A hard-won Senate confirmation was not enough to keep the aroma of scandal away from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth’s fellow Republicans have struggled to ignore calls, mostly from Democrats, for his resignation.

One point that appears to be universally recognized: using Signal, an open-source encrypted messaging service, to detail plans for air strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen was not a great idea.

That chat, as the world knows by now, mistakenly included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, who received an unexpected invitation from Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, who later said Goldberg was invited by mistake.

While the White House tried to diminish the seriousness of the security breach, the war-planning group chat, which included all of the highest-ranking defense Cabinet members and Vice President J.D. Vance, the snafu is alarming on multiple levels.

For one, it makes the newly installed Trump White House sound like amateur hour. The conversation took place outside the channels that normally would be used for classified and highly sensitive war planning.

President Trump’s slow response — expressing ignorance at first, then tentatively shifting blame to Waltz, who set up the group chat, and away from Hegseth — raised echoes of the historic Watergate-era question: What did the president know and when did he know it?

More importantly, what have our country’s rivals learned from the blunder?

The unsecured Signal group chat may have violated the law and Department of Defense regulations, including a warning a week earlier about security vulnerabilities within the Signal app that were being targeted by nosy Russian hacking groups.

Yet, the Trump White House and leading Republicans in Congress have tried mightily to put a positive spin on the colossal blunder, even as Democrats pounced on it.

The blame game offers little reassurance to our military pilots, among other service members, that their superiors have their backs.

Clarence Page is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune.