On Monday, Americans learned
that President Trump shared with the Russians highly classified
intelligence about the United States fight against the Islamic State.
Mr. Trump jocularly passed secrets obtained by Israel
to Kremlin representatives in a White House meeting last week, blithely
endangering America’s relationship with a vital counterterrorism ally
and its national security.
Republicans
called Mr. Trump’s act “deeply disturbing,” “troubling” and “very
serious.” It is worse than that. It is further proof of the menace posed
by an erratic president who, we now learn, may also have interfered
with the F.B.I.’s investigation of his former national security adviser,
Michael Flynn. Mr. Trump defended himself (on Twitter, as usual) by
asserting that sharing highly classified intelligence with a foreign
adversary is something “I have the absolute right to do.” What’s
terrifying is that he’s right. But what he fails to grasp is that he was
elected to protect American interests, not his own.
How then can Congress’s Republican leaders seem so diffident? Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said,
“It would be helpful if the president spent more time on things we’re
trying to accomplish.” Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, said through
a spokesman that he “hopes for a full explanation of the facts from the
administration.” But so far the best he’s gotten is another Trumpian
Twitter blast in which the president vowed to avenge caps-lock “LEAKERS”
among the American intelligence professionals whose years of work he
may have unraveled with his ad-hoc bumbling.
There’s a danger to overthinking this man. We needn’t apply, as the Times columnist David Brooks put it,
the “vast analytic powers of the entire world … trying to understand a
guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a
jar.”
Mr.
Trump created this latest crisis during an immature boast about
himself. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every
day,” he is reported
to have said, before telling Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign
minister, and Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United
States, about his knowledge of an ISIS plot.
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After
his Russian guests left the Oval Office, White House officials
struggled to limit the damage by contacting the Central Intelligence
Agency and the National Security Agency and trying to scrub transcripts
from the meeting. The news media has withheld the most sensitive details
of what Mr. Trump told the Russians. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the
national security adviser, mounted
an odd and hairsplitting defense, saying that Mr. Trump’s disclosure
was “wholly appropriate” while acknowledging that Mr. Trump didn’t know
the source of the information and had blurted it out at the spur of the
moment.
It
is bad enough that the intelligence community is now likely to do what
it can to wall off sensitive information, sources and methods from this
irresponsible leader. But the president of the United States has
unlimited access to the nation’s secrets, and virtually unfettered
authority to act unilaterally on matters of national security. That is
enshrined in our Constitution — but so are means for curtailing the
danger posed by a leader who misuses that power.
So
far, Republicans in Congress repeat the mantra we heard during Mr.
Trump’s campaign: that he is coachable and will mature in office. Or,
maybe his White House will, as Senator Bob Corker put it on Monday
night, “bring itself under control and in order. … Obviously they’re in a
downward spiral right now and they’ve got to figure out a way to come
to grips.”
That’s
not going to happen. We are seeing the real Mr. Trump. This same
inattention and ignorance, vanity and foolish impulsivity nearly sank
his business — until his lenders stepped in before he took them down
with him.
So
what will Republicans do, as he threatens to do the same to all of us?
They might start devising a plan. The downward spiral is accelerating.
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