• US Officials allegedly share top secret military information with a journalist
  • The messages were shared over Signal, an encrypted messaging app
  • Naturally, the Internet had a field day
President Donald Trump group chat leak: The memes have started rolling in, with many taking aim at Pete Hegseth.
President Donald Trump group chat leak: The memes have started rolling in. Credit: Imago

The Trump group chat fallout is in full swing.

It must be pretty tense in President Donald Trump’s White House today as the dust starts to settle from an alleged highly sensitive group chat leak.

Earlier this week, The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, claimed that he had received a message on the encrypted messaging app Signal from an account with the name ‘White House National Security Adviser Michael Waltz’.

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Signal is an open source app that’s available for anyone to download. It provides a higher level of security than text messages and some other messaging apps.

As Goldberg explains in his article, the Trump group chat featured input from many high-up Washington officials. While unconfirmed, these are believed to have included Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth. 

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It continued to lay out details of a military operation regarding strikes that took place in Yemen. Meanwhile, Goldberg was present in the message thread – with everyone presumably unaware of his presence. 

Soon after the news broke, a journalist quizzed President Trump on the situation but he said it was the first time he’d heard about it. “I don’t know anything about it,” the President told reporters. “You’re telling me about it for the first time.”

Naturally, it didn’t take long for the Internet to react. With that in mind, here are the best memes so far.

Trump group chat memes: The Internet didn’t hold back

As this news made its way across social media, the internet relished the chance to poke fun at this spectacular mess up. 

Late nite political satire The Daily Show threw their hat into the ring, creating their own version of a fictional fake chat that featuring JD Vance losing control of his profile picture – and the size of his face.

Others made reference to one of Kieran Culkin’s most memorable Succession moments – the time where he accidentally sends a NSFW picture to his own dad.

Others poked fun at the casual sharing of such sensitive information.

American stand-up comic Paula Poundstone said that she actually had quite a bit in common with Hegseth.

Others questioned how the whole thing happened in the first place.

…and the dreaded auto spell checker.

Some joked about the casualness of this info-dump…

Meanwhile, Goldberg wasn’t offered an opt-out. He chose to leave the Trump group chat.

What has Pete Hegseth said?

When asked about this ongoing situation, Fox News presenter-turned-Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth mostly tried to swerve questions although he did claim that “Nobody was texting war plans.”

Elsewhere, he did his best to question Goldberg’s journalistic credentials. In addition to saying he “peddles garbage,” Hegseth called Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist.”

However, it begs the question: if Goldberg hadn’t had spoken up, just how long would this kind of information have been shared with a third party?

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Simon Bland
Simon is a freelance entertainment journalist and SEO writer based in the UK. He writes about movies, TV and pop-culture and his work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Beast, IndieWire, Yahoo Entertainment, Rolling Stone, Little White Lies and more.
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