The White House's Barstool problem
Dave Portnoy, a Trump supporter and the founder of Barstool Sports, went viral for his blistering critique of the administration’s group chat debacle
One of the most viral responses to the Trump administration’s Signal chat debacle this week came not from a lawmaker or military expert, but from a man who rates pizza slices after taking a single bite.
“We are lucky it didn’t cause the death of American military members,” Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, said Wednesday in a video on X in which he called for the firing of national security adviser Michael Waltz. “Somebody has to go down for this.”
Portnoy interviewed President Donald Trump ahead of the 2020 election and publicly supported him in last year’s campaign. Portnoy’s irreverent persona and knack for connecting with sports fans, gamblers and other “bros” allowed him to serve as a conduit for Trump’s message to reach a key segment of the electorate he was laser-focused on.
But Portnoy’s six-minute, direct-to-camera video on X eviscerated Trump officials for inadvertently adding a prominent journalist, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, to a Signal app group chat in which they discussed plans to attack Houthi rebels in Yemen in the hours before launching strikes on March 16.
“It’s surreal that these guys added Jeffrey Goldberg to this group,” Portnoy said, adding: “And if this information somehow got out to the Houthis, and I assume in situations like this, things move at the speed of light, lots of American soldiers could have died, lives in jeopardy. So to me, a major, major, major glitch in intelligence and just a huge mistake.”
Rating: 5