This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.
To put it bluntly: no one working for a three-letter agency in Washington trusts President Trump to keep his mouth shut.
From early in his first term, Trump showed so little regard for the nation’s secrets that it shifted relationships between the U.S. intel community and those of our strongest allies. Less than a month into the job, Trump and the Japanese Prime Minister plotted their response to a North Korean missile launch in the open-air patio of Mar a Lago, photos of which ended up on Facebook. Then Trump shared Israeli-passed intelligence with Russia’s Foreign Minister in May 2017, horrifying Israeli intel leaders. Subsequently, a spy for the U.S. inside Vladimir Putin’s regime was extracted on fears Trump and his team were being sloppy with the nation’s secrets and could put the spook at risk.
Also that year, Trump boasted to his Filipino counterpart that he had two nuclear submarines off the coast of North Korea and shared details of a Manchester arena bombing before the Brits were ready to release them—leading U.K. spy services to shut off the spigot of secrets for a spell. And he demanded his interpreter turn over his notes after a meeting with Putin, prompting some in the intel community to suspect he had spilled more secrets to Moscow. Trump’s Florida retreat became a mark for spies from around the world.
Two years later, Trump tweeted—yes, tweeted!—spy satellite images over Iran that confirmed U.S. capacity to look into any adversaries’ backyards and confirmed a capacity that had been in doubt, at least publicly. That same year, he boasted to Bob Woodward that the United States had nuke tools that would shock Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin.
All that happened before August of 2022, when FBI agents raided Mar a Lago to retrieve classified documents that seemed to follow Trump from his presidency into his return to private life.
This Trumpian trail of recklessness with the nation’s most valuable secrets puts the revelations that Trump’s senior leadership discussed an active military operation over an unprotected messaging platform in a different light. During his first term, the intelligence community could view Trump as the chaos agent who those around him were doing their best to contain. But the details of the Signal chat that Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg inadvertently gained access to show how different things are in Trump’s second term. The carelessness has spread beyond the Big Guy himself, seeping into those tasked with carrying out his agenda.
The indifference to keeping America’s dirty laundry buried in the basket has been one of the rare constants in Trumpism, as has been a see-no-evil ethos by the President in response to forehead-slapping details that have stunned national security hawks of every background.
“They’ve made a big deal out of this because we’ve had two perfect months,” Trump said Tuesday, responding to—but not really answering—questions from reporters about why his national security adviser Mike Waltz added Goldberg to a conversation that also included Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and spy chief Tulsi Gabbard.
In an interview with NBC News on Tuesday, Trump described it the “only glitch in two months.”
In fact, Trump seemed to treat the whole incident as an annoyance that was taking him away from his chaos-soaked agenda.
“This was not classified,” Trump said during a session with visiting diplomats. “Now if it’s classified information, it’s probably a little bit different. But, I always say, you have to learn from every experience.”
Early Wednesday, The Atlantic released a tranche of the messages to let the public have a broader look at what had been discussed in that Signal chat, including messages from Hegseth that included the precise timeline of air strikes scheduled to commence around two hours later—details that are routinely classified. The Administration called the whole story a “hoax” and “misinformation,” and said it proved no wrongdoing, while Democrats argued the exact opposite in real time. It was a classic choose-your-own-adventure reality.
Instead of addressing the terrible mistake, GOP lawmakers mostly ignored it over two days of previously scheduled hearings featuring the nation’s top nat-sec players. At Tuesday’s Senate hearing on global threats, they asked exactly zero questions about the conversation that included the name of a CIA official, active targets, and the timing, weapons and aircraft involved in the surprise March 15 attack on Yemen’s Houthi militants. As TIME’s Nik Popli, on the Hill for the hearings, reported, Trump’s top intelligence officials insisted nothing was improperly shared—internally or externally—about the strikes.
On Wednesday, when a House intel panel convened with the same Administration officials, the tone continued to be one of disbelief that details of any unfolding military action were being shared on an app widely seen as a vulnerability for hackers—by people widely seen as top hacking targets of foreign adversaries. Republicans maintained their defense of their team, with Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas even joking about the details. “I will note I always use fire emojis when I see terrorists getting killed,” he said, referencing Waltz’s response in the chat to an unfolding military attack apparently hitting its target.
Crenshaw’s quip mirrored the attitude of much of Trump’s base, which has largely brushed aside Signal-gate, while also embracing a case of amnesia about how almost everyone on the leaked chain had blasted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 over the apparent national security catastrophe of her using a private email account—on par with what predecessor Colin Powell used during his time as President George W. Bush’s top diplomat. Those allegations birthed years of “lock her up” chants during Trump’s rallies.
MAGA world’s reaction to Trump’s team using a similarly non-secure platform couldn’t be more different, proving once again that seemingly nothing will dent Trump’s invincibility among Republicans.
“Lock her up” has found its update: Let it go.
Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.
The post This Isn’t Trump’s First Intelligence Crisis—But the Damage This Time Is Different appeared first on TIME.
