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 provides 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 John Ratcliffe or any of the other 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, moreover, would stand in the way of their real motivation, which is power. None is qualified. All are willing to say and do anything for Trump, consequences be damned. The only “qualification” was whether they were loyal, and the best guarantee of that, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, was whether they were the kinds of clowns, idiots and buffoons who might “accidentally text” war plans to The Atlantic.

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 Tuesday. “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. It’s a magazine that’s going out of business. To me, 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. 

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE FOR JUST $6 A MONTH!

---

Click here to leave a tip. $10? Thanks!

---

Carelessness – or any of the injurious attributes of clowns, idiots and buffoons – is something Trump can trust. 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 in they love him. They are talking about it in the negative sense, as in unincarcerated life 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 now in his name, which means it’s “legal,” which means they can do whatever they want without fear of consequence. Those are the kinds of people a criminal president wants around him.

That’s the takeaway: Loyalty to Trump is the national security crisis.

---

---

Unfortunately, this is not widely understood. As things stand, there’s still this idea that incompetence 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 fuckup 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 fuckup isn’t making America unsafe, not primarily. 

Loyalty to Trump is. 

Fuckups happen all the time. There’s always a moron or fiend who’s willing to take chances with 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 on purpose, because he believes the worst people can be counted on to fail so spectacularly that they will be bonded to him until he betrays them. 

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 last time, stand in the way of his power.

---

---

Which brings me back to disbelief. 

Despite everything we know, it is still possible to be outraged by Trump. (I include myself in this.) As Senator 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 him some benefit of the doubt – if we have expectations of him that are just above the level of criminal. If we drop those, we wouldn’t be in disbelief anymore. He will never do better. Let’s not expect it. He will betray us all. That much we can.