Top Democrats are seizing on Signalgate in campaign fundraising appeals — highlighting how the party hopes the fallout of the national security issue can resonate beyond Washington.

The news that top Trump administration officials discussed a planned attack on Houthi rebels in a Signal chat that accidentally included an Atlantic journalist has rocked national security circles, with some top Democrats calling for the resignations of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Mike Waltz.

Democrats have pointed to the sequence of events as an example of the Trump administration’s incompetence — and the potential consequences for the military and broader U.S. security — but it is less clear how the issue will resonate beyond Washington. The new fundraising messages indicate Democrats believe it will at least energize its base of online donors.

“Do you feel safe under the Trump administration?” asked an email from the campaign of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Tuesday, which featured the headline of The Atlantic article and called it one of the Trump administration’s “most egregious and dangerous actions yet.”

“This is amateur hour. We’re damn lucky the pilots on that mission and the sailors and marines on ships offshore didn’t make the ultimate sacrifice that day. The Trump Administration’s carelessness and incompetence put their lives at risk,” said a Tuesday email from the campaign of Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), which included a link to a petition calling on Hegseth to resign.

An email from Justice Democrats, a progressive group, said the Trump administration was “out here talking about unconstitutional war plans via a texting app called Signal” while criticizing the strikes on Yemen and Trump’s broader agenda.

The White House acknowledged this week that the texts were legitimate but has largely defended the officials involved in the group chat.

The real enemy? The Atlantic journalist who published the story, whom Waltz called “the bottom scum of journalists” in an interview on Fox News on Tuesday.

A Republican lawmaker is rejecting White House efforts to downplay the inadvertent sharing of military attack plans with a journalist on an unclassified group chat.

“The White House is in denial that this was not classified or sensitive data,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a former Air Force brigadier general and member of the House Armed Services Committee, on Wednesday. “They should just own up to it and preserve credibility.”

Bacon’s criticism is a sign that the explanations and deflections coming from President Donald Trump’s administration could be falling flat as new details emerge about the stunning disclosures to Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.

Bacon spoke soon after The Atlantic published additional excerpts of the Signal group chat involving Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, national security adviser Michael Waltz and other top Trump aides. In those messages, Hegseth shares detailed timing, targeting and weapons information for a military strike on Houthi forces in Yemen roughly a half-hour before they were set to begin.

Hegseth and other members of the Trump administration are denying that any classified information was shared.

Testifying Wednesday to the House Intelligence Committee, Gabbard said “it was a mistake” that Goldberg was added to the chat but that “there were no sources, methods, locations or war plans that were shared.” She called it a “standard update … provided alongside updates that were given to foreign partners in the region.”

Waltz said much the same Wednesday in an X post after the new Atlantic reporting: “No locations. No sources & methods. NO WAR PLANS.”

One crucial administration ally on Capitol Hill, Senate Intelligence Chair Tom Cotton, also echoed that response Wednesday.

“There’s no locations listed there. There are no sources and methods. There’s no specific targets,” Cotton (R-Ark.) told reporters. “Certainly, there’s nothing called war plans, which was an embellishment and exaggeration by known left-wing partisan opponents of the president.”

Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a former Army helicopter pilot, rebutted Republicans in a sharply worded X posting Wednesday: “Pete Hegseth is a f*cking liar. This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.”

Ben Jacobs and Amy Mackinnon contributed to this report.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is gearing up for perhaps the most difficult election battle of his long career, securing an early endorsement from Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Wednesday, his one-time opponent in the fight for the chamber’s top job.

“I’ve been honored to work alongside @JohnCornyn—one of the most effective and respected conservative leaders in the country,” Thune wrote on X hours after Cornyn officially launched his reelection campaign. “He was tireless and instrumental in building our majority. We need to keep him in the Senate & in the fight to deliver on President Trump’s agenda.”

While Thune’s endorsement is widely expected — it would be almost unheard of for a chamber leader to not back one of their members — Cornyn faces what could be a difficult primary challenge, with Texas Attorney General and MAGA firebrand Ken Paxton likely to throw his hat in the ring as the candidate closer to President Donald Trump.

