Americans think "#SignalGate" is worse than Hillary's emails
74% of Americans, and 60% of Republicans, say the Trump administration's scandal is a very or somewhat serious problem
If it’s Friday, it’s Chart of the Week here at Strength In Numbers.
It was obvious when preparing this week’s COTW that I needed to write about #SignalGate — the fallout from the story in The Atlantic about senior Department of Defense and intelligence officials unintentionally sharing classified real-time U.S. war plans with a journalist over the encrypted messaging app Signal. I planned on writing something on the newest Index of Consumer Sentiment release from the University of Michigan this week — the ICS is now at a new low since December 2023, and long-term inflation expectations are actually higher than at any point since 2009 — but the news has moved on. And rightly so; adding a journalist to a text chain in which senior government officials are sharing intel on troop movements is a big deal.1
There is no COTW without data, though. While it is still too soon to know how all Americans will react to the news and what its true consequences will be (not every adult will have heard a…
