This administration's op-sec has been consistently "barney fife" levels of incompetence.
It's not uncommon for incompetent people to be put in positions of power. Because they are incompetent, competent but malicious people take advantage of this and commit actual crimes.
This is where actual conspiracies show up. And that is the incompetent powerful people cover up said crime to avoid looking incompetent.
It is an extremely common pattern.
DT has had a long history of operating like a mafia boss where the design of the people he chooses around him is to put scapegoats on when the criminal activities he's involved in is caught.
It's sycophancy plain and simple. Surround yourself with only yes-men, it ends up becoming less and less competent as the ones who stand up and say no are replaced.
Even if they know better, they can't do better because they know there is no loyalty to nay-sayers.
It's the "market can remain irrational..." problem.
It's yet another broken feedback loop.
Or when the previous admin leaked classified Iran attack plans from the Pentagon, so bad that they didn't even know whether they were hacked or not.
You can at least pretend to make a technical argument over a political one.
Isn’t that the fault of the ISPs, not the admin?
From [0]: “Last year almost a dozen major U.S. ISPs were the victim”, “the intruders spent much of the last year rooting around the ISP networks”, “telecom administrators failing to change default passwords”, “Biden FCC officials did try to implement some very basic cybersecurity safeguards, requiring that telecoms try to do a better job securing their networks”. Per the original topic, the article goes on to explain how the Trump admin destroyed those little security steps.
I’m okay with some both-sidesing of bad opsec, but I think you’re incorrect on the blame in this story, and to the extent it is the government’s responsibility, the Trump II response was worse than the Biden’s.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/07/trump-cybersecurity-poli...
It's the worst U.S. government leak of all time, by far.
What do you consider a compromise of integrity if not a hacking of political campaigns?
Also, please clarify whether the 2016 DNC hack is an exemption to your prior answer so I can weigh your bias.
In fact the only people questioning it are conspirancy-minded people who don't know that there are robust methodologies to detect election fraud.
For example, this wasn’t just “oops, I used the wrong number” but Hegseth getting a custom line run into a secure facility so he could use a personal computer of unknown provenance and security:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/us/politics/hegseth-signa...
That’s one of the reasons why one of the first moves they made was to fire CISOs and the inspectors general who would normally be investigating serious policy violations.
This isn’t “big government”, it’s the attitude that the law is a tool used to hurt their opponents and help themselves but never the reverse.
https://www.apa.org/topics/cognitive-neuroscience/polygraph
> Reviews of decades of scientific research suggest that polygraph tests are not reliable or accurate enough to be used in most forensic, legal or employment settings.
> Although lying can cause the physiological responses measured by polygraph machines—such as sweating and increased heart rate—those same changes can occur even when people are not lying, for example when they are nervous.