When Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, found himself included in a Trump administration group chat to discuss attacking Yemen, his first reaction was to assume it was a hoax.

It was inconceivable, he imagined, for senior US officials to be using a messaging app on their phones to discuss military plans — let alone to invite a journalist into the conversation.

“[I was] 100 per cent convinced it’s a fake,” Goldberg told the Bulwark podcast about his initial response. “100 per cent. Because that doesn’t happen, somebody’s setting me up.”

On Saturday March 15, while Goldberg was in the parking lot at a Safeway, he saw on his phone that defence secretary Pete Hegseth had sent detailed plans of an upcoming US attack. (“We are a GO for mission launch,” he wrote.) It was at that moment the journalist realised the Signal messaging group might be real after all — and constituted a breathtaking breach of national security. After all, this was the sort of information “really four or five humans should know”.

“Signalgate”, as the scandal has become known, has turned into the first big crisis of Donald Trump’s second presidential term — just over two months in.

It has been revealing for two reasons. The episode has called into question the competence of some of his most senior officials, not just Hegseth, a former weekend Fox News host, but also Mike Waltz, the national security adviser who appears to have been the person who included Goldberg in the group chat.

Critics say such scandals were inevitable given the thin resumes of many of Trump’s senior officials when they came into the administration.

“The warnings were clear that . . . many . . . were not up to the job, they didn’t have the necessary experience,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton University. “And here you just watch and you can see in real time as they did something which was extraordinarily dangerous and, on some level, reckless.”

Democrats have been quick to make the same charge. “This is what happens when you have Fox News personalities cosplaying as government officials,” says Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator for Georgia. “Honestly it would be funny, except that it is deadly serious. They’re talking about the execution of lethal military operations.”

Just as striking as the massive security breach has been the Trump administration’s reaction — brazen defiance and a refusal to apologise or even acknowledge the vulnerabilities highlighted by the fiasco.

Indeed, the affair has revealed in the starkest terms possible how different this presidency is from Trump’s first term. During his initial stint in the White House the former reality TV star relied on experienced national security hands like former generals Jim Mattis, John Kelly and HR McMaster — the so-called adults in the room who pushed back against his more outlandish ideas.

This time, the guardrails are gone and even Trump’s most eccentric proposals — turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East”, taking over the Panama Canal, incorporating Canada and Greenland — have all been supported uncritically by the rest of the cabinet.

The result is an administration stacked with people who critics say were chosen less for their qualifications or suitability for the role and more for their loyalty to the commander-in-chief, their commitment to his nationalist agenda — and how they come across on TV.

“This administration is Trumpier,” says Kyle Kondik, a non-partisan analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “The people in the key jobs around Trump are more like him and closer to him than . . . the first time around.”

Faced with such a humiliating story as Signalgate, the Trump administration’s communications strategy has been clear — attack.

Hegseth called Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes, time and time again”. Fighting to save his job, Waltz took the same approach, describing the Atlantic editor as “the bottom scum of journalists”.

Officials initially downplayed the incident, denying flat out that the texts contained any classified information, or that the officials were even discussing plans for an attack on Houthi targets in Yemen.

That approach barely changed after The Atlantic published an edited transcript of the group chat, in which Hegseth divulged the timing of the strikes before they were launched and even listed the weapons to be deployed — F-18 fighter jets, strike drones and Tomahawk missiles.

Some of the texts were “almost comical”, Mark Kelly, a Democratic senator from Arizona, told NPR. “At the end of this text message, the secretary of defence puts ‘we are currently clean on OPSEC’, that is operational security,” he said. “That’s what he said. On an unsecured message app, where this information could have got into the hands of the Russians, or the Iranians, or the Houthis.”

Even after the second Atlantic article, which this time printed the chats near-verbatim, officials continued to play down the affair, a strategy that even some Republican lawmakers found objectionable. “I’m not buying it,” Kevin Cramer, a Republican senator from North Dakota, told reporters. A better approach would, he said, have been to “own it, it happened, and say it will never happen again”.

In a further sign of GOP concern, it emerged on Thursday that the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate armed services committee had asked the Pentagon for an inquiry into the potential “use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know”.

Mark Warner, vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said that if a military or intelligence officer had exhibited “this kind of behaviour, they would be fired”.

Trump administration officials argued that The Atlantic had changed the way it referred to the messages, speaking of “attack plans” instead of the “war plans” in its initial reporting — a distinction Goldberg dismissed as a “semantic game”.

But the hairsplitting appeared to backfire, with even diehard Republicans expressing their annoyance. “Trying to wordsmith the hell outta this Signal debacle is making it worse,” Tomi Lahren, the Fox Nation host wrote on X. “It was bad. And I’m honestly getting sick of the whataboutisms from my own side.”

Trump simply dismissed the scandal as a “witch-hunt” — typical of his tendency to hit back at the media, deny any wrongdoing and question his critics’ motivation.

“One of his defining features is that he never apologises and he never gives an inch on anything,” says Kondik. “And it’s hard to argue that strategy has been bad for him over the years.”

The difference is that he is now surrounded by officials who take the same approach. “They’ve learnt from him,” says Doug Heye, a veteran Republican strategist. “They’re imitating his tactics; they’re imitating his language as well.”

This mimicry was most conspicuous in a press briefing by Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, on Wednesday, when she angrily swatted away repeated questions about Signalgate and denounced a “co-ordinated campaign to try and sow chaos in this White House”.

“This has been the most successful first two months of any administration ever, which is exactly why they’re doing this,” she said.

Later she told Fox News the American people should be “grateful” to people like Hegseth and Waltz and “especially to President Trump for putting together such a competent and highly qualified team . . . who are getting things done, moving at Trump-speed to make this world a safer place”.

There’s nothing unusual, of course, about White House officials praising the president — that is their job, after all.

But experts say the Trump team goes much further. “Beyond just the policy line, they almost mimic the affect of President Trump,” says Zelizer at Princeton. “It’s like the Republicans in Congress — they speak the way he speaks, they act with a certain tough demeanour, the way he likes to present himself.”

One of the most striking examples of an official in tune with both Trump’s worldview and language is Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate developer who has known the president since the 1980s and who is now special envoy for the Middle East, while also playing a central role in talks with Russia over Ukraine.

In an interview with the rightwing media personality Tucker Carlson, Witkoff exhibited an almost Trump-like respect and admiration for Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, whom he has met in person twice — calling him “super smart”, “straight up” and “enormously gracious”.

Witkoff, who has no previous experience in diplomacy, said Putin had given him a “beautiful portrait” of Trump, which he then delivered to the president. The Russian leader also told him he had gone to church and prayed for Trump after the attempt on the then Republican presidential candidate’s life last July.

Repeating what many analysts believe to be Kremlin talking points, Witkoff claimed the “overwhelming majority” of people in the four eastern regions of Ukraine — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — that were illegally annexed by Russia in 2022 “want to be under Russian rule”. He cited the results of Kremlin-managed referendums that were denounced as shams at the time by the US and EU.

Witkoff also dismissed European plans to send peacekeeping forces to Ukraine as “a posture and a pose” and an attempt “to be like Winston Churchill”.

For some observers, the interview had parallels with the infamous shouting match in the White House last month, when vice-president JD Vance joined Trump in publicly berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for allegedly standing in the way of a peace agreement with Russia.

“They’re playing to an audience of one,” says Zelizer of the Trump officials. “It’s a way to protect their jobs and positions of influence. Because he [Trump] has made it very clear that if you don’t do that, there’ll be a cost.”