See no evil: the toll of the Trump team's Signal chat lapse(s?)

Wouldn't they have loved to get the intel on D-Day?

The people whose lives might be at risk as a result of the Trump team's frat boy approach to national security are not amused.

Signal Chat Leak Angers U.S. Military Pilots
Men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States expressed bewilderment after the leak of attack plans. “You’re going to kill somebody,” one pilot said.

Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs and use of her right arm when the combat helicopter she piloted in the Iraq war was shot down, had a very direct response

Duckworth: ‘Pete Hegseth is a ‘f‑‑‑ing liar’ “...This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately,” Duckworth said in a statement. 

The Washington Post's judicious columnist Philip Bump unpacks what accountability for the security breach might look like and why we won't get it from the Trump clown show.

The point of accountability is to reinforce that bad things are bad. ...

... Trump — and by extension his party — have proved increasingly likely to rise to the defense of anyone seen as under fire from any perceived opponent. (“Deny, deny, deny,” Trump once reportedly advised an ally.) In any previous administration, Hegseth wouldn’t be the secretary of defense in the first place. Deeply unqualified (beyond his closeness to Trump) and mired in multiple scandals, he was nonetheless confirmed by a Republican-led Senate unwilling to face the ire of Trump. Since the Signal scandal broke, Hill Republicans — a group ostensibly empowered to enforce accountability from the executive branch — have not indicated any newfound appetite for challenging the White House. No one thinks the Justice Department, helmed by some of the more energetic Trump sycophants in America, will launch any serious investigation.

Without accountability, the damage here would not simply be that the U.S. government will continue to be led by people who don’t know or don’t care why communications about military operations occur over secure channels. It is also that there will be no public signal that the actions of these officials were bad. No signal to others in government. No signal to Trump’s base of support. No signal to America’s overseas allies that this government holds such mistakes to account.

This is precisely what (the deeply insecure) Trump wants to avoid, of course. He will happily malign people who used to serve under his direction — but always as he introduces some imaginary distance from them. It would be very hard for him to do so with Hegseth in particular: He picked and advocated Hegseth despite concerns about his readiness; if the criticisms of Hegseth were accurate, then so were the criticisms of Trump.

What results is a weird (and for the right, ironic) moral relativism, one centered on the whims and actions of Donald Trump. We know that religious conservatives revamped their moral boundaries once Trump became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016. What we’ve seen since is an entire party willing to shift black-and-white moral and ethical issues into a muddy, gray area in which Trump alone remains untainted.

Republican politicians have replaced both common sense and elementary ethical calculation with "Anything for Mr Trump." They've become servile as well as ignorant.