The ‘Hoax’ Hoax

“Words about words” is Kevin Williamson’s beat, not mine, but one misused (and overused) term that chronically gets under my skin is “gaslighting.”

It pops up a lot nowadays in discussions of dating and relationships, typically among the same younger cohort that’s twisted the word “literally” into a near-meaningless expression of emphasis.

To clarify, in case any 20-somethings are reading: If I say that the Signal group chat fiasco makes me literally want to vomit, I’m saying a lot more than that I’m appalled. I’m warning you to stand back, as my lunch is about to reappear.

The word “gaslighting” hasn’t been brutalized as ruthlessly as “literally” but it’s also drifted from its actual (literal!) meaning. To Gen Z and lesser-educated millennials, it’s often used as a synonym for deceit—incorrectly. If your boyfriend tells you he’s working late when in fact he’s with another woman, he hasn’t “gaslit” you. He’s lied.

Gaslighting, properly understood, is less about convincing someone to believe something that isn’t true than about making them question their ability to distinguish what’s true from what isn’t. If you walk in on your boyfriend with another woman and he spends the next week adamantly insisting that you dreamed it, to the point where you begin to wonder whether you really might have, that’s gaslighting.

Lying is easy, gaslighting is hard. In the first case, the victim isn’t privy to the truth; in the second, they’ve seen it with their own eyes and ears. Lying is a matter of constructing a false reality, gaslighting is a matter of deconstructing observable reality itself.

On Monday, Jeffrey Goldberg published a Big Scoop in The Atlantic about being accidentally included in a Signal group chat among the Trump administration’s top foreign policy officials. The chat included classified “war plans” for an imminent strike on Houthi forces in Yemen, he claimed, declining for national security reasons to offer details that would substantiate the allegation. Numerous Trump officials, from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, denied it. No classified “war plans” were mentioned, they maintained.

On Wednesday, Goldberg showed his cards. In a new piece with co-author Shane Harris titled, “Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal,” he published the, er, attack plans that Trump’s advisers apparently shared on Signal. Allegedly, some 31 minutes before American jets took off on March 15, Hegseth posted a timeline of the operation to come in the group chat. A sample: “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s).” Another: “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets).”

If you don’t trust Goldberg’s and Harris’ transcription, there are screenshots. I don’t yet literally want to vomit over this debacle, but at the rate it’s going, lunch really might make a cameo before the day is out.

Unless The Atlantic invented the alleged Hegseth posts whole cloth, which no one appears to be claiming, we’re left with an observable reality that’s all but impossible for the White House to rationalize. Can you guess how they’re choosing to handle it?

Right. They’re going to try to gaslight America, or at least the right-leaning half of it, by crying “hoax.”

A simple question.

Whether the gaslighting strategy succeeds will depend in part on how deep into the weeds the commentary about this clusterfark gets. When is information “classified” and when isn’t it? What constitutes “war plans,” specifically? How secure is an encrypted messaging platform like Signal?

It’s all noise. Lay it aside and tether yourself to reality with a simple question. Is it responsible for the secretary of defense to be sharing operational information about an impending military attack in a forum that isn’t secured by the U.S. government?

Or, as The Bulwark’s Tim Miller put it: “If a black lesbian soldier had texted the exact time we were planning to bomb Yemen to a woke anti-Trump reporter, what do you think Pete Hegseth would be calling for today?”

You don’t need to parse legal definitions or get into technical details about Signal to understand the impropriety here—although if you want to do that, you’ll find plenty of validation. One former White House official interviewed by Politico called it “unbelievable” that Hegseth et al. would use the app when “these guys all have traveling security details to set up secure comms for them, wherever they are.” Signal can’t even be downloaded on most federal devices; participants in the chat were likely using their personal—i.e., hackable—phones.

And not only is advance warning of a U.S. military attack considered “classified” (obviously), it’s treated as “top secret” (also obviously). As a defense official told CNN of the group chat:

It is safe to say that anybody in uniform would be court martialed for this. … We don’t provide that level of information on unclassified systems, in order to protect the lives and safety of the servicemembers carrying out these strikes. If we did, it would be wholly irresponsible. My most junior analysts know not to do this.

