Signal Leak Shows Trump Only Takes Federal Secrets Seriously When It Suits Him

As far as the Trump administration is concerned, there are government secrets and then there are government secrets.

Details sought by a federal court about a military flight of immigrants that landed many days ago with video cameras recording its arrival? Sorry, judge, too secret to reveal, even now long after the fact.

Details about an upcoming military strike against American enemies disclosed by the president’s top national security advisers on an unsecured group text chat? Not classified, not a breach of national security and not a big deal.

What constitutes an official secret in this new era in Washington, it turns out, seems to depend on who is asking and who is telling. The juxtaposition of two cases involving sensitive information in the same week reinforces just how situational President Trump’s approach to government secrecy can be.

And it illustrates Mr. Trump’s remarkable capacity for bending political reality to his will without worrying about facts or consistency. After all, this is a president who has made Canada and Europe out to be enemies not allies, who rewrote history to claim that Ukraine started the war with Russia and who sent lawyers to court to argue that Elon Musk is not really in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency.

This has become so common that the disparity in what constitutes a secret played out without much acknowledgment of the disparity. On the one hand, the Trump administration invoked the so-called state secrets privilege to defy a federal judge trying to determine whether its no-hearing, no-due-process deportation of immigrants was legal. On the other hand, Mr. Trump brushed off the stunning disclosure of a planned attack on Houthi militants on a group chat that inadvertently included a journalist on the commercial platform Signal.