The wife of an active duty service member slammed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump, and Republicans online for attempting to downplay the Signal chat leak scandal that has rocked the White House this week.
“There hasn’t been a single night that I haven’t cried myself to sleep for my husband’s safety, and the safety of other service members ... just for being in the military with these people in charge,” Kendall Brown, 38, told the Daily Beast in a phone call Wednesday.
Brown posted videos on X and Instagram blasting Republican congressmen for supporting the Defense Department following news that national security adviser Mike Waltz somehow added The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group chat discussing missile strikes in Yemen.
ADVERTISEMENT
Brown is a lifelong Oklahoman, and her husband has served in the military for nearly all of their eight years together, currently deployed near Yemen. Although her husband is currently not in imminent danger, Brown said she worries that incompetence will put his life and the lives of others at greater risk.
“I don’t think it’s fair for politicians in extremely cushy jobs, never at any risk themselves, to be making these kinds of decisions and [deploy] people while simultaneously dismissing the danger they’re put in by incompetent fools who can’t follow basic security laws,” she told the Beast.
Although Brown is an outspoken Democrat and leftist on social media, her hot takes on the Trump administration’s treatment of veterans have received bipartisan support from other military wives.
She added that her husband, an Air Force sergeant, has been equally repulsed by the administration’s treatment of the military but can’t speak openly about it.
“It’s part of the reason conservatives for so long have gotten away with tokenizing service members while simultaneously voting in ways that screw them over, because they can’t speak out,” she said, adding that service members have been “taken advantage of” by the government.
“If the dozens of DMs I just received from active duty spouses are any indication, taking the votes for granted is a really big mistake that they’re going to come to regret,” she added.
Some spouses are posting publicly, flooding Brown’s posts with comments such as, “Spouse of Army Vet over here and wow, do I feel [every] ounce of your anger! Say it loud and often!”
But Brown’s sometimes expletive laden videos have also ignited backlash for their angry tone.
“As someone whose husband is currently deployed in the Middle East not far from Yemen, I’m going to warn you now this is going to be the angriest f---ing video I’ve ever made in my entire because there are not adequate words in the English language for me to fully f---ing communicate to you right now how f---ing furious I am,” she said in the video.
She accused high-level Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Hegseth of “violating the f---ing Espionage Act” in the leak, “putting the lives of thousands of service members, including my husband’s, at risk.”
She wagered that service members connected to the airstrikes were only still alive because Goldberg did not go public with the information sooner.
“Signal-gate” broke only a week after Pentagon employees received an agency-wide email warning them about the messaging app’s security issues.
Brown alleged, “All it would take is one of those f---ing phones falling into the wrong hands. And those motherf---ers would have sent hundreds of troop members into a f---ing ambush.”
On the outside, Brown is utterly enraged. But deep down she said she is also very scared. She told the Daily Beast that she has had constant nightmares about her husband being killed and getting a call to receive his body in Delaware—while Trump stands watch.
“It is really frightening to know such an impulsive, careless, and un-empathetic person is the one who controls whether my husband lives or dies,” she said. “At every level of leadership, the leaders have shown that they don’t have the best interest of service members as a priority.”
White House press secretary Karoline Levitt declined to comment directly to the Beast but pointed to an earlier statement at her daily briefing that said, in part, that Trump and Hegseth “take the lives of our American service members with the utmost responsibility, and they would never do anything intentionally to put Americans’ lives at risk.”
As a healthcare advocate, Brown said she frequently meets Republican families that have switched parties over how military members and veterans have been treated by the GOP.
She especially took aim at her senator, Markwayne Mullin, who on Tuesday posted a video on X attempting to downplay the situation.
“For years, Hillary Clinton shared classified national security secrets from her personal email,” said the Republican. “Forget about apples to oranges, this is like comparing apples to a steak.”
But while Mullin claimed the chat had no classified information, even he seemed a bit hesitant in the clip. “Was the conversation something that could have happened or should have happened? I don’t know,” he admitted.
He called the chat, which was loaded with fist-bump and American flag emojis, “thoughtful” and “collective” and said, “We should be glad that the conversation took place.”
Brown said that Mullin’s office hasn’t returned any of her calls, and she went viral for another video on X Tuesday in which she spoke with someone at his front desk who promised to relay the information.
Brown called the senator a coward and suggested that if he didn’t return her call, she would go to the ends of his earth to “destroy his career” and make sure every Oklahoman “knows how few f---s he gave about my husband’s life and the lives of other active duty service members.”
She told the Daily Beast that this wasn’t the first time that Mullin delayed in returning her calls. She received her husband’s blessing in January to call Mullin and voice her opposition against Hegseth’s confirmation as defense secretary. She said the senator did not return her call until a week later after she “applied public pressure” through another viral video.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Mullin for comment.
