that the story is “another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

But I want to focus on another aspect of the messages, the one that I find, upon reflection, unexpectedly upsetting: the emoji!

“I will say a prayer for victory,” J.D. Vance texted, to which two people responded with the prayer-hands emoji.

When Waltz reported to the group that the target—“their top missile guy”—had entered his girlfriend’s house and that the house has been destroyed, someone reacted with the thumbs-up emoji.

And then Waltz wrote, in response to a military action that, according to reports, killed 53 Yemenis: “👊🇺🇸🔥.”

I’ve understood, on some level, how fundamentally unserious so many members of the Trump administration are about government, about duty, and about service. But reading these messages, and boggling at these emoji—at these high-ranking government officials responding to operational details of an airstrike the way I do to my daughter texting me that she got an A on her English paper—really drove home how repulsive this all is. I am willing to accept that the “top missile guy” was an actual terrorist, and maybe, if someone who really understood national security sat me down and explained it all to me, I might come around to the idea that it’s acceptable to blow up a whole building and kill scores of people just to get him. But to respond to American soldiers putting themselves at risk, and real human beings dying, with the fist, the flag, and the flames—who are these guys? Why would any thinking, feeling person do that?

Maybe I’m thinking too much about the emoji. This is just the way people communicate these days, I understand. Perhaps if emoji had been a lingua franca in 1944, Eisenhower and Roosevelt would have been sending each other prayer hands before D-Day. But the emoji are part and parcel of a set of exchanges that reveal a group of people play-acting at importance. The vice president making cocksure proclamations about how he understands what the president might not? The secretary of defense who’s so excited about staging his first real attack that he sends everyone the timeline so they can enjoy it along with him? The national security adviser, exhilarated by the attack, typing so fast that no one can understand what he’s talking about?

Heather Schwedel
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It’s embarrassing! It’s unbelievably embarrassing. America is, indeed, under siege by losers. These are the texts of middle-management doofuses elevated, unexpectedly, to the executive suite. They are mortifyingly self-important about their new status. They cannot stop prancing around in their new suits, bragging about their new toys. Look at how important they are! Look at how they praise God and CENTCOM! Look at Tulsi Gabbard typing, “Great work and effects!” Is it too much to ask our nation’s designated button-pushers to at least act like this is real? Is it too much to ask them to discuss a military operation with statesmanlike assurance, rather than with bluff enthusiasm, high-fives, and the muscular-arm emoji? Is it too much to expect them to act like they’ve been here before?

It’s terrible enough when members of the administration act this cavalier about relieving civil servants of their jobs, or shipping people to maximum-security prisons based, it seems, only on their tattoos. But to observe the most powerful people in the world fist-flag-firing their way through another day at the office, while across the world fire rains from the sky and human beings perish—it fills me with despair. Or, as the “Houthi PC small group” might have put it if their carelessness had actually caused the mission to fail: 😢