What Were You Expecting?

It's the emperor that sets the tone

Image by Nicholas Konrad for The New Yorker, from David Rohde's coverage of the Mar-a-Lago documents case, August 2022.

The defense secretary makes more use of that inadequately secured communications platform than he originally said, like to keep his missus and his brother apprised of his military activities, thus endangering national security even more than when he did this with members of the Principals Committee, plus the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic (who wasn't supposed to be there but seems to be the only person involved who had a clue on how to behave in a situation where sensitive information is being discussed). Hegseth seems extremely reliant on the missus and the brother, dragging the one of them to meetings for which she hasn't got an appropriate, or indeed any, security clearance, and appointing the other to a Pentagon sinecure, and I can't help thinking their job is to carry the hip flasks, but who knows.

The punditry explodes with excitement: surely the president will have to fire him now, but that's not what happens when the president is informed:

Mr. Hegseth called the president around 8 p.m., said the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. The president told Mr. Hegseth that disgruntled “leakers” were to blame for the report and made clear that he had Mr. Hegseth’s back. The president also said he had plenty of experience dealing with leakers.

As far as Trump is concerned, the problem isn't that Hegseth is a threat to national security, it's that disgruntled leakers let everybody know about it. That's what those leakers do, probably because of whatever it was that disgruntled them. Once disgruntled, twice shy.

Indeed it might be the still gruntled ones who are the greater problem, like the White House anonymi who persuaded NPR to report that Trump was actively seeking a new defense secretary. At least the disgruntled ones are likely to be telling us the truth—that more or less everything is out of control.

One of the things I'd like to see getting more attention in connection with these Signalgate scandals or whatever we're calling them is the president's attitude toward secrecy with sensitive information, which could only be described as one of depraved indifference, based on his conduct in the previous term, starting from May 2017 and that Oval Office meeting with Kislyak and Lavrov (attended by Russian, but not American press) when he tossed the Russians a nugget of secret intelligence on Israel, to the apocalypse on the day before the Biden inauguration, when he stole thousands of documents from the White House, a number of them highly classified, and dozens of folders from which classified documents had disappeared, and whisked them away to his club in Palm Beach, where he showed them off to visitors and played huckle buckle beanstalk with the National Archives and FBI trying to keep them from taking them back.

Trump has no respect for official secrets, or classification, or any of the mysteries of national security. I don't mean he's cynical about them, as you or I might well be, thinking that a lot of classification is unnecessary and probably self-serving, meant to hide things that embarrass or inculpate their institution. I mean he hasn't got the basic concept of how it works—how your enemies getting a copy of your planning document could help them defeat you, and therefore you need to keep the document out of their hands.

I'm serious; it's to do, like so much of my Trump understanding, with the literacy issue. Trump is, as we know, used to the use of written documents to hide things (like the sale value of a particular real estate project), but has no idea how written documents can, sometimes unwittingly, reveal things that they don't actually say. He's never read a murder mystery, and when he watches a spy thriller all he sees is the violence, not the critical reading of the evidence that led there. He truly doesn't understand what classification is supposed to be for, or what it is meant to prevent. You can tell from the way he defends himself from accusations that he's mishandled classified material—he neither denies it ("Oh, I would never endanger our security"—though he did say a report that nuclear secrets were among the stolen Mar-a-Lago documents was a "hoax") nor minimizes it ("It shouldn't have been classified, it's stuff everybody knows"). Instead, he rests exclusively on his privilege ("As president, I can take it if I want"). When he or Patel make one of their never substantiated claims that he's used his presidential power to declassify some set of documents, they never try to explain that it didn't need to be classified; they don't seem to think any explanation is required. It's his right to do it, the claim is, for any reason whatever.

In point of fact, that's what he believes classification is about: him, and his rights and prestige. Access to classified material is a symbol of your place in the hierarchy of power and majesty, with the president at the very top. At the beginning of his first term in 2017, he passed out the security clearances with abandon, without regard to needs or qualifications, as a mark not only of his imperial favor, but also of his imperial power—other officials can give out clearances, but only the president is so grand he can do it without subjecting the individual to a background check. This time, he's gone beyond that, issuing not only the clearances (even to awful people like the DOGEboys), but the power to issue clearances, to people who could hardly have passed a background check themselves, like Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, I think John Ratcliffe, and of course Hegseth. And by the same token taking clearances away as a sign of his imperial displeasure, from all the people, Democrats, Republicans, and neither, that he regards as his personal enemies, Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and Lisa Monaco, Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindman, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, including people who didn't even have clearances, or had already had them pulled by Gabbard. Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, Mark Milley and Anthony Fauci. A bunch of law firms. And that's also what he used the stolen documents for, at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, as far as we know, though also to argue that he was innocent of some other crimes that had been imputed to him, as after Milley accused him of planning to attack Iran ("I didn't plan to attack Iran, he did!—Look at this secret report I'm waving in your face!").

Given all that, is it any wonder that the gang he's gathered around himself, not just Hegseth and Gabbard, but also people we've thought of as more or less respectable, like Waltz and Rubio in that Signal chat group, is unable to take information security seriously?

We elected a president under multiple federal indictment, not just for his multiple attempts, some violent, to hold onto his office after losing the 2020 election, which some claim would be justified if the election had been fraudulently stolen from him, as he continues to maintain, without evidence, that it was, but also for the extraordinarily egregious security violation of the stolen Mar-a-Lago documents, for which he never offered a defense, but successfully avoided trial through endless procedural maneuvers and delay, and finally by getting reelected.

I mean really, what else were you expecting?