A sprawling network of Signal group chats involving hundreds of top business executives, Silicon Valley leaders, and journalists, as well as legal and economic analysts, has massively reshaped national politics since the pandemic—in large part thanks to the platform’s disappearing-message function.

“Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens,” Substack author Noah Smith wrote.

Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the tech venture capitalist firm a16z and onetime co-author of Mosaic, an early internet web browser, spends “half his life on 100” of these sorts of group chats at a time, one anonymous participant hyperbolized to Semafor’s Ben Smith.*

In a blog post announcing Erik Torenberg as one of a16z’s general partners, Andreessen described the private spaces as having produced a national “vibe shift.” That’s because powerful individuals are less afraid to share what they really think in the closed-circuit digital rooms, according to several sources that spoke with Semafor.

“People during 2020 felt that there was a monoculture on social media, and if they didn’t agree with something, group chats became a safe space to debate that, share that, build consensus, feel that you’re not alone,” Torenberg told the publication.

Andreessen agreed—telling Torenberg on a recent podcast that they’re having “all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” blaming the public silence on a general air of censorship on major social platforms.

But some of those conversations have straggled away from friendly discourse and into the realm of political influence. Amid the network lies a vast web of right-wing chatrooms bent on keeping Donald Trump in power and vanquishing political dissent from the left.

“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,” conservative culture warrior Christopher Rufo told Semafor. “By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end—so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”

Rufo—who has risen to popularity on the right for inventing a fiction that the left has taken over America—had seen the opportunity within the Signal spaces to influence those in power all along.

“I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right,” Rufo said.

With time, dissenters were brandished as upstarts suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (sometimes shorthanded to TDS), spawning what are effectively echo chambers: smaller and tighter group chats that have nixed alternative perspectives.

“This group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS,” David Sacks wrote of the popular group chat Chatham House, informing Torenberg that he should “create a new one with just smart people.” Sacks left shortly after sending that message.

That spawned the exit of another three notable figures: Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, bitcoin billionaire Tyler Winklevoss, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

* This article previously mischaracterized Mosaic.

Donald Trump can’t help speculating about serving a third term as president—even as he claims, “It’s not something that I’m looking to do. And I think it would be a very hard thing to do.”

The president made the comments to The Atlantic in a new interview published Monday, laughing about the idea. He said, “That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it? Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter.”

In a startling sign, the Trump Organization has started selling “Trump 2028” hats for $50 each, and the president said last month that he was “not joking” about running for a third term. Such a move would violate the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution, and would require a two-thirds majority vote in Congress and a three-fourths majority of state governments to change.

Even with that lofty path, Trump has talked about other plans for staying in office beyond 2028, including having JD Vance as the top of a presidential ticket with Trump as the vice president. Trump’s comments on that idea in March were not reassuring.

“Well, that’s one. But there are others too. There are others,” Trump said, refusing to elaborate on whatever plans and schemes he has to stay in office.

Even if he doesn’t have the majorities needed to make the constitutional changes, Trump does have his die-hard allies—Representative Andy Ogles filed legislation in January, only days into Trump’s second term, to amend the Twenty-Second Amendment. One of his top lawyers, Boris Epshteyn, has been floating the unfounded claim that Trump could run again in 2028 since at least October 2023.

There’s also the fact that Trump’s allies in the conservative movement, including on the Supreme Court, could support his attempts to stay in office beyond 2028. As with any half-baked or outrageous Trump statement, it’s only far-fetched until Trump tries to put it into action. The question is how strong resistance would be if and when the time comes.

President Trump woke up early and angry Monday morning after multiple polls showed he has the lowest........

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