White House Leaks Are Patriotic
On Sunday, Russian president and American shadow president Vladimir Putin won an unprecedented fourth term as his country's head of state in what was widely understood to be a sham contest in which the opposition leader was barred from even participating. The next day, Putin had a phone call with American president and longtime Russia fanboy Donald Trump. In light of the alleged electoral irregularities—already a sticky subject between the two countries—White House officials included in the president's briefing papers an all-caps reminder: "DO NOT CONGRATULATE." According to Washington Post, he did it anyway.
Trump told reporters that he had offered his well wishes on Putin’s new six-year term during a conversation that covered a range of topics, including arms control and the security situations in Syria and North Korea.
...
It was not clear whether Trump read the notes, administration officials said. Trump, who initiated the call, opened it with the congratulations for Putin, one person familiar with the conversation said.
Later, when White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked if the Trump administration believes that Russia's election qualified as a "free and fair" one, she turned into a real-life version of the shruggie.
“We don’t get to dictate how other countries operate,” she said. “What we do know is that Putin has been elected in their country, and that’s not something that we can dictate to them how they operate.”
What followed was the usual bits of tiresome handwringing from conservative types about the scourge of leaking that plagues this administration at every turn. "This [White House] still is disloyal to the president and to each other," groaned Ari Fleischer, who tweeted this country into the Iraq War before Twitter even existed. "Every president, even including one as bad as this one, has the right to confidential communications with his assistants," said purported Never-Trumper Tom Nichols, attempting to walk such an absurdly narrow line—he went on to contend that the president's praise of an allegedly murderous dictator should be reported, but that the existence of the notes he ignored while doing so should not—that it basically vanished beneath him. Marco Rubio took a break from ignoring gun safety and posting Bible verses to weigh in, too.
The reason arguments like these are so galling is because they pretend that a president who flagrantly disregards all their beloved institutional norms of the American presidency should nonetheless be afforded the opportunity to benefit from them. When the his own national security staff does everything they can to get him to follow one important instruction during a high-stakes call with a foreign head of state, and they then sit back and watch him do the exact opposite, that has profound implications for his fitness for the job with which he has been entrusted. Insisting that Trump's incompetence should nonetheless be shielded from public view misses the unhinged demagogue for the trees, and acknowledging the story's importance but quibbling about the precise method of dissemination is the most toothless form of rebuke imaginable.
As Rubio suggests, White House officials alarmed by the president's conduct could quit their jobs, call a press conference, and tell everyone just how often the leader of the free world would, say, open up the nuclear football and stare at its contents "just to see what it felt like." It isn't a terrible idea, and some members of the much-hyped but evidently-powerless Committee to Save America should probably think it over.
Insisting on this solution to the exclusion of all others is risky, though, because doing so assumes that it would be sufficient to mitigate the danger, or end this chaos, or at least make an appreciable difference in how this administration conducts itself. If you have the guts to do it, you can only go down in a blaze of glory once. Talking about what you've seen doesn't require nearly as much courage, but it is the next-best option.
Imagine if the alarmed staffers were to leave en masse tomorrow. You know exactly what would happen next: Donald Trump would go on Twitter and smear the whistleblowers as disloyal, traitorous liars, and stooges like Fleischer and Rubio would egg him on with the same brand of performative tut-tutting that they currently reserve for the Post's anonymous sources. Paul Ryan would conclude that there "just isn't any need for congressional hearings at this time." Meanwhile, inside the West Wing, the only people left would be bobbleheaded yes-men who exist only to enable whatever the boss wants to do in any given moment. Sometimes, leaks can be good, even patriotic. A Trump White House that eradicates all of them is the scariest Trump White House of all.
