March 26: The Meaning of Signalgate

Israeli invasion plans?; A Black Sea cease-fire?; Trump announces new tariffs, export controls

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The Big Story

We’re on day three of the fallout from “Signalgate,” i.e., the leak to Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg of a high-level government discussion about impending airstrikes on the Houthis. Despite speculation that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz could lose his job over the affair, Trump defended Waltz in a press conference Tuesday, calling him a “very good man,” praising the strikes as “totally successful,” and describing the attacks on Waltz as “very unfair.” Instead, the White House has publicly settled on two messages about the scandal: (1) that no classified information was disclosed; and (2) that Goldberg sucks.

It’s hard to argue with (2) as a general matter. On this particular issue, though, it seems that while Goldberg might have hyped his story a bit, he otherwise behaved as most journalists would. On (1), well, it depends on your definition of classified. On Wednesday The Atlantic published a full transcript of the conversation, including this from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, which doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d normally give to a journalist:

Reckless? Probably, though, as the Associated Press reported last week, Signal’s encrypted messaging service is commonly used by officials at every level of government, and we’d never have heard of this scandal if someone had not added Goldberg to the chat. On the latter point, we’ve seen plenty of theories swirling about how Goldberg got in, but the most plausible one is also the most simple. Like many of the chat’s participants, Goldberg was identified on Signal only by his initials, JG. Those are also the initials of U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. So we figure Goldberg got added by mistake—apparently by Waltz, though that wasn’t made explicit in the original Atlantic story.

All in all, the “scandal” is interesting less as a scandal than as a window into the thinking of the administration’s various national security principals. We saw that Waltz and Hegseth were supportive of the strikes against the Houthis, while Vice President J.D. Vance and a surrogate for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were more skeptical, with Vance calling them a “mistake.” We also saw that Hegseth, though supportive of the strikes, designated as his staff point of contact Dan Caldwell, a “realist” veteran of the Koch think tank network who is more aligned with the Vance/Gabbard position than with Hegseth’s. White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, meanwhile, ultimately closed the debate by casting it as a question of loyalty to Trump’s wishes.

Many in the so-called realist wing of MAGA, however, seized on Signalgate to demand that Waltz be fired—ostensibly due to Waltz’s allegedly chummy relationship with Goldberg, but in reality because they oppose the White House policy, supported by Waltz, of striking the Houthis and pressuring Iran and its proxies. As one Waltz ally told Politico of the “MAGA-aligned insiders” pushing for Waltz’s ouster, “They want an excuse to knife Waltz in the back because they think, erroneously, he isn’t in line with Trump’s foreign policy agenda.”

On X, that charge was led by Curt Mills, the executive editor of The American Conservative and a prominent surrogate of the Tucker Carlson faction, who boosted the call for Waltz’s firing by casting him as John Bolton 2.0:

Mills also shared a post from Drop Site editor and former Intercept reporter Ryan Grim, an anti-Trump socialist and noted fan of PFLP schizophrenic @zei_squirrel, alleging that Waltz had been leaking to Goldberg even before Signalgate for “internal Trump admin fights,” per a “source familiar”:

Who is the “source familiar”? We don’t know; but we would note that Grim would be a strange person for White House sources to leak to, given that he’s, you know, an anti-Trump leftist. Then again, Grim has been a preferred outlet for “sources” leaking in support of Caldwell, Michael DiMino, Elbridge Colby, and other Trump administration staffers or would-be staffers who have, in Grim’s characterization, “spoken out against war with Iran.” MAGA!

Mills also appeared Monday on American Moment’s podcast to argue, echoing Vance’s points in the Signal chat, that the United States had no national interest in maintaining freedom of navigation in the Red Sea:

What is American Moment? Well, it’s a “conservative personnel development organization” (per Politico) that, since 2021, has been working to train “populist” junior staffers to take over the next Republican administration. As Politico explained in a 2023 profile of the organization, the group is tightly allied with Vance (described in the piece as “one of the group’s closest political allies and ideological lodestars”) and has developed close relations with major conservative institutions such as The Heritage Foundation. American Moment’s cofounder, Saurabh Sharma, is now a special assistant to the president in the Presidential Personnel Office, where he is an influential voice in administration hiring.

