Trump continues to erode national security by leaking vital secrets
- On This Day In The Trump Administration
- Aug 29, 2024
- 1 min read
August 30: On This Day In 2018
His blunder came, as usual, in a tweet. After a catastrophic accident during the launch of an Iranian spacecraft, Trump couldn’t restrain himself from gloating—and sabotaging our operations in the process. He destroyed years of effort by thousands of people to keep secret some of our intelligence-gathering capabilities.
OTDI 2019, he used his favorite social network to share an image of the devastated site, sarcastically offering Iran "best wishes and good luck in determining what happened.”
There was just one massive problem: The high-resolution picture he shared revealed to the world that the U.S. had access to aerial data with a previously-unknown level of detail. We used to have an advantage over Iran, because we could peek in on their sensitive sites with greater accuracy than they realized.
Our own president destroyed that advantage with one thoughtless blast of schoolyard bragging. Remember a few days ago when we asked if it was fair to say that Trump is stupid?
Even Trump’s own former National Security Advisor lambasted the move: “There’s utterly no excuse for that. There’s no conceivable reason for that, except it made him feel good to be able to do it,” John Bolton commented.
Dive Deeper
NPR reports on the ill-advised tweet and shows the comparison
HuffPost’s interview with John Bolton
On This Day In The Trump Administration: Trump is a national security threat; leaks Iran photos