Hillary Clinton on Friday condemned the Trump administration’s governing style as both reckless and incompetent in an op-ed for The New York Times. Criticizing the Signal chat scandal and Elon Musk’s effort to slash the federal workforce, Clinton warned that Trump’s leadership would leave the U.S. “feeble and friendless.”
Titled “How Much Dumber Will This Get?” the essay opens with a blunt statement: “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity.”
Clinton highlighted the Signal chat controversy, where Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, mistakenly added a top journalist to a private government group chat. The group included Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. In the chat, Hegseth openly discussed a planned U.S. airstrike on Houthi militants in Yemen, later reporting back with updates on its deadly aftermath—messages that were met with celebratory emojis from some officials.
“Top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb,” Clinton wrote.
She described the scandal as part of a broader pattern of mismanagement, arguing that Trump’s administration was “squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security.”
Clinton also criticized the aggressive downsizing of the federal workforce, orchestrated by top Trump adviser and tech billionaire Elon Musk. Without naming Musk directly, she pointed to the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a key institution established under President John F. Kennedy to project American influence through diplomacy and humanitarian work rather than military force alone.
“In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart,” she wrote. “As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I advocated for smart power—combining military strength with diplomacy, development assistance, economic influence, and cultural engagement. The Trump approach is dumb power.”
Clinton warned that Trump’s administration, driven by “swagger” rather than competence, was leading the U.S. down a reckless path. She criticized Trump and Hegseth’s attacks on diversity initiatives in the military, arguing that they prioritized ideological battles over national security.
“If there’s a grand strategy at work here, I don’t know what it is,” she wrote. “He’s gambling with the national security of the United States. If this continues, a group chat foul will be the least of our concerns, and all the fist and flag emojis in the world won’t save us.”
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