The idea that the United States has no real interest in keeping shipping lanes open, however, is not shared by the president. In remarks on Tuesday, Trump defended the strikes by describing the Houthis’ impact on global shipping. These are “people who shoot down ships,” including U.S. ships, Trump said, as well as “anything that happens to be flying in the area.” Hegseth, too, explicitly stated in the leaked Signal messages that defending freedom of navigation was a “core national interest.” On the other hand, one person who does apparently buy the Mills argument is Hegseth’s top Middle East adviser at the Pentagon, DiMino. Last January, DiMino wrote in Responsible Statecraft:

Washington should start by recognizing that both its economic and national security interests are largely unaffected by Red Sea transit. If it wants, the U.S. can truly afford to do nothing there. Despite a 65% decline in expected freight container volumes transiting the Red Sea, the U.S. saw just a 1% decline in net imports for the month of December. The U.S. does not need to spend between $260 and $573 million per month, as some analysts estimate, to defend foreign merchant shipping with no end in sight.

As Lee Smith wrote for Tablet earlier this month, it’s a mistake to view these intra-administration knife fights as a “split inside MAGA” between realists and neoconservatives, since there is no “MAGA”—and no “Trumpism”—outside of Trump himself. Trump’s own foreign policy views are neither “neocon” nor “realist”: He prefers peace and opposes what he derides as “stupid wars,” but he has also shown time and again over nearly a decade at the center of national politics that he is willing to use American power to enforce the United States’ interests against its adversaries, among which he counts China, Iran, and Islamist terror groups around the world.

What we are seeing instead, as Smith argued, is an “external faction trying to attach itself to MAGA” to pursue its own pet issues—among them the decades-long Beltway obsessions with “rebalancing” American global commitments, “pivoting” to Asia, and realigning American power in the Middle East away from Israel and Saudi Arabia and toward Iran and Qatar. This is, as we say all the time, not Trump’s policy. But the competition within “MAGA” right now is only partly about what the administration will do for the next four years. Mostly, it’s about what happens after 2028.

—Park MacDougald

IN THE BACK PAGES: Moshe Cohen-Eliya on the Israeli deep state

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The Rest

→Is Israel planning to invade and reoccupy Gaza? Last month, we noted reports in The Washington Free Beacon suggesting that IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir was drawing up plans to invade Gaza with as many as 50,000 ground troops to “conquer Gaza and eradicate Hamas.” Earlier this week, while we were distracted with Steve Witkoff and Signalgate, Haaretz and the Financial Times reported on the existence of a similar-seeming plan, which they also attributed to Zamir—though, as the FT noted, the plan has not yet been approved by the Israeli security cabinet. According to the FT, the plan calls for the IDF to call up “several combat divisions” to reinvade Gaza, defeat Hamas, occupy large stretches of the territory, move the civilian population into a “humanitarian zone” along the Mediterranean coast, and then assume direct responsibility for administration, including the distribution of food and other forms of aid. “The prior administration wanted us to end the war. Trump wants us to win the war,” an Israeli official told the FT about the alleged change in strategy.

→The United States announced Tuesday that it had brokered a maritime cease-fire agreement between Russia and Ukraine in the Black Sea, though Russia has demanded guarantees of sanctions relief before it will agree to the terms, the Financial Times reports. The cease-fire, which Ukraine immediately agreed to, would halt all attacks on shipping in the Black Sea and on Ukrainian Black Sea ports such as Odesa in exchange for Ukraine ceasing strikes on Russian energy infrastructure. In a statement quoted in a Bloomberg report, the White House announced that the deal “will help restore Russia’s access to the world market for agricultural and fertilizer exports, lower maritime insurance costs, and enhance access to ports and payment systems for such transactions.” The Kremlin announced several hours later, however, that the deal was conditional on the removal of Western sanctions on Russian banks. In an interview with Newsmax, Trump said he thought that “Russia wants to see an end to [the war], but it could be they’re dragging their feet.” He added, “I just want to see it stop. I also don’t want to pay.”

