What's next, Tarriffgate? Will Trump's presidency be known for its gates? By Hal M. Brown

 

Tarriffgate hasn’t happened yet. At least nobody is calling it this. However we could say Trade-Wargate has been engaged.

Related to Trump’s tarrifs, another “gate” could be Stupidgate:

Another “gate” that shows indications it may be around the corner is Muskgate. 

With the market cratering 1000+ points this morning (article) we now can consider a pending Recessiongate. 

My life partner and intrepid proofreader added Stagnationgate.

Some horrors may not lend themselves to a short “gate” term but still have a grim ring to them. A good example is Starving-Childrengate. 

How about Bird-flugate? For that matter, if we have more than one disease reach epidemic or pandemic levels we could have Diseasegate we can blame on Trump and RJF Jr.

With enough excesses in Trump’s manic sadistic quest to punish his enemies we could have Police-Stategate.

A lot of these don’t have the simple one word “gate” name which we can thank a Washington, DC building complete for:

When the Signalgate story broke, I wrote Trump survived Pussygate unscathed. Will he survive Signalgate unscathed?

The term Signalgate was used in only three articles that night. By the next morning it was everywhere. 

One has to be careful about labeling something a “gate” too early. You can run a “gate” up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes and hope that if it doesn’t turn into a damaging scandal people forget you predicted that it would. 

Wikipedia has a list of some 800 gate scandals (here) most of which never went anywhere.

Aside from Watergate, which brought Nixon down and sent people to jail, there are two other famous ones. Emailgate might have contributed to Hillary Clinton losing the election. Pussygate proved that not enough people cared that Turmp was a gross disgusting sexual assaulting misogynist to keep him out of the White House.

So far Trump is the only politician to have had two gates: Pussygate and Signalgate. He survived the first and is so far well along the way to surviving the second.

I predict that the gate that may yet hurt him is Tarriffgate. Trump may have put way too many of his eggs in one basket with his tariff war.

Read my previous Substacks here.

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Trump survived Pussygate unscathed. Will he survive Signalgate unscathed? By Hal M. Brown (It appears that our military and intelligence agencies are being run by Col. Klink and Sgt. Shutlz.)

 

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• I wrote this last night and was waiting to proofread it for typos this morning. Then I turned on “Morning Joe” I see that Jeffery Goldberg, whose name everyone following the news now knows, has released the Signal message text chain he originally withheld. They show without a doubt that this messages contained highly sensitive classifiedinformation.

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• It was revealed today that there are other Signal message chats some of which may have included people without authorization to be on them. The talk is about whether what Hegseth having done is a fireable offense. It is being emphasized that one of the people on the chat, Steve Witkoff, was in Russia at the time.

Morning Update:

The verdict of what to call this is in. It is now Signalgate or SignalGate! This is from USA Today.

As if we need an example of the level of the incompetence and nincompoopery that Trump sold the Senate with his appointments, we only have to look at what may or may not come to be commonly called Signalgate. (Update: It is now Signalgate) The following is all outdated. This reference in Wikipedia needs to be revised: The incident has been coined "Signalgate" by some in the media.^[2][3][4])

This is from Foreign Policy:

Wikipedia already has an entry where the term Signalgate is used. They note three instances where the term Signalgate was used including in the Foreign Policy article.

There is only one “gate,” Watergate, which sent people to jail and brought down a president. It was the gate that made gate a suffix. 

Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate may have contributed to her losing the election. There’s no way to know how much it did, if it had any effect at all.

Wikipedia has a list of over 800 scandal “gates.”. Aside from the most famous, Watergate, they range from Janet Jackson’s “nipplegate” to those I doubt many people have heard of like “tomato gate.”

Pussygate (described here in the Access Hollywood entry)  is on the list. It never made it into the vernacular. Perhaps this is because the term is so crude or because it never effected Trump’s political career. Many publications writing about the Access Hollywood bus recording never spelled out what he said writing instead that Trump’s words were “you can grab them by the p**sy.” It never became a gate because it barely was a scandal.

If anything, Pussygate may have helped Trump burnish his image as both untouchable politically and as a man other misogynistic men envied.

Ironically, considering what has just happened, Emailgate is on the list. This describes the scandal over Hillary Cinton’s email server.

I doubt Signalgate will be Trump’s Watergate, but this does have some potential to seriously harm his reputation for hiring the best and the brightest. 

If Trump has to fire one person and blame them for the entire thing it would be a bad look but he’d get over it. The person most likely to be blamed and fired may be the person whose fault it possibly was. Lucky for Trump he has someone nobody has heard of possibly on the staff of Mike Waltz, who also is someone nobody has heard of, or possibly Waltz himself.

Trump blames unnamed ‘lower level’ staffer for Waltz having reporter’s number Politico.

Excerpt:

In his revelation of the incident on Monday, Goldberg wrote that he was added to the encrypted conversation, presumably inadvertently, after receiving “a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz.”

Of course the scandal wouldn’t be a scandal if someone hadn’t included Jeffrey Goldberg in the message stream. However, since it is now out, the scandal is made worse because these top brains were using Signal in the first place.

Another scandal waiting to emerge is where Trump was in all this. Why didn’t he know about it when it had been all over the news for two hours before he spoke to the press. Another question is where was he when the raids were going on? It would seem that if there was a Situation Room photo op like the one for the bin Laden raid to be had, Trump would have made sure he was there.

Anyone who saw the Senate hearing will know why I made this image:

None of the people above, including Sgt. Shultz, who worked for the clueless Nazi Col. Klink, are the best and the brightest. Those testifying before the Senate aren’t Nazis, but what they do have in common with Nazis is slavish loyalty to a dictator.

Update: Watch this.

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