Signal Chat? NBD: MAGAReport 3/25/25

Administration follies have no place in the MAGA Forums

You cannot escape the fiasco where national security leaders included Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic in their war-planning group chat in the news today. Even FOX and Newsmax, who sometimes decline to cover administration mistakes, have it as their top stories:

The MAGA forums closely follow the news but if you checked there for SignalGate reactions, it would be as though it didn’t exist. I put the first four screens of the forum home page at the bottom of this post and you will see none of them mention the story. On the fifth page there’s a reference, but only through a meme about what a Democratic group chat would look like. Basically, it’s absent from the discussion.

It is interesting because this is 100% the “but her emails” crowd who acted like they were very concerned about information security back in 2016. It is a new addition to many examples of how this particular part of the MAGA movement doesn’t have any real policy or political beliefs. They will change their stated beliefs at Trump’s whim. Their only real concerns are that they can troll liberals and score points for their side.

This is especially interesting to me right now as I am working on a project about the Proud Boys who, whatever you think of them, do have a set of principles that they stand by. They call out the administration when it doesn’t live up to their expectations. They care about the core issues that they say they care about.

For people who oppose MAGA, the forum-style supporters, who are mostly the ones I write about, are the most difficult to deal with. They can’t be “gotten” on a bad point they make because they do not care about the point. They will drop a stated position and move on if it’s not achieving the end, and the end is really just making sure other people are upset and suffering.