→Trump is expected to announce new auto tariffs on Wednesday afternoon, though the size and breadth of the tariffs were not yet clear by the time The Scroll closed. Trump had signaled in a Tuesday interview, however, that “I’ll probably be more lenient than reciprocal” with tariffs, and allies of the White House have suggested that the new auto tariffs may apply solely to finished vehicles and not to components, which would encourage final assembly in the United States while muting potential economic damage. More generally, as trade lawyer Nicholas Phillips explained in an essay for Commonplace earlier this week, the point of the overall tariff strategy is to create leverage with Canada and Mexico for a renegotiation of the United States—Mexico—Canada Agreement to prevent adversaries such as China from using Mexico and Canada to duck U.S. import duties. As Phillips explains, the current iteration of the USMCA…

Means that any broad, global tariff can be immediately undermined by transshipping or transferring production to either of our neighboring countries and exporting duty-free to the U.S. Indeed, China has already had success in circumventing high tariffs on its U.S. exports by relocating its factories to Mexico. In the international trading system, tariffs are applied based on the country of manufacture, not the corporate nationality of the manufacturer, so a car made in Mexico by a Chinese corporation gets treated as a Mexican car—meaning, under USMCA, the U.S. can’t tariff it.

That loophole, Phillips suggests, is what the administration’s current, seemingly combative approach to its neighbors is designed to close.

→The U.S. Commerce Department has added more than 50 Chinese firms to an export blacklist designed to curtail “Beijing’s artificial intelligence and advanced computing capabilities,” NBC reports. The blacklisted companies include Nettrix—a major customer of American chip manufacturers such as Nvidia and Intel that was the subject of a 2024 New York Times investigation on how China was skirting sensitive-technology export bans—and six subsidiaries of Inspur, a cloud computing and artificial intelligence firm that was blacklisted by the Biden administration in 2023. According to the Times, “Tuesday’s entity listings together will affect a significant portion of the Chinese market for servers, a type of computer that is necessary to generate artificial intelligence.”

→Video of the Day:

→That’s from a Tuesday protest against Hamas and the resumption of the war in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, translated and shared on X by the Middle East Media Research Institute. According to a Wednesday report in The Times of Israel, protests broke out in Beit Lahia and Jabalia in the north, and in Khan Younis in the south, where Gazans also called for an end to the war—and Hamas’ rule.

→Big, if true:

That was what was at the top of our X “Explore” tab for most of the day; it serves as a nice reminder of what it means when people say that X is “the future” and “the media” and “citizen journalism.” Now, you can learn all about how in 1988, secret CIA tests used guidance from a psychic to discover the Ark of the Covenant buried underground in Ethiopia, where it was guarded by “entities”—and there’s no annoying editor there to tell you it’s fake.

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Israel’s Deep State Is Worse Than America’s

For left-wing elites in Jerusalem and Washington, ‘saving democracy’ means rule by a rogue judiciary and intelligence services

by Moshe Cohen-Eliya

The Israeli government’s decision to dismiss Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar against the warnings of its attorney general arguably marks the most dangerous inflection point yet in Israel’s long-simmering constitutional crisis. On Sunday the Israeli government unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara herself, a first step toward dismissing her. The Supreme Court, which last year struck down a constitutional amendment to overhaul the Israeli judicial system, has now intervened to block Bar’s dismissal—a ruling the government says it intends to defy. So the question is no longer whether Israel has a judicial problem. The question is: Who actually governs the country?

