Forget the Trump administration’s buffoonery here’s the real crisis

We should talk about the prevailing reaction to Signalgate – utter disbelief. People who know something about national security, military affairs, government secrets and federal law appear to be stunned by the clowns, idiots and buffoons who “accidentally texted” the classified planning of airstrikes on Yemeni Houthis to the editor of The Atlantic.Michael Bennet is an example of this reaction. During testimony, the US senator from Colorado asked CIA Director John Ratcliffe if he knew who added Jeffrey Goldberg to the encrypted group chat on Signal. Bennet also asked if Ratcliffe knew that Trump’s Middle East adviser was on the chat, and that he was in Moscow at the time, meaning that the Kremlin was almost certainly spying on him.To both questions, Ratcliffe said he didn’t know.In the beforetimes, that might have been a firing offense, as in: how is it even possible for the Central Intelligence Agency’s director to not know! That disbelief is surely what brought on Michael Bennet’s apoplexy. “This sloppiness, this incompetence, this disrespect – for our intelligence agencies and the personnel who work for them – is entirely unacceptable. It’s an embarrassment. You need to do better!”But doing better does not motivate Ratcliffe or any of the highest-ranking national security officials involved, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and Vice President JD Vance.Doing better would mean meeting or surpassing certain levels of excellence according to law, the Constitution and standards of professional conduct, as well as accepting responsibility for failure. Excellence, however, would stand in the way of their real motivation, which is power. None is qualified. All are willing to say and do anything, consequences be damned. The only qualification was whether they were loyal to Trump, and the best guarantee of that, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, was whether they were the kind of clowns, idiots and buffoons who might “accidentally text” war plans to a reporter.Let me put this another way. The president didn’t know about the security breach. “I don’t know anything about it,” he told a reporter who asked about it for the first time. “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. It’s a magazine that’s going out of business. It’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it.”Why wasn’t he told? A reasonable guess might be that Hegseth and the others knew they were being careless and didn’t want to tell him.But that would mean carelessness is a flaw.It’s not. Carelessness – or any of the injurious attributes of clowns, idiots and buffoons – is something Trump can trust them. When things go south, as they always do, he can trust them to cling to him more tightly, as by then, he might be the only thing standing between them and a jail cell. When people talk about loyalty to Trump, they are not talking about it in the positive sense, as if they love him. They are talking about it in the negative sense, as if life as they know it would end without him.Once the president becomes the only thing standing between them and criminal accountability, he becomes, to them, the law itself, such that whatever they do is in his name, which means it’s “legal,” which means they can do whatever they want without fear of consequence. Those are the kind of people a criminal president wants around him.That’s the takeaway: Loyalty to Trump is the national security crisis.Unfortunately, this is not yet widely understood. As things stand, there’s still this idea that failure in matters of national security is the exception to the rule instead of the rule itself under Donald Trump.“This is more than ‘loose lips sink ships,’” a former CIA officer said. “This is a criminally negligent breach of classified information and war planning,” involving the vice president, the secretary of defense and the CIA director, “all putting troops at risk. America is not safe.”But criminal negligence isn’t putting troops at risk, not primarily. Loyalty to Trump is. “This is the highest level of f—up imaginable,” former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said. “These people cannot keep America safe.” (I read this quote and the above quote in Heather Cox Richardson.)But this f—up isn’t making America unsafe, not primarily. Loyalty to Trump is. F—-ups happen all the time. There’s always someone willing to take his chances by breaking the law. We are not talking about ordinary human error. We are not talking about ordinary human venality. We are talking about a president who chose the worst people, because they are the worst people, as the worst people can be counted on to fail so spectacularly that they will be bonded to him forever. We are talking about a president who decided against excellence, because excellence threatens his control. He can’t afford to have men and women of integrity, who will honor their oath of office, because they might, as they did in the time, stand in the way of his power.Which brings me back to utter disbelief. Despite everything we know about Donald Trump, it is still possible, apparently, to be outraged. As Senate Michael Bennet told CIA Director Ratcliffe, “This sloppiness, this incompetence, this disrespect … is entirely unacceptable. It’s an embarrassment. You need to do better!”But that’s only if we’re still giving Trump some benefit of the doubt – if we still have expectations of him that are just above the level of a criminal. If we drop those, we wouldn’t be in utter disbelief anymore. They will never do better, so we should expect them to never do better. We should expect Signalgate to be as good as it’s ever going to get. We should expect him and his goons to harm and betray America. And, God help us, we will be right.NOW READ: Dear GOP: America is not going to forget — and many Americans will never forgive

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