There are many things you can complain about when it comes to signal, but overall it's a huge improvement from unencrypted messengers like discord and definitely a step leap in the right direction

You have to be very tinfoil hat to believe that this current administration is capable of anything so sophisticated as a misdirection.

Bad actors are sowing distrust by implying that Signal is not secure. Always remember that the powers that be don’t want the public to have encrypted comms and would love to ban private messaging apps altogether.

Wrong logic, trying to guess what they are doing. I mean, if you were a god-level poker player, then maybe, but most people are not and god-level players lose too.

and Signal is in fact a fed honeypot

Being competitive and protected from network effects (decentralized, p2p, federation, one standard and many implementations, all that) can hurt being secure. The complexity of being both may not be practical.

The point of Signal is academic level security. It has a clear model and is not doing anything to make it more complex.

Which is why it is centralized, leading to suspicions and accusations of being a honeypot.

The code is open-source though, and I’m hoping that individuals more learned than I would surely alert us if there were any backdoors/exploits…

That's a wrong hope in any case.