Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

Donald Trump’s laissez faire attitude about secrets has been a curiosity about him from early in his first term. Just three weeks after taking office in 2017, during dinner on a public terrace at Mar-a-Lago with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump took a call on his private cell phone about a North Korea launch of a ballistic missile that broke a U.N. resolution barring the country from testing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. Aides to both men scurried around the table presenting papers and briefing books illuminated by lights from their cell phones as Trump resort members at nearby tables looked on. “A keyboard player crooned in the background,” according to a reporter from CNN who was present.

Jaws dropped all over Washington the next day when news of the Mar-a-Lago public discussion of top secret information became known, but it turned out that Trump was just getting started with his casual attitude about the nation’s secrets.

A few weeks later Trump fired James Comey for insufficient loyalty, and the following day, he invited Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov into the Oval Office—along with a reporter and photographer for Tass, but not anyone from the White House pool—and promptly shared secrets about Israel with the two Russians. Then there was the day he showed plans to attack Iran to a writer at his Bedminster golf club. And of course we can’t forget the boxes of classified materials he had piled practically to the ceiling of a bathroom just off the pool deck at Mar-a-Lago after leaving office.

But what am I doing going over all this ancient history when over the last two days we’ve been treated to a brand spanking new example of Trump and his administration’s disdain for secrecy? I’m speaking, of course, of what has been termed Signal-gate—Jeffrey Goldberg’s bombshell revelation that he was included in a supposedly secret text group comprised of Trump’s top national security brain trust plus a smattering of other White House power mongers as they discussed the planning and execution of the recent U.S. attack on Houthi military installations and leaders in Yemen. It’s all anyone has been talking about in Washington D.C. for two days—how could this have happened?

Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging app that comes nowhere near the level of security needed for discussion of top secret military plans and operations such as the Yemen attack. Didn’t they know what they were doing? And if they did know, why were they chatting on a cell phone app that their own kids have probably have on their phones? It’s being called the biggest breach of national security information in the nation’s history. That might be an exaggeration, but it’s close. It makes Hillary’s emails look like passing notes in junior high.

The White House quickly decided to treat the whole thing as business as usual. First the excuse was that nothing in the chat group was classified. When Goldberg of the Atlantic called their bluff today and released the texts of the war plans he had withheld from his Monday story, the White House sent Karoline Leavitt into the press room to claim that it was just a policy discussion that involved attack plans, not war plans, splitting hairs in the wig they had thrown over the whole thing. Hegseth lied his ass off, they all attacked Goldberg as an unreliable and biased enemy of the president, and nobody got as much as a slap on the wrist, much less being fired.

So what was it? Who are we to believe? Is it a scandal, or isn’t it? Weren’t they all just following Donald Trump’s lead? He hasn’t shown any respect for secrets, so why should they?

It’s clear that nobody is going to take a hit over this misuse of a public chat channel to discuss national security information in a way that could have put soldiers, sailors, and airmen at risk. But why?

First of all, Trump doesn’t give a shit about the members of “his” military. Remember him asking John Kelly at Arlington Cemetery what was in it for them, as he gazed upon the field of white head stones? He called the war dead in another cemetery in Europe “suckers and losers,” and it is not lost upon him that it was Jeffrey Goldberg who reported that quote. So, when it comes to the security of military operations that if compromised might lead to deaths of Americans, well, for Donald Trump, they’re just more suckers and losers to put in cemeteries that won’t be on his travel schedule this time around.

But it goes deeper than that. Or maybe it’s even more shallow. He wants the world to know how tough he is. That’s why he advertised the attack on Yemen ahead of time. For Donald Trump, making the threat is as important as the attack itself. He didn’t care if the Houthis knew the attack was going to happen. They weren’t half as important to him as the rest of the world he knew was watching.

Everything to Trump is like selling a condo. That’s why he doesn’t believe in keeping secrets. How can you sell a condo if you don’t put it on the market? It’s the opposite of secrecy. It’s advertising, it’s publicity, it’s fame, it’s all the stuff that’s been in Trump’s DNA since the day he was born. Trump got more power out of being on Page Six in the New York Post than he did from buying the Commodore Hotel, slapping a bunch of reflective glass on it, and calling it the Grand Hyatt, his first real estate deal in Manhattan.

What did Trump do when he wanted to bully NATO? He made them promise to increase their defense budgets. It’s always about money. Even the attack on Yemen was about money. Trump’s alter-Id, Stephen Miller, was in on the chat group for one reason: if they were going to open up shipping lines that would be used by Europe more than the U.S., “we need to make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return…there needs to be some further economic gain,” Miller wrote on the Signal chat.

And just like a condo sale, you set the price and wait for the market to come to you. When that happens, you jack up the price. That’s what he’s doing with Ukraine right now, dangling U.S. support and now threats of tariffs to squeeze more out of countries that used to be our allies and now are merely our customers.

Trump isn’t upset about the leak of the Signal chat because secrets don’t matter. It’s not a scandal to him, it’s an opportunity. The first thing he had Hegseth do was bully the Atlantic’s Goldberg. Trump treats Putin as an ally and our European friends as if they’re enemies. Trump’s national security team may have screwed up by using a public chat app to plan a sensitive military operation, but the reporter who found out about it was labeled the bad guy.

To Donald Trump, everything is a deal, and the only thing that matters is how much he can get out of it. To achieve power by making deals, they must be public. That is why he sees keeping secrets as counterproductive. Deals are anti-treaties. It’s not you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. It’s pay me money up front, or I’ll stab you in the back.

You can’t secretly bully someone. Donald Trump’s makeshift realpolitik is simple: Only suckers make alliances. Winners make deals.