The Biden administration never recovered from the Afghanistan debacle. Donald Trump, on the other hand, will almost certainly survive “Signalgate.” The national furor over the administration’s leaked military strike plans is an inflated story, created ex nihilo by a leftist political operative calling himself a reporter.

It’s a classic example of the kind of activist journalism that has become the standard since Watergate. The same strategy was deployed successfully against Trump during his first term, with the Russian collusion narrative. This time, though, Trump is seasoned by experience and surrounded by a loyal team that is in no mood for capitulation. The scandal—that a liberal reporter was somehow looped into an encrypted group message about a successful military operation—will blow over in a matter of days.

“What if those group chats fell into the wrong hands?” Well, they did not. The only reason we even know about the chats is that they were intercepted by this anti-Trump reporter with an axe to grind, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goldberg is the most important person in the story, and yet, he has escaped almost all scrutiny. His behavior demonstrates the usual combination of false virtue signaling mixed with shameless self-promotion that we have come to expect from today’s media. After publishing his initial account of the private chats with the egocentric title, “The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans,” Goldberg later released screenshots of the messages. To justify leaking these sensitive details, he pointed to the administration’s attempts to discredit his “reporting,” that is, eavesdropping.

Following the progression here? Goldberg is creating a story about himself. He did this first by publishing a gratuitous account of a group chat that he had no business seeing. The press then joined him in his mud fight with the government, which is a fact we can surmise Goldberg is quite pleased with himself in seeing it unfold. He then used the government’s response to the “story” to justify releasing more “bombshells.” Before long, the whole country was repeating his name.

Today’s liberal journalists are always very fussy about the need to maintain the secrecy of national security information—that is when they aren’t sharing it with the world. While Goldberg has said he initially withheld the details to protect the national interest—and while the left f is extoling his supposed demonstration of patriotic forbearance—we can safely assume he was planning to release them all along. Publishing embarrassing tidbits about a political enemy piecemeal is a time-tested  strategy for getting the most out of attacking them.

One certainly cannot blame Goldberg for following his own partisan and professional incentives.

All we can say about “Signalgate” is that a notorious political enemy of the president somehow managed to get access of information that he should not have had. We still have no clue as to how he got in. This is the million-dollar question, and the rest is noise. 

Now, some friendly critics of the administration have argued that heads should roll over the failure to maintain, to borrow a phrase from Pete Hegseth, “clean OPSEC.” Michael Waltz has taken heat for inadvertently adding Goldberg to the chat room. But Trump and his team are following exhortation from Butler, Pennsylvania: “Fight, fight, fight.”

Trump understands that weakness begets aggression. Any sign of wobbling will encourage more attacks than Trump can afford, especially on the national security front. He is negotiating the end to a major war in Europe, and his domestic agenda is being tied up by activist district judges.

Democrats, still knocked off balance by Trump’s re-election, are all too happy to pounce on any perceived scandal or weakness. But the White House is correct to believe this story will soon fizzle. For one, it’s about counterfactuals. The administration’s critics are fretting over things that did not happen.

Unfortunately, the administration’s talking points have not been convincing. The average person may not be convinced that secret information about a military strike is not classified. But, as the White House has argued repeatedly, the main point is the attack was a success.

Trump did not get to where he is today by compromising, but instead by making the world compromise with him. Those who have his best interests in mind realize that it would set a terrible precedent early in his second term to start handing scalps to the opposition on a silver platter. The better course is to sit back and let the storm pass.