WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has used the fallout from a leaked group chat about counterstrikes in Yemen to sketch its definition of war, with congressional Democrats mostly focused on the commercial technology used to discuss sensitive military operations.

An examination of remarks made by Trump officials this week shows that they view the F-18 fighter, MQ-9 Reaper drone and Tomahawk cruise missile strikes against the Houthis as the kind of targeted attacks common in the post-9/11 era — but shy of clearing the bar for an act of war. That aligns Trump 2.0 with every president since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, including Trump during his first administration.

Democratic lawmakers this week roared at administration officials during public hearings, asking why they used the Signal messaging platform to discuss the strikes, as revealed when an editor for The Atlantic was inadvertently added to the text chain. But they did little, if anything, to grab back some of the war-making and war-defining powers both parties have steadily ceded to the executive branch in recent decades.

Lawmakers could have used “Signal-gate” to demand that administration officials seek their approval before such strikes. Instead, Democratic members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees were laser-focused on the double-encrypted messaging app.

“There’s risks to that app,” Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, an Army veteran who served three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Wednesday.

“It is completely outrageous to me … that the administration officials come before us today with impunity,” he said. “No acceptance of responsibility. Excuse after excuse after excuse while we send our men and women downrange to do incredibly difficult, incredibly dangerous things on our behalf. And yet, nobody is willing to come to us and say, ‘This was wrong. This was a breach of security and we won’t do it again.’”

White House officials seized on the contention by congressional Democrats and some media outlets that what was shared on the group chat met the high bar for “war plans.”

“I would characterize this messaging thread as a policy discussion — a sensitive policy discussion, surely — amongst high-level Cabinet officials and senior staff,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a Wednesday briefing. “There were no war plans discussed.”

After Leavitt wrapped up a noticeably short briefing of about 26 minutes, another White House official told CQ Roll Call that the use of Signal was appropriate because “there were no war plans shared in that chat.” At one point, the official interrupted a reporter’s question to ask: “Where are the war plans? It’s not classified that America has F-18s, is it? Or Tomahawk missiles?”

‘I really don’t know’

For his part, Trump has mostly opted to allow his subordinates to take the lead on the war-defining and counter-messaging. In a twist, a president who typically casts himself as all-knowing has resorted several times this week to three rarely used words: “I don’t know.”

“That’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know. I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask the various people involved,” the commander in chief told reporters Wednesday. “I really don’t know.”

But like his aides, Trump signaled that he ordered the strikes under existing executive authorities, including the Article II powers granted by the Constitution.

“The Houthis have been horrible to the world, what they’ve done, killed a lot of people and knocked down a lot of ships and planes and anything else,” Trump said.

Article II gives a president the authority to “protect and defend the Constitution” and to direct the military as commander in chief. The Constitution gives Congress the ability to declare war and provide the military with funding. But a number of undeclared wars, as well as strikes and clandestine operations on which presidents acted on their own, have eroded lawmakers’ war powers.

The fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act does not contain an official definition of war; nor does a bicameral conference report that accompanied the annual Pentagon policy bill, according to electronic searches of those documents.

One reason for that is lawmakers often define military matters in vastly different ways. Over the past decade, several congressional committees have shelved attempts to revamp the 2001 authorization for use of military force that was passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush because of unresolvable differences over what constitutes things such as “ground forces” and what kinds of missions a new or revised force-authorizing measure would cover.

Such differences have only hardened as the political environment has gotten more and more partisan.

A bipartisan conclusion

To be sure, Trump 2.0 is picking up where Trump 1.0 left off.

During his first term, the admittedly anti-war commander in chief ordered a number of military strikes, including on targets in Syria, Somalia and Pakistan, citing his authority under Article II powers and the 2001 AUMF.

Trump’s first predecessor, Democrat Barack Obama, carried out a sweeping armed drone and special operations campaign against groups such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State in a number of countries where such organizations did not operate in 2001. Obama and his White House counselors contended that the Constitution, along with the 2001 AUMF, vested in the office of the presidency enough war powers to carry out isolated military operations without lawmakers’ approval.

Trump and his national security team first entered the White House in January 2017 after disagreeing with most of Obama’s decisions during his two terms — but not their assessment that a president possesses the authority to carry out strikes on groups like the Houthis without a new blessing from Congress.

It was a conclusion that the Biden White House also came to and one that remains in place during Trump’s second term, making the 2001 measure akin to a legal rubber band that can be stretched in various ways to cover all kinds of military operations in all kinds of places.

But as long as operations like the Houthi strikes remain relatively limited in scope and targets, there probably won’t be much pushback from Capitol Hill or demands for a new or revised AUMF — nor any objections to the Trump administration’s emerging definition for what constitutes a war.

©2025 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.