It has been a rough week for national security adviser Mike Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the rest of the Trump administration’s national security team. The so-called Signalgate catastrophe, in which Waltz organized a top-secret chat on the Signal messenger application about pending U.S. airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen, only to accidentally add one of Washington’s most famous journalists to the conversation, is the epitome of a blunder. The White House’s attempts at damage control — at one point, Waltz insisted he couldn’t pick journalist Jeffrey Goldberg out of a lineup, only for an old picture to surface of the two of them standing next to each other at the French Embassy in Washington — has created only more problems.

The Washington punditocracy sees blood in the water. So do Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who have called on Waltz and Hegseth to resign for sharing top-secret information through an unclassified channel. The Senate Armed Services Committee has called for an investigation by the Defense Department’s inspector general. And a federal judge has ordered the U.S. government to preserve the Signal messages for the public record. The whole thing is one big, embarrassing scandal.

This is a serious issue. If any junior analyst in the U.S. government acted the way Waltz or Hegseth did, they would have been fired immediately. Sharing war plans outside U.S. government systems is the kind of offense that is almost too stupid to commit. And just reading that a journalist was invited to the chat makes one’s IQ score drop.

Even so, Signalgate is such an obsession that it’s clouding discussions that are more important than the intra-administration knife fights the pundits love to cover. For instance, we’ve spent more time over the last week debating whether Waltz should be shown the door than we have in scrutinizing whether an extensive U.S. strike campaign in Yemen will actually work. And at a time when so many are worried about America’s system of checks and balances becoming an artifact, I find it ironic that nobody seems to care about the president in effect declaring war on his own.

The second item on this list is the most straightforward. President Donald Trump’s administration has been bombing the Houthis, the de facto government in Yemen, since March 15. With the exception of a few vague updates from the Pentagon and a couple of pictures from U.S. Central Command’s social media accounts, the military campaign has been among the least transparent in history. We know bombs are being dropped, but at the same time, we’re not exactly sure where and on what, how long the operation is going to last and what the objective is. Americans are just supposed to trust the Trump administration to have it all in hand.

The military campaign unmistakably is an unconstitutional one. The U.S. Constitution is quite clear: Taking the country to war is a power of the legislative branch. This is by design; members of Congress are directly elected by their constituents and thus more in tune with the pulse of the nation than the president is. Going to war is the most consequential decision any state can take, so deliberation is required before that weighty step is or is not taken. While the president as commander-in-chief has the unilateral authority to defend the country in an emergency, this is quite different from embarking on a long campaign thousands of miles away from the homeland. This isn’t a Trump-era phenomenon; every president since at least Ronald Reagan has deployed the military in combat without congressional approval. Trump is only the latest to do so. The difference between then and today, however, is that executive war-making is now normalized to the point in which nobody thinks twice about it.

The second issue not getting much discussion is whether the U.S. bombing campaign in Yemen is actually smart policy. The Trump administration is making the case that a sustained series of airstrikes against Houthi leadership targets, military infrastructure and weapons manufacturing facilities will, over time, degrade the Yemeni rebel group’s capacity to threaten civilian vessels in the Red Sea, where approximately 30% of the world’s container traffic passes. President Joe Biden’s administration carried on with the same assumption; at one point last year, the U.S. was announcing so many air attacks on Houthi facilities that it was rare when a day passed without one.

Yet if the Biden administration’s goal was to degrade the Houthis or deter them from conducting additional attacks, it failed on both accounts. The Houthis continued sending attack drones and land-based cruise missiles toward civilian and U.S. Navy ships in the area, even as the Houthis launched ballistic missiles toward Israel. The U.S. airstrikes did nothing to calm the fears of international shipping companies that refrained from traveling through the Red Sea to get their goods to market. The longer route around South Africa remains the safer option.

Trump officials claim that Biden didn’t use enough force to compel the Houthis to stop. In the 2 ½ weeks since U.S. strikes began, the Trump administration has broadened the list of targets in more areas of Yemen, including in densely packed neighborhoods previously viewed as off-limits. Yet the Houthi drones and missiles keep on coming. While the U.S. is undoubtedly the stronger party in this confrontation, policymakers in Washington need to start asking themselves whether the Houthis might be pining for a fight with the world’s biggest superpower to bolster their resistance credentials, grow their ranks and distract from their terrible record of administering the poor Arab nation.

To be blunt, all of this stuff matters. Unfortunately, most of the mainstream media appear to disagree.

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Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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