“The people of Texas know John Cornyn,” Paxton told Tucker Carlson in a February interview. “And I don’t think he’ll survive another primary.”

The two have been duking it out for years.

“To me, he’s been in Washington too long,” Paxton told Carlson back in 2023. “He’s been there, what, for 14 years or so? And I can’t think of a single thing he’s accomplished for our state or even for the country.”

This, after Cornyn called Paxton’s legal difficulties an “embarrassment” — the attorney general was impeached by the GOP-controlled Texas House (but acquitted by the state Senate), and has faced criminal investigations for years.

A Paxton run could challenge Cornyn’s grip on the Senate seat he’s held since winning it in 2002, with the state attorney general popular among the party’s MAGA base.

Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune indicated there was at least one point of agreement from their White House meeting Tuesday: Adding a debt ceiling hike to their party-line tax, border and energy bill.

That’s a gamble some Senate Republicans fear could sink the whole package. And while President Donald Trump told GOP lawmakers that was his preference earlier this month, he’ll now have to convince several skeptical Republicans to get behind the idea.

Johnson called it “everybody’s preferred outcome at this point.” Thune said it was “clearly a preferable outcome,” though he acknowledged he still needs to “determine whether or not the Senate can get on board with that idea.”

Still, plenty of sticking points remain as both chambers hope to work out a deal on a reconciliation bill framework they hope to adopt by the week of April 7.

House Republicans are digging in on the spending cuts their budget blueprint would prescribe for the reconciliation process, with Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie defending the $880 billion in cuts his committee has been tasked with finding as “realistic.” But Republican senators have aired doubts on that point, fearful of major reductions to Medicaid benefits. Many of them want to adjust the level of savings the committee would be tasked with finding to spare slashes to the popular safety net program.

“I’m not going to vote for something that would lead to Medicaid cuts,” said Sen. Josh Hawley.

That’s not a position all Senate Republicans share, however. Some conservatives want even deeper spending cuts. Thune is hoping to appease those lawmakers by pointing out all the federal funding reductions already undertaken by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Senate Republicans also want to make the expiring 2017 tax cuts permanent — something that wasn’t included in the House GOP blueprint. And Republican senators are making clear they intend to tweak the House-passed budget resolution on that point.

“They said they needed time to do one big, beautiful bill,” Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham told reporters, referring to House Republicans. “They had a chance; the product is woefully inadequate.”

What else we’re watching:

• X-date projection: The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is planning to release its projection for when the U.S. will breach the debt limit at 10 a.m. The Bipartisan Policy Center predicted Monday that the so-called X-date would occur sometime between mid-July and early October if Congress doesn’t act.
• Discharge petition drama: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is pushing her discharge petition to allow new parents in the House to vote remotely, which has secured the necessary 218 signatures. Hard-liners and GOP leaders both want to kill Luna’s proposal, and hard-liners engaged in a brief standoff with leadership on the floor Tuesday as a way to push for Johnson to find a way to table the effort.
• NPR and PBS face the DOGE spotlight: The heads of NPR and PBS are set to appear Wednesday in front of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Federal Communications Commission is actively investigating both public media broadcasters over their corporate sponsorships, and Trump has said he would “love to” defund both organizations.

Jordain Carney, Ben Leonard, Benjamin Guggenheim, Meredith Lee Hill and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he plans to use the cuts undertaken by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative as he tries to get Republican fiscal hawks on board with a budget blueprint paving the way for a massive party-line tax, border and energy bill.

The strategy, confirmed in a brief interview Tuesday, comes as Senate GOP leaders face a growing challenge in convincing a handful of conservatives members who want to go beyond the $2 trillion in cuts contained in the House budget framework.

“In the end, a lot of our folks who want to see a more aggressive approach to that realize that there are political considerations, and it’s all [about] what you can get the votes for,” Thune said.

Thune said that in addition to the massive domestic policy bill, “hopefully we’ll get other opportunities to” cut spending, naming DOGE as one of “a lot of good opportunities to get our country on a more sustainable fiscal path.“

Asked if the DOGE cuts could help sell a deal to conservatives, Thune said, “Anything that complements efforts to demonstrate that we are making serious headway in reducing spending and getting the deficit and debt under control is going to be progress. So however we get there, we want to get there.”

Senate Republicans haven’t aligned internally — much less with the House — on how deeply they want to cut spending. Even as Thune deals with demands from his right for more sweeping cuts, he’s got concerns in other corners of his conference that the House blueprint would require politically unpopular cuts to Medicaid.

The DOGE cuts aren’t expected to be a part of the final party-line megabill. But GOP senators, including Thune allies, have previously suggested that they could be included in the overall accounting showing fiscal hawks that Republicans won’t be adding to federal budget deficits.

Many Senate Republicans are pushing President Donald Trump to send them a so-called “rescissions” package — one that would allow Congress to vote on codifying Musk’s work.

While some Republicans doubt Trump will do so while his administration fights to defend DOGE’s work in court, Trump himself told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that he supported the idea of rescissions: “That would be great. I think we’re going to do that,” he said.

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to be fired over using a group Signal chat to discuss war plans.

“His behavior shocks the conscience, risked American lives and likely violated the law,” Jeffries said in a Tuesday letter to President Donald Trump. “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth should be fired immediately.”

Hegseth and other top national security officials had used the unsecured group chat to discuss plans to bomb Houthi rebels in Yemen and had inadvertently added a journalist, sparking the imbroglio. Some of those officials had faced pointed questioning from Hill Democrats on Tuesday, and the minority party has sought to capitalize on the damaging revelations stemming from the incident.

Jeffries’ letter follows calls from other Democrats for the officials to step down. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that both Hegseth and national security adviser Mike Waltz should resign. But top Hill Republicans like Speaker Mike Johnson have backed Hegseth and the other Trump officials amid the debacle, with Johnson telling reporters Tuesday that it was a “mistake” but wouldn’t happen again.

Republican leaders are aiming to bring legislation adding more federal judges to a House vote during the week of April 7, according to two people who were granted anonymity to discuss internal plans.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) confirmed in a brief interview that his team had spoken with Republican leadership about plans to call a vote on the JUDGES Act, which he introduced this Congress. A similar bill passed both chambers last session, but former President Joe Biden vetoed the measure after Donald Trump won the election in November.

Issa’s bill, which passed out of committee earlier this month, would add dozens of new seats on federal district courts before the end of 2035 over a staggered timeline. Congress has not added new district court judges in more than two decades.

The push to add more lower-court judges comes as Trump and his allies lash out at a string of unfavorable rulings from district judges who have sought to block some of his second-term initiatives.

House Republicans don’t have the votes to impeach those judges — as Trump, GOP megadonor Elon Musk and other hard-liners have suggested — so Speaker Mike Johnson has been looking for alternatives. Those include hearings and putting some judiciary-related bills on the House floor in coming weeks, including another Issa bill meant to rein in nationwide injunctions.

Johnson told Judiciary Committee Republicans in a closed-door meeting Tuesday that he was coordinating his strategy with the White House and focused his remarks on how House Republicans can work with panel members to hold “activist” judges accountable, according to three Republicans granted anonymity to describe the private meeting.

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) also said he had spoken with House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) as part of an effort to understand how Republicans could use the fiscal 2026 government funding process to achieve their goals with the courts.

In a new video, Capitol Hill Bureau Chief and Senior Washington Columnist Rachael Bade discusses the big question on everyone’s minds at the White House right now: Is President Donald Trump going to fire national security adviser Mike Waltz for sharing what looks like a war plan in a group chat?

Waltz inadvertently added a reporter to a highly sensitive Signal conversation with himself and other top Trump officials, where they discussed U.S. plans to bomb the Houthis in Yemen.

A person very close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told POLITICO last night: “Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a f–ing idiot.”

Ultimately, Waltz’s fate is going to be Trump’s call. This morning, he told NBC that he still has confidence in Waltz — but that could change on a dime.

Want to know the four key dynamics to watch as the scandal unfolds? Watch the video here.

Captain Ahab had Moby Dick. Wile E. Coyote had Road Runner. Senate Democrats have Susan Collins.