By not using the most secure channels available to him, Hegseth took an enormous, unnecessary risk that the information he posted about the airstrikes would be intercepted and the targets would go to ground before U.S. jets struck. What else is there to say?

Conducting military business this way is so hard to justify on the merits that some right-wing propagandists have resorted to damage control that … doesn’t actually control any damage. On Tuesday night, for example, Fox News primetime host Jesse Watters tried to explain how a liberal journalist ended up in a virtual meeting of Donald Trump’s war Cabinet. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Goldberg sneaked his way in” through some form of chicanery, he theorized.

Goldberg, who uses the initials “JG” on Signal, claims he received an invitation to join the chat from National Security Adviser Mike Waltz in an apparent case of mistaken identity. But even if what Watters said was true, he’d be proving his opponents’ point: A virtual space that a reporter can supposedly “sneak” his way into is, by definition, a space that isn’t secure. If Jeffrey Goldberg managed to bamboozle his way into a top-tier national security conversation, God only knows who else did.

As for how Goldberg’s Signal number came to be on Mike Waltz’s phone in the first place, don’t ask. (Fine: It was, allegedly, “sucked in.”) Waltz is a man of many talents, no doubt, but lying convincingly isn’t one of them.

Team Trump isn’t going to lie or spin its way out of this. But it might gaslight its way out.

The magic word.

On Wednesday morning, after The Atlantic published the operational details that Hegseth had posted in the group chat, Trump’s press secretary hopped onto Twitter to declare victory.

Goldberg’s initial story had described what Hegseth shared as “war plans.” Wednesday’s follow-up piece describes them as “attack plans.” Aha. “The Atlantic has conceded: These were NOT ‘war plans,’” Karoline Leavitt declared, noting the change in terminology. “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

Hoax. She said the magic word.

Fox News said it too, showcasing Leavitt’s tweet under the all-caps header “ANOTHER HOAX” and crowing that The Atlantic had finally “admitted the truth.” Then Hegseth got in on the action. “No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information. Those are some really sh-tty war plans,” he said of the revelations in the new Atlantic piece. “We will continue to do our job, while the media does what it does best: peddle hoaxes.”

Goldberg claimed to have “war plans.” What he really had were “attack plans.” Checkmate, libs.

We might pause here, as others have, to consider that the Trump administration’s definition of “war” is somehow broad enough to justify deporting immigrants without due process yet not so broad as to fairly describe bombing Iranian proxies in Yemen. I’m focused on a more basic problem, though: Do they really think we’re this stupid?

I don’t think so. This is less about stupidity than psychology.

Drilling down on the difference between “war plans” and “attack plans” is gaslighting, the White House’s way of getting people of good faith to question the reality in front of them. If you’re an average joe who read Goldberg’s piece and came away thinking that what Hegseth did was obviously reckless, yet now you find Trump officials and right-wing propagandists angrily insisting that The Atlantic moved the goalposts in a meaningful way, you might plausibly second-guess yourself. Is there a material legal or political difference between “war plans” and “attack plans”? It’s true that there are “no names” and “no targets” specified. What if the group chat isn’t as damning as it appeared on its face to be?

Is this a scandal or a hoax?

The point isn’t to convince Americans that it’s the latter—we’re not that stupid, I hope—but, through insistent indignant repetition of the “hoax” talking point, to render them uncertain and unwilling to draw a firm conclusion. It’s the political equivalent of the Asch experiments, where groups of people were asked to compare the length of lines drawn on a board. In each group, all of the participants were secretly actors except one, the test subject. The actors were instructed to give the same wrong answer when asked about the size of the lines to see if their faulty consensus would influence the test subject.

It did. The psychological pressure to conform caused some subjects to doubt their own perceptions and, in more than a third of the experiments, to give the wrong answer themselves. Gaslighting, particularly when practiced by a group, can cause reasonable people to question their own ability to distinguish what’s real from what isn’t.

