Keep your eye on the ball

The Houthi chat group scandal is hilarious and disturbing, but it's distracting from other damage the GOP is doing.

The Houthi chat group scandal has made Twitter fun again. The tweets dunking on the Trump national security team who engaged in behavior that was clearly not secure are hilarious. The episode exposed the incompetence of the administration and has cut through the noise to dominate the national conversation. Democrats should keep pressure on the administration, but they don’t need to let the fiasco distract from more serious damage that Musk is doing.

Social Security is under attack. Musk has called it a Ponzi scheme and claims the Social Security Administration is full of waste and fraud. They’re following the playbook North Carolina Republicans used to privatize the state’s public education system. Musk and Trump will use the same plan to privatize social security.

Back when Republicans took control of the North Carolina legislature in 2011, they began a drumbeat of negative publicity against public schools, calling them “broken.” They derided teachers as having cushy jobs. They claimed administrations were top-heavy with too much support staff and too little money going directly to the classrooms.

They assaulted the reputation of public education in North Carolina. They created a negative atmosphere for school employees that led experienced teachers to leave their jobs. Teacher and per pupil spending fell to among the lowest rates in the nation. Staff became overwhelmed and classrooms underfunded.

Republicans intentionally broke the schools and offered a voucher scheme as a solution. They initially claimed that they were only offering economically struggling families a way for their children to escape failing schools. Vouchers would not go to wealthy families—until they did. Today, vouchers shift large sums of money from public schools to private ones and give huge tax break for wealthy families who were already attending private schools.

Musk and Trump are taking a similar path to gut Social Security. According to the Washington Post, they’ve cut 57,000 employees from the Social Security Administration. They’ve eliminated phone support while also closing offices across the country and the website is crashing. The Post article says, “Depending on the time of day, a recorded message tells callers their wait on hold will last more than 120 minutes or 180 minutes. Some callers report being on hold for four or five hours.”

Musk and Trump will declare Social Security broken as they break it. They say the system is riddled with fraud and abuse that they’ve yet to disclose. Musk claimed that there are millions of fraudulent claims going to dead people, but his accusations have been debunked. That won’t keep them from saying it, though. Like they did in North Carolina, Republicans will create their own reality to destroy a functioning system to plunder it.

Privatizing Social Security has been a Republican dream for decades, but it’s been politically unpalatable. George W. Bush proposed it and Democrats used it to batter the GOP in the 2006 wave that gave them control of Congress. Musk and Trump are trying to create a false reality that will build the political support to gut the system and give investors access to money that hard working men and women have paid into the fund. Imagine if they open it up to crypto currency. Talk about a Ponzi scheme.

The Houthi chat group needs the light that’s being shined on it, but it should not distract from other assaults on government. Trump appointed a crew of misanthropes, conspiracy theorists and, in the case of Pete Hegseth, blubbering idiots for a reason. He knew they would create headlines. He didn’t care about incompetence. He wanted distractions as he and Musk plunder the government.

Trump would much prefer the press and Democrats become obsessed with the clown car of national security leaders on a group chat than focus on the destruction of Social Security in real time. He knows that the GOP is in the tank for him. They aren’t going to hold anybody accountable for anything. Republicans would let him sell the Washington Monument and take a 50% commission if that’s what he wanted to do. And they’ll justify it with smaller government, less regulations, and tax cuts for millionaires.

The Houthi chat group scandal will erode confidence in the Trump administration and expose them as reckless and inexperienced. It will also show a GOP in Congress disregarding its obligation to provide oversight of the Executive Branch. The scandal will hurt the administration’s favorability rating, but it probably won’t have a direct impact on voters’ decisions in 2026. Missing Social Security checks will. Democrats need to make sure they keep their eye on the ball.