Even as ticket-splitting rates have plummeted, Collins has stymied all previous Democratic attempts to oust her from her Maine Senate seat and she remains the only Republican senator left standing in a state that Donald Trump lost in 2024. A rare GOP moderate, she frequently crosses party lines, voting to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial and against confirming his Defense secretary four years later.

That has made her unpopular with some Trump voters, but Collins’ path has always been to make up for her weakness on her right flank by bringing in an impressive number of moderate Democrats and cleaning up with independents. In the midterms, Democrats are hoping she’s become so unpalatable that her coalition collapses.

A Public Policy Polling survey, commissioned by a top Democratic super PAC and shared first with POLITICO, is giving them reason for optimism. Collins’ approval rating is underwater by 37 points with 24 percent approving of her and 61 percent disapproving, per the survey of 569 registered Maine voters. The crosstabs show she is being pinched on both sides — she’s upside down with Kamala Harris voters 17/71 and with Trump voters at 30/52.

“A big part of Collins’ problem is that when it comes to Trump her approach is just antagonizing everyone,” the pollster wrote in the memo, noting that 81 percent “of Harris voters think she votes with Trump too often” and 73 percent of “of Trump voters think she doesn’t vote with Trump often enough.”

Her overall favorability rating was underwater at 19/65. Similarly among independents it was upside down at 19/66.

The poll, which had a sample size split nearly evenly among Democrats, independents and Republicans and was conducted on March 20-21 on behalf of Senate Majority PAC, a group with close ties to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. It has a margin of error of 4.1 percentage points.

But Collins still has one massive advantage: Democrats are likely to have a hard time recruiting a candidate to go against her. There is a wide open governor’s race that looks far more enticing than challenging a formidable incumbent. One prominent Democrat, former state Senate President Troy Jackson, is exploring a run for governor and moderate Democratic Rep. Jared Golden, a former Collins staffer, is highly unlikely to challenge her.

Even with a top-tier challenger, Collins knows how to survive. A Public Policy Polling survey conducted in mid-October of 2019 found her approval rating underwater by 15 points with 35 percent approving to 50 percent disapproving.

In that race, she was vastly outraised by her 2020 opponent, then-Maine state House Speaker Sara Gideon. Collins consistently trailed her in the polls and even some in the GOP doubted her ability to prevail. Ultimately, the incumbent won, 51 to 42 percent in November 2020 — even as Trump lost the state and under Maine’s new ranked-choice voting system.

“Chuck Schumer literally ran out of things to spend money on last time he tried to take down Susan Collins and she still won,” said Nick Puglia, a spokesperson for the Senate GOP campaign arm. “In 2026, Mainers will reelect Susan Collins again and no amount of partisan polling or openly begging any Democrat to run against her will change that.”

At a time when the MAGA movement has demanded unwavering loyalty to Trump, Collins could be vulnerable to a primary challenger. But she ran unopposed for the Republican nomination in 2020 and could again avoid a serious challenge in 2026. Trump allies are well aware that Collins is the only Republican who could win the seat, though they don’t control every MAGA activist in the state.

The survey does have some good results for Collins. She still has support from 17 percent of Harris voters, a not insignificant level of crossover appeal. Compare that to Trump, who has an approval rating of just 2 percent with Harris voters.

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Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) mocked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his wheelchair in remarks that circulated online Tuesday, drawing sharp condemnation from Republicans.

“Y’all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there. Come on now,” Crockett said at a Human Rights Campaign dinner in Los Angeles Saturday. “And the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot ass mess, honey.”

Abbott was paralyzed after a tree fell on him while out running over 40 years ago.

The Texas Republican is a key ally for President Donald Trump and has long clashed with Democrats over gun control, immigration and voting rights, among other issues.

Crockett’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on her remarks.

Crockett has emerged as a vocal member of Congress as the fractured Democratic Party looks for a response to the new Trump administration and has embraced using some profanity in her attacks.

Conservatives were quick to pile on Crockett’s comments Tuesday, with some urging House Speaker Mike Johnson for her censure.

“Recent polling shows Crazy Crockett as one of the leaders of the Democrat Party. This is who they are,” the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm, wrote on X.

Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.