Scandal or hoax? Who can say?

Avoiding an argument.

The “hoax” hoax also works on not-so-reasonable people, but in a different way.

To MAGA true believers, the word seems to function like a rhetorical Bat Signal. When a “hoax” is afoot, populists are expected to rally behind their president, no questions asked. Whatever they might privately think of the Signal group chat, defending Trump from the latest plot to sabotage him by the media or liberals or whoever the villain du jour is takes precedence.

The 2020 election defeat? A Democratic hoax. January 6? An Antifa and/or FBI hoax. Concealing classified material at Mar-a-Lago? Definitely a “deep state” hoax. “Hoax” is essentially an incantation by which Trump’s political operation turns very bad political developments into loyalty tests for their ultra-loyal base. Reframing every setback, failure, and scandal as a test of credibility between the president and some hated cultural enemy ensures that most on the right will take his side regardless of the merits.

And as they do, it becomes easier to gaslight more reasonable observers. The more “actors” there are in this political experiment who are giving the wrong answer to the “scandal or hoax?” question, the more the “test subjects” will question their own perception.

Beyond the “Bat Signal” effect, the “hoax” nonsense works well on diehard populists because it offers them a way to redirect their anger away from Trump and toward the right’s political enemies instead. Confronting the president’s failures is a miserable experience for a hero-worshiping partisan Republican; demagoguing Democrats, the FBI, and the “deep state” is fun and easy by comparison. Trump-era politics is largely entertainment, and hating Jeffrey Goldberg is a lot more entertaining—and gratifying—for the right than hating Pete Hegseth.

Our own Steve Hayes identified another essential reason why Trump and his toadies resort to “hoax” nonsense every time they land in a bad spot politically. “They’re not concerned about the truth or winning an argument based on facts,” Steve said on Wednesday of the White House and its favorite talking point. “In this partisan media environment, it’s about giving the MAGA personalities something that allows them to claim ‘hoax’ and go after [Jeffrey] Goldberg. Many MAGA types will see the counterargument without ever seeing the facts.”

Just so. “Counterargument without facts” is a succinct description of how much of modern populist media operates. The outlets that cater to Trump supporters are ruthless gatekeepers of unfavorable information; ignorance is bliss, as the saying goes, and MAGA house organs are all about keeping consumers blissed out. I will be very surprised if Fox News and others delve into detail about what was actually said, particularly by Pete Hegseth, in the world’s most notorious group chat instead of digging up old examples of Jeffrey Goldberg’s liberal bias. It’s way easier to get a “hoax” panic going when you don’t disclose the details that disprove the “hoax.”

Way more expensive too. But still, way easier.

Now and forever: Propaganda doesn’t concern itself with what’s true, it concerns itself with what’s useful. If the politics you practice prizes truth, having the facts on your side will matter. If the politics you practice prizes entertainment, catastrophism, and making your enemies suffer, it will not. The “hoax” hoax isn’t about winning an argument, as Steve said. It’s about avoiding an argument, and never more so than with a scandal as indefensible and absurd as Groupchat-gate.

Having said all that, though, bookmark this poll.

It was taken on Tuesday, in the first flush of reporting about Goldberg’s exposé and before the White House had flashed the Bat Signal. Surprisingly, 60 percent of Republicans agreed that it was at least “somewhat serious” that top Trump officials had discussed “highly sensitive military plans using an unclassified chat application in a group that inadvertently included a journalist.” (Anecdotally, the man who inspired the term “Barstool conservative” seems bothered by it too.) It’ll be fascinating to see where that 60 percent stands in a week or two, after the talismanic chanting about a “hoax” has sunken in. This may be the rare Trump scandal that’s so straightforward and so plainly indefensible that even the usual gaslighting tactics won’t work. 

But I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Trump has overcome far worse than this. A country with as many boiled frogs as ours is pretty well cooked.