By now, you’ve heard the story: Several of President Trump’s top national security officials used a publicly available nongovernmental messaging app to make plans to bombard Yemen, unwittingly added the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine to the group chat and proceeded to share information that seems, to put it mildly, highly sensitive.
Some of the chat’s messages were set to auto-delete in what seems to be a violation of federal records-keeping laws. Watching the details unfold has been an exercise in shock compounding shock. By the end, it’s hard to figure out what to be most disgusted by. The recklessness? The incompetence? The danger? The use of prayer emojis before weapons were launched?
Add to the list: The mother lode of hypocrisy. After the Trump administration denied that any classified material was shared in the group chat, The Atlantic published the conversation nearly in full, redacting only the name of a C.I.A. employee. If the story was bad before, it’s now worse. And one thing is clear: In Trump world, the rules often — maddeningly — seem to apply only to other people.
It doesn’t “expose” anything really, since that implies that it was formerly hidden and it very much wasn’t. Trump and his co-conspirators and mercenaries have been very clear that their position is that the rules only apply to other people literally since day one.
Legal concepts are only relevant if they’re enforced - if they’re not, then they’re just meaningless mouth noises that might as well not exist at all. So the real problem isn’t that Trump et al consider themselves above the law, but that damned near NOBODY in the entire fucking government is doing one single thing to disabuse them of that notion.