When you have a guy whose Nebuchadnezzar-like values system gets blurred by his followers into Biblical evidence of God's favor, you know that the world is truly upside down here in America. Donald Trump's not the only one contributing to chaos, but he's the president, and when this president stocks a cabinet with conformists to his version of reality, you end up with the Pete Hegseth debacle.

In a Signal chat with national security officials that included - apparently inadvertently - a journalist, the Secretary of Defense disclosed sensitive military information about what was at that time an as-yet undertaken military strike.

From CNN:

"The updates Hegseth was giving in the Signal chat were the kind of real-time play-by-play that a commander would be giving to the president in a highly classified setting as the operation unfolded.

'These are operational plans that are highly classified in order to protect the service members,' [a defense official explained]."

Subsequently, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic Magazine, the journalist on the Signal chat, wrote this: "On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, 'Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.'

For more context, from Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant Defense secretary under the first Trump administration, who told Politico: “You do not need to be a member of the military or intelligence community to know that this information is exactly what the enemy would want to know. And it does clearly put our military members at risk.” Even Fox News’s Brit Hume, who reposted a video of Hegseth’s comments on the social platform X and wrote, “Oh for God’s sake.”

But that's what you get in this administration, where cabinet officials like Hegseth start with the proposition of fealty to Trump, not to the country, to the alternative reality that he embodies, not the truth, and to the virtue of unaccountability, the very cornerstone of MAGA, where iconography supplants fact.