By Victoria Marshall

Washington is livid over Trump Cabinet officials discussing “war plans” over the messaging app Signal and accidentally giving Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffery Goldberg the inside scoop. Congressional Democrats continue to hound both CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard over the alleged security breach.

At the crux of the controversy is whether the information shared in the chat was classified and whether Signal is a lawful and secure means of communication for top Trump officials (both Democrats and Republicans agree adding Goldberg to the text chain was a big no-no). Yet strangely absent from the court of public opinion is the question of whether President Trump’s bombing of the Houthi rebels is the right course of action.

Now I’m old enough to remember when then-candidate Trump criticized the Biden administration’s bombing of the Houthi rebels during his 2024 presidential campaign: “It’s just a failed mentality. It’s crazy. You can solve problems over a telephone. Instead, they start dropping bombs. I see recently they’re dropping bombs all over Yemen,” Trump told podcaster Tim Pool. “You don’t have to do that. You can talk in such a way where they respect you when they listen.”

Fast-forward to March 2025, and President Trump is now dropping bombs in Yemen just like his predecessor. It’s no wonder Democrats aren’t taking issue with Trump’s offensive — they agree with it!

But what explains this sudden about-face? Did Trump’s attempts at diplomacy fail? Did he even try?

The answer is yes. Trump did try diplomacy, and it sort of worked. Back in January 2025, the incoming Trump administration helped the outgoing Biden administration negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas. The Houthi rebels, who are allied with Hamas, apparently stopped their attacks of commercial shipping in the Red Sea as a result of the ceasefire. But as the Israel-Hamas ceasefire started to disintegrate in early March, the Houthis resumed their attacks in the Red Sea against commercial shipping and U.S. Navy vessels. This prompted the Trump administration to begin a series of airstrikes against Houthi targets.

Now, I don’t blame the Trump administration for the ceasefire collapse. But I am curious about what Trump officials are hoping to accomplish by following the Biden administration’s playbook instead of their own.

“The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message,” Vice President J.D. Vance wrote in the leaked chat. But if you are continuing the same strategy as your predecessor’s, what kind of message are you really sending?

To the Houthis, it’s the same message that Biden sent. And that message — a year of airstrikes — did not stop them from manufacturing weapons and continuing their attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea, on U.S. naval ships, and on Israel.

While the Trump administration has tried to differentiate its offensive from Biden’s (the Pentagon has said the airstrikes contain a greater number of targets), it is not obvious this will be more successful in weakening the Houthis and stopping their attacks. Trump officials have also been reticent to say what they hope to accomplish from this open-ended campaign. Lt. General Alex Grynkewich told reporters earlier this month that “There [are] specific targets that have been selected and approaches that we’re taking in order to achieve the president’s end state.” Grynkewich did not go into detail about what that “end state” entails.

Clearly, the Trump administration has plenty of fish to fry. While distracted at home with a burgeoning scandal of whether “heads should roll” because of Goldberg’s admission to a Cabinet-level chat, and abroad with multiple international war fronts, perhaps the Trump administration should take 2024 Trump’s advice and solve the Houthi problem by picking up a telephone.

Victoria Marshall is a news reporter for FRC’s Washington Watch and is a contributor to The Washington Stand.