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.
They see it like a war. Even when your soldiers do something wrong, you’re not going to hope that the Germans win the battle because of it. You will, however, take every advantage if they make the same mistake.
The point of the lies isn’t to convince anyone - supporters know or at least suspect that their leader is lying and they approve. The point is to cripple rules-based opposition, which constantly has to disprove the official story before it can do anything.
How do you disprove a story when your opponents are themselves lying about believing it? They already know it’s not true. Meanwhile, that story changes faster than you can respond. So what if this was illegal? It won’t even be in the news in a week, forgotten because of some new outrage.