Team Trump will pay a price for whistling past the Signal group-chat fiasco

It looks like Team Trump has decided to try to whistle right past the “Operation Overshare” fiasco, and may well pull it off — but not cost-free.President Donald Trump is standing up for National Security Adviser Mike Waltz after he (or maybe his staff) mistakenly added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat on Signal into which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth later dropped sensitive details of the anti-Houthi bombing campaign.The stunning security breach had “no impact at all,” the prez announced Tuesday morning, and “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson.” Uh .

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what lesson is that?Hegseth, meanwhile, opted for denial: “Nobody was texting war plans.”Actually, Pete, Goldberg has the screenshots to prove they were, and the National Security Council has authenticated them.  Never mind the desperate efforts of social-media warriors to pretend they’re fake (in a pathetic echo of how the left defended Hunter on his laptop), or the even more sad “seven-dimensional chess” fans who argue the leak was somehow deliberate. The White House, and Waltz especially, handed the left a loaded bazooka.Now of all times, as the admin faces major fights on everything from the border to campus Jew-hate to the economy.We get it: Trump went through too many national-security advisers in his first term, he still has the team he wants and a shakeup would bring its own costs right now.But you can only play the “diminish, deny and delay” game so many times before it becomes your new brand.

Look: Trump was elected in good part because Americans were sick to death of the last administration’s endless cavalcade of lame, easily disproved lies. Joe Biden is sharp as a tack.The border is secure.

Inflation is transitory.The US exit from Afghanistan was a huge success. Yes, we get that stepping up to own failures is hard.

But it just got that much harder for Americans to trust the administration on national-security issues going forward.At the very leas...