In the Trump administration and Israel, a grotesque display of virility coupled with a loss of humanity

Robert Zaretsky
March 28, 2025

There has been a storm of chatter devoted to a recent group chat. Yes, that one: the Signal chat about an imminent attack on Houthi bases in Yemen that included all our nation’s ranking defense and security officials. Oh, and also the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, whose accidental presence no one questioned.

The storm, though still roaring several days after Goldberg revealed the extraordinary security breach, will eventually give way to yet another new storm sparked by a new outrage against the rule of law, reason and decency. Yet there is an aspect to the current scandal that merits more attention than it has received, one that bears a disturbing resemblance to events in Israel.

Ever since 2015, when Donald Trump descended on the gleaming escalator at Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for president, political discourse in our country is not what it used to be. Of course, it was often bland and predictable, but these skin-deep qualities encourage other qualities, like civility, which has less to do with being polite than it has to do with being civic-minded. Without civility, mutual trust and respect — the basis for a flourishing democracy — will wither and die.

Signalgate reflects the coarsening and brutalizing of political discourse in the Age of Trump.  By now, there is no need to repeat how this exchange revealed not just the political inexperience and practical ineptitude of Trump’s national security team, but its sheer stupidity and dazzling vanity as well. But there is still the need, perhaps, to underscore the show of virility paraded by the participants both during the chat and their subsequent reactions to the public outcry. This particularly toxic brand of virility drips from the complaint of the participant identified as “JD Vance”—“I just hate bailing our Europe again”—to the response of “Pete Hegseth”: “I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC.”

Once Goldberg, after taking every imaginable security precaution, posted his account on the Atlantic website, the degree of toxic virility jumped several notches. Trump slammed Goldberg as a “sleazebag,” Hegseth blasted him as “deceitful,” and Waltz, most succinctly, dismissed Goldberg as the “bottom scum” who might have “tricked” his way into the group chat. That these pejoratives are pulled from the lexicon of antisemites does not seem to have raised eyebrows.

What has raised eyebrows, though, was Waltz’s use of emojis. As the world now knows, he texted the images of a punching fist, American flag, and flames shortly after the attack — the same attack whose planning he had already signaled in advance on Signal. What is shocking about this series of emojis is the lack not just of humility for someone who wields such power, but also the lack of humanity over the attack’s possible consequences for lives other than that of the “missile guy” who was being targeted.

This mixture of indecency and puerility is not unique to our government; it is key to the character of Israel’s government and settlers. It comes from the top, as when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cast Palestinians in the role of “Amakelites,” the persecutors of biblical Israelites. It also comes from the bottom. The West Bank militants who have called for the “extermination of the brutes” exhibit the same disdain for the lives of men, women, and children whose sole crime is to own, farm, and tend the land they are being torn from.

Last year, during a killing spree that left thousands of animals slaughtered, a dozen houses torched, and four Palestinians dead, a group of settlers who described themselves as the “Honor Guard of Nablus,” peppered the WhatsApp group chat with calls to eliminate “the Nazi enemy,” punctuated by angry face and, yes, flame emojis. (At the same time, it should be noted that journalists using social platforms, facing algorithms that discourage reporting on events in Gaza, are using emojis like gravestones or skulls to convey the extraordinary toll of civilian lives in Gaza.)

There is the tendency to describe the folks responsible for these words and acts as ideologues — namely, individuals who see and act in the world through the prism of an idea. Yet, 80 years ago in his book Réflexions sur la question juive, (misleadingly titled Anti-Semite and Jew in the English translation), Jean-Paul Sartre, insisted that antisemitism, or any other form of racism, is anything but an opinion. As he noted, an opinion which entails the eradication of an entire people is an opinion pas comme les autres.

For the same reason, it is not an idea; instead it is a passion, one which relieves the antisemite (whether the Semite is a Jew or Palestinian) of the hard work of seeing clearly and thinking rationally. What better vehicle for such passions than tweets, texts, and emojis on social platforms? Or what better means to find, as Sartre writes, one’s “being entirely outside himself, never to look within, to be aware of nothing save the fear he inspires in others?”

And what better epitaph, for that matter, for both of our governments and the fate to which they want to condemn us?

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