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Let us not engage in overwrought responses to the likelihood that President Donald Trump abruptly revealed classified information from an ally to a couple of Russian officials who were in the Oval Office last week. There is a lot to chew over, and there are a lot of people with a lot of competing agendas who either want to scream that Trump is going to bring about a literal apocalypse or alternatively want to insist that everything is just fine and Trump didn't do anything wrong. This morning National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster held a press briefing and repeated several times that everything Trump said was "wholly appropriate" in the context of his meeting.Rather than turning to the now established drum circles that accompany every outrageous Trump story (and the beating is particularly loud with this one), let's instead apply a healthy dose of Occam's razor both in analyzing what happened with Trump's disclosures and what likely consequences may come. Let's dispense with conspiracy theories and Nth-dimensional chess games and keep things simple.The president likely said things he should not have . . .The president is dumb, is boastful, and lacks any sort of discipline . . .Trump will be cut out of intel and decision-making, and that's dangerous . . .. . . Trump lacks discipline and doesn't understand the complex issues involved and makes very poor decisions about what to say in sensitive environments. As a result, there are parts of the executive branch that may well be operating independently of him, and it's not the leaks that are the problem. It's the lack of responsibility. Trump's attempt to crack down on leakers will likely fail (thank God) because he's not terribly competent, and frankly it looks like he wouldn't have a staff afterward if they got them all.There's nothing about the electoral process that guarantees that we'll get anywhere near some mythical concept of the "right person" in charge. We have a president who is wealthy, nasty, powerful, and not terribly smart. It may well have been inevitable at some point. And yet, there's still very little discussion or interest in scaling back the power of the executive branch in any way, even after Trump's administration weighs attacks on the free press. So far the best thing Trump has done, according to many pundits and newspapers (and to be very clear, not Reason), was a pointless, violent military strike on Syria.Trump may be a particularly bad man and somehow both very stubborn yet also prone to manipulation, but his behavior and the consequences of it highlight the flaws of the power of the executive branch of the government. Do not make the mistake of ignoring the threats that come from this expansive level of power with any unique threats that come from Trump.
The federal government should be weakened greatly.
Fixed!
