'We've all done this': Trump admin group chat scandal is its most relatable fail
Last year Morgan Matthews woke up to discover that she had sent a text message while she was asleep.
“I don’t don’t know what to do with my wwwa w www waawaww we awW,” the lengthy message began, accompanied by a photo of a makeup sponge Matthews said she saved to her phone years earlier.
The lucky recipients of her sleep-induced text? A friend’s mother, the person she was in a relationship with at the time, and three strangers.
Now, Matthews, 24, who lives in Spring Hill, Tennessee, double-checks her texts and direct messages every day just to make sure she didn’t accidentally post in her sleep again.
“It can be a little worrying. But at the end of the day, nothing dramatic happens,” she said.
We have all done it, mistakenly texted the colleague we were bad mouthing or added a random stranger to a family group chat. Adding the wrong person to an email or chat string may be the world’s most relatable faux pas.
While many of these slip-ups can be mortifying – the person who accidentally texted “wanna smoke?” to a Mississippi police officer or the "TODAY" show co-host Sheinelle Jones who sent a photo of her bathing suit-clad posterior to a moms chat instead of close friends – they usually don’t have national security implications.
But that’s what happened when President Donald Trump's national security adviser, Michael Waltz, accidentally disclosed secret war plans to the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in a group text.
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg said he was added to a thread on a commercial messaging app about plans for airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen that included some of the nation’s highest-ranking officials, such as Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“It’s just something that can happen. You can even prepare for it, and it can happen,” Trump told reporters. “We always want to use the best technology. This was the best technology for the moment.”
The group chat failure quickly broke the internet. “That horrible feeling when you accidentally add the wrong Jennifer to the email thread is... not as bad as this,” one person commented on LinkedIn.
Matthews said she was stunned by the high-stakes foul-up.
“It’s one thing to send an accidental text," she said. “I feel like what happened with that – it’s just sad, the fact that it happened. How did that happen?”
People often turn to Signal to keep their communications private from prying eyes such as government surveillance because the app’s end-to-end encryption can lock down digital conversations. No one but the people in the chat can read the messages as they ricochet from device to device. But few people suspected that high-ranking officials inside the Trump administration were using it to communicate with each other.
Trump said the White House will consider changing how officials communicate with each other, including the use of Signal, which he said he will likely not be using as often.
"We'll look into it," Trump said. "But everybody else seems to be using it, it seems to be the No. 1 used device or app, whatever you want to call it."
The national security breach reveals a key weakness, not about Signal but about being human: No digital system, no matter how secure, can protect you from your own careless mistakes.
That’s why the Trump administration’s Signalgate blunder was all anyone could talk about on news shows and social media, in workplaces, even in schools, said New York University psychology professor Tessa West.
Even West’s 11-year-old son came home from school Monday and confessed that he, too, had once added the wrong person to a group chat. “Mommy, I did that. I did exactly what those Trump people did,” he told her.
“For 11-year-old boys, this is the most relatable thing that the Trump administration has done, which just shows you just how ubiquitous this experience is from Slack channels to group chats,” West said. “We’ve all done this.”
Added by mistake to a chat? What to do
Private group chats can be a useful tool for organizing family get-togethers and school pick-ups. They are also a favorite spot for spicy takes, office gossip and internet memes. But there aren’t many graceful ways to bow out of them, whether you were the intended recipient or not.
“If you show up in person to a party and there is a group of people having a conversation where you don’t belong, all those social cues are there. You can tell when you are not welcome. You can tell when you have accidentally walked into something private. But none of that is present online,” West said. “So it can be very difficult to extract yourself, especially if you have just been privy to a whole bunch of private information.”
Not all group chat flubs are bad. Some have led to heartwarming moments and even new friendships.
A Michigan high school basketball team in 2021 accidentally added former Tampa Bay Buccaneers cornerback Sean Murphy-Bunting to their group chat, leading to a FaceTime call with Tom Brady and other players. A 2016 text message from Wanda Dench accidentally inviting stranger Jamal Hinton to her family’s holiday gathering has led to the two sharing multiple Thanksgivings together.
But the best rule of thumb in general: If you're mistakenly added to a group chat, leave. If you think it’s necessary, send a short, polite message to the group explaining that you were added by mistake.
How to remove strangers from your group chat
On Apple:
◾Enter the group message, then tap the group icon at the top of the thread.
◾Tap the gray arrow icon to the right of the contacts. Swipe left over the name of the person you’d like to remove.
◾Tap “Remove,” then “Done.”
On Android:
◾Open the RCS (Rich Communication Services) conversation in Google Messages.
◾At the top right, tap “More,” then “Group details.”
◾Tap the three dots next to the name of the person you’d like to remove. Select “Remove from group.”
◾An individual member of a chat can be removed if all members have RCS enabled. This option is not available with SMS (short message service) or MMS (multimedia messaging service) groups, according to Google’s support website.
Keep strangers out of Signal chats
The nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation has tips on how to protect who has access to your Signal group chats.
◾Approve new members: Enable this so you can approve or deny new members.
◾Put the administrators in charge: Make sure administrators are the only ones who can add new members.
◾Restrict who can add new members: Tap the group chat name and then “permissions” to restrict people from renaming the group or adding new members.
Contributing: Joey Garrison