The Ugly American

March 28, 2025

Not issues or policies. What tortures me most is the sheer ugliness, the disgusting classless crassness, the dishonesty. Degrading my once-beloved country.

Epitomized by the “Signal” scandal. Mistakenly including journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in an online group chat among top officials planning military action. Mistakes happen, but this one bespeaks extraordinary slapdash carelessness about highly sensitive national security matters, potentially endangering the mission and the soldiers executing it.

Bad enough by itself. But worse yet, denying responsibility, and blowing off all accountability, the Trump clown-show went to its standard operating procedure: lying. “Nothing to see here, folks.”

That’s not how a major nation’s government should behave concerning a matter of the highest national security seriousness.

But not even that was the awfullest thing. Rather, the reflexive vicious smearing of Goldberg, the journalist involved here only because they screwed up. When in fact Goldberg behaved with far more discretion and responsibility. Yet Trump, Hegseth, and their gang assaulted his professional integrity, labeling him a lowlife liar, hoaxer, conspiracist. Classic pot calling kettle black.

Goldberg is the highly regarded editor of The Atlantic, a longstanding premier public affairs journal, and moderator of PBS’s “Washington Week” news discussion. The Trump and Hegseth calumnies say more about them than him. They shamelessly spew out such garbage because they can.

Entirely characteristic of those people and everything they do. They’re very bad people; the worst of the worst. Their behavior profoundly sick and sickening. A nation choosing them to “lead,” knowing no better, is itself deeply sick.