You’ve probably, at some point, gotten a text alert on your phone about some nasty weather, an Amber Alert about a missing child, or even a (very poorly worded) alert about police looking for a criminal. These 90-character messages, known as Wireless Emergency Alerts (or WEAs), are part of a program put in place after Congress passed the Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act, in 2006. WEAs allow for targeted messages to be sent to every cell phone getting a signal from certain geographically relevant cell towers (or, in a national emergency, all of them).
Here’s where things get interesting. Per the FCC, a WEA may be sent for three different reasons…
Right next to Amber Alerts, there are messages from the President. Part of me thinks it’s funny when you think of how prolific of a Tweeter Donald Trump is but I think this will fall back to a Nixon-esque style of administration.
But there are also longstanding safety measures—and a precedent for a kind of passive-aggressive resistance to the president within the national security community. Most notably, the national security team around President Richard Nixon repeatedly made up excuses to not launch strikes. The president was seen as temperamental and, some believed, increasingly unhinged by the Watergate scandal. In September 1970 as the Palestine Liberation Organization sought to overthrow the regime of King Hussein of Jordan, known as Black September, Nixon ordered the generals to “bomb the bastards.” Instead, the generals came up with an excuse.
“They would always say it was the weather. There are too many clouds,” Ray Locker, who authored Nixon’s Gamble: How a President’s Own Secret Government Destroyed His Administration, explained to the Daily Beast. Delaying bombing orders “was a hallmark of his White House. They would let Nixon vent his frustration and let it slide. They would hope the next day he forgot about it.”
Every time our president is dead set on something, a team of distractors will just take his mind off of it.