Outside observers, particularly in the West, often describe Israel’s legal crisis as a power grab by a radical right-wing government. The truth is the opposite. For years, unelected officials in Israel’s judiciary, security services, and legal bureaucracy have amassed extraordinary powers to override elected decision-makers. Israel has become the only Western constitutional democracy in which judges have veto power over judicial appointments to the Supreme Court, the attorney general controls the government’s legal voice, and intelligence chiefs act as constitutional guardians. The result is a crisis of legitimacy—and a growing confrontation between the institutions of popular sovereignty and what can only be described as a deep state.

Nowhere is this confrontation more acute than in the relationship between Israel’s judiciary and its security establishment.

The showdown over the Shin Bet is not symbolic—it is existential. It encapsulates the various elements of the elite that are trying to cripple the elected government. Bar headed an agency most responsible for internal security that failed miserably on Oct. 7, 2023. The prime minister lost confidence in him long ago, but with Israel at war, Netanyahu refrained from dismissing key security figures like Bar and then-Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi. Following the IDF’s report on its failings on Oct. 7, which came out end of February, Halevi resigned. Bar had no intention of doing so. Not only was the Shin Bet’s report pathetically self-exculpatory, but also Bar preempted it by launching an investigation into the prime minister’s senior aides’ alleged financial ties with Qatar. The maneuver simultaneously deflected criticism of Shin Bet’s Oct. 7 failure and allowed Bar to claim that his dismissal was tainted by a conflict of interest, and thereby get folded into the ongoing campaign against the government.

Enter Attorney General Baharav-Miara.

The attorney general is both the government’s legal adviser and its chief prosecutor, but in practice, the role functions as a legal viceroy—binding the government to her own interpretations of the law. If the attorney general refuses to defend a government decision before the Supreme Court, the government is not allowed to defend it independently. That’s not theory—that’s practice.

In the Bar case, Baharav-Miara announced she will not defend the government’s decision, yet she allowed the government to seek representation elsewhere; in other cases she denied any representation in the court from the government. Her own potential dismissal will almost certainly be challenged in the Supreme Court, much like with Bar. No other democracy vests this kind of unchecked authority in a single unelected official.

Ironically, even Israel’s own Supreme Court has found some of the attorney general’s decisions indefensible. But it was the court itself—led by Chief Justice Aharon Barak—that conferred these extraordinary powers on the attorney general in the first place. In a landmark 1990s decision, Barak declared that the government must obey the attorney general’s opinions—while citing a report that said the opposite. The net effect is that the attorney general, appointed by the previous left-leaning government, wields more power over Israel’s policy than the current elected ministers.

The Supreme Court has issued a temporary order halting the government’s decision against Bar. Following the injunction, Baharav-Miara instructed Prime Minister Netanyahu that he is not allowed to appoint a new Shin Bet head, interview candidates, or even appoint a temporary chief, pending the Supreme Court’s final ruling.

But the big question is, what happens if the court invalidates the government’s decision and the government refuses to comply—who decides then?

That question leads to what one may call the “bodyguard test.” Imagine a scenario in which the attorney general declares Prime Minister Netanyahu “incapacitated” due to his ongoing corruption trial—something the court has suggested it has the power to do. If Netanyahu arrives at his office, and the attorney general has declared him unfit to serve, what will his bodyguard do?

That bodyguard, of course, will escalate the issue up the chain of command—eventually reaching the Shin Bet chief. In that moment, it will not be the law, the constitution, or the court that determines who governs Israel. It will be one unelected security official making a decision based on loyalty.

This is why the battle over the identity of the Shin Bet director matters so profoundly. Security chiefs may ultimately determine the outcome of Israel’s constitutional standoff. That is the logic—and the danger—of a system in which the levers of force answer not to elected officials, but to a caste of unaccountable elites.

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Israel’s constitutional dysfunction did not begin overnight. While the country’s Declaration of Independence envisioned the adoption of a formal constitution, David Ben-Gurion rejected the idea, wary of judges overruling elected officials. Instead, Ben-Gurion preferred the British model of parliamentary supremacy. In 1950, the Knesset opted to pass Basic Laws incrementally, intending to compile them into a formal constitution at a later date. That moment never came.

