ANALYSIS — The Trump administration has used the fallout from a leaked group chat about counterstrikes in Yemen to sketch its definition of war, with congressional Democrats mostly focused on the commercial technology used to discuss sensitive military operations.
An examination of remarks made by Trump officials this week shows that they view the F-18 fighter, MQ-9 Reaper drone and Tomahawk cruise missile strikes against the Houthis as the kind of targeted attacks common in the post-9/11 era — but shy of clearing the bar for an act of war. That aligns Trump 2.0 with every president since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, including Trump during his first administration.
Democratic lawmakers this week roared at administration officials during public hearings, asking why they used the Signal messaging platform to discuss the strikes, as revealed when an editor for The Atlantic was inadvertently added to the text chain. But they did little, if anything, to grab back some of the war-making and war-defining powers both parties have steadily ceded to the executive branch in recent decades.
