Trump’s Most Outrageous Scandal Yet Is Actually Going Viral

The early data shows that people are paying attention the group chat heard around the world

We have turned down this road countless times before. Trump does something outrageous, illegal, or stunningly incompetent. Washington works itself into a lather, the cable news networks air wall-to-wall coverage, the usual suspects tweet up a storm (often with siren emojis), and the political newsletters and podcasts go crazy while the rest of America yawns. It’s not that people don’t care; it’s that they seldom hear about it. The Trumpian crisis du jour rarely escapes the political news bubble for the vast majority of Americans who don’t follow politics closely.

Despite his reputation as “Teflon Don” — someone who can survive the sorts of transgressions that would end most political careers — it’s this media dynamic that benefits him most. Many of Trump’s misdeeds don’t break through to the broader public in our hyper-fragmented, algorithmically-powered media ecosystem. One or two pieces of derogatory information will not collapse Trump’s public support — far from it. However, most Americans remain unaware of the daily chaos and corruption that defines Trump’s White House.

The gap between the political obsessives and everyone else has widened significantly since Trump’s first term. Media consumption habits changed during the pandemic. The traditional media lost reach and credibility. Facebook stopped promoting journalism. Elon Musk bought (and ruined) Twitter. Tiktok took control of the news.

The blockbuster story in The Atlantic about Trump Administration officials plotting a military strike on an unsecured app after accidentally inviting a reporter to join the group chat had all the makings of a typical “inside the beltway” scandal. The story broke in The Atlantic — a particularly august publication that has historically catered to elites. It involved a classified military operation that most people didn’t know happened against a group most don’t know exists in a part of the world many cannot locate on a map.

However, early evidence predicts that the Yemen group chat story is a blockbuster. More than any other story since Trump was inaugurated, this one is breaking through to the broader public.