In the 1990s, under the leadership of Chief Justice Barak, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned previous judicial precedents and declared the Basic Laws to be constitutional in nature. With no formal constitution and no effective checks on judicial powers, the court became a hybrid super-legislature.

Barak’s judicial revolution unfolded in three waves. In the 1980s, he diluted the standing rules, allowing NGOs to bring political issues before the court, and ruled that "everything is justiciable." He also discarded the strict traditional Wednesbury test of reasonableness—used in other common law countries—in favor of a “balancing” test that enabled judges to replace executive decisions with their own preferences under the guise of legal review.

In the 1990s, the court transformed the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty—originally a modest compromise between liberals and conservatives in Israel—into a sweeping quasi-constitution. And in 2024, it reached the apex of its power by annulling a constitutional amendment designed to curtail judicial overreach itself. The Israeli court is now unique in the democratic world in its assertion of the authority to cancel a constitutional amendment, absent any "eternity clauses" in the Israeli Basic Laws.

The real roots of this power imbalance are sociological as much as legal. Since Menachem Begin’s historic electoral victory in 1977, Israel’s traditional Ashkenazi secular elite has gradually lost its political dominance. In response, this liberal, globally connected minority sought to entrench its influence through institutions it continued to control: the courts, academia, the Bank of Israel, and key departments within the civil service.

The security establishment, particularly the Shin Bet (Israel's equivalent to the FBI) and IDF General Staff, have also become instruments of this unelected power bloc. Time and again, elected governments have been thwarted not by parliamentary opposition, but by hostile bureaucracies and security chiefs willing to challenge their authority on ostensibly legal or professional grounds. The idea that it is vital for democracy for the Shin Bet head to serve as a check on the prime minister echoes the circus America experienced during President Trump’s first term and is just as preposterous. But that is why the elite has embraced Bar—precisely because he runs an agency that operates with vast extra-legal power.

These dynamics were on full display this week, as the Shin Bet director and the attorney general refused to attend a cabinet meeting discussing their own dismissals. Instead, they submitted letters challenging the legitimacy of the elected government. Their open defiance marks a pivotal moment: We are no longer dealing with internal bureaucratic resistance, but with an institutional rebellion.

The judiciary, too, is actively escalating the confrontation. Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit—appointed in open defiance of the current government—has handpicked a judicial panel to rule on the dismissal of Ronen Bar. Research by professor Yonathan Givati shows how Israeli Supreme Court presidents have long manipulated their power to form judicial panels in order to produce desired rulings. This week’s decision appears no different. The panel includes two out of three justices known for their hyperactivist bent. In Israel, as the saying now goes, the justices shoot the arrow—then draw the target.

Meanwhile, Baharav-Miara has denounced as “politicization” a parliamentary bill that would reform judicial appointments by requiring consensus between the government coalition and the opposition. Yet in virtually every Western constitutional democracy—including the U.S.—Supreme Court justices are appointed by elected officials.

Israel’s constitutional crisis is not a legal debate. It is a struggle over sovereignty. One side seeks to preserve a system in which unelected elites in robes and uniform dictate national policy. The other side, embodied by the current government, is trying to restore democratic accountability.

The judiciary, emboldened by decades of activist jurisprudence, is now openly resisting any attempt to reform its power. Meanwhile, security agencies, legal advisers, and civil service bureaucrats are acting in lockstep to block the government’s agenda—even at the cost of subverting democratic norms.

This is no longer just Israel’s crisis. As Elon Musk recently warned, the fight against the unelected bureaucratic class—what many now call the deep state—is a global struggle. From Washington to Brussels to Jerusalem, elected governments are being boxed in by entrenched elites who use the language of law, security, and “professionalism” to undermine democratic mandates. What is needed now is not only internal reform, but international solidarity among nations—and citizens—who value representative government over rule by unaccountable institutions. Israel’s struggle is the front line of a wider battle. It is time for those who believe in self-government to form alliances across borders, cultures, and political divides. The alternative is not stability—it is permanent rule by those who were never chosen.