Will Trump’s loose lips sink his ship?

News reports last week revealed that, in April 2021, former President Trump told a member of his Mar-a-Lago club, an Australian billionaire named Anthony Pratt, the number of warheads carried on U.S. nuclear submarines and how close they can get to Russian subs without being detected. Pratt shared this sensitive and probably classified information with at least 45 people, including Australian officials, journalists and employees of his company.

Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, declared that the former president “did nothing wrong, has always insisted on truth and transparency, and acted in a proper manner, according to the law.” The incident, however, is part of an extraordinarily well-documented pattern of cavalier, reckless and probably criminal conduct, at odds with Trump’s own statements about threats to national security posed by anyone who mishandles classified material and the penalties leakers should receive. It’s time to hold him accountable.

In 2016, candidate Trump insisted that Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified material on her email server rendered her unfit to be president. If elected, he promised “to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.” In 2017, President Trump repeated, “Classified. That’s classified. You go to prison when you release stuff like that.” In 2018, he signed a law increasing the penalty for “unauthorized removal and retention” of classified material from a misdemeanor to a felony, subject to up to five years in prison.

Trump ordered the FBI to establish a special unit to investigate whistleblowers and leakers, whom he blasted as “traitors and cowards.” The Bureau referred a record 334 people for possible indictment. “Classified information is being given to media that could have a devastating effect on U.S.,” Trump tweeted in 2017. “FIND NOW.”

And yet leaks were “a common problem” in the Trump administration, former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper acknowledged, but the president was “the biggest leaker of all.” There can be no doubt that Esper was — and still is — right about his former boss.

Shortly after he moved into the White House, Trump discussed information classified at the highest level about a violent ISIS plot in a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence had been given to the United States by an ally on the condition that it not be shared without permission. “I have people brief me on great intel every day,” the president boasted. By specifying the city where the source learned about the plot, Trump may have put him or her in harm’s way. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster’s carefully worded denial did not really refute the principal claims in the news stories.

In a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, Trump reportedly commandeered his interpreter’s notes and instructed the linguist to say nothing to officials in his own administration about what he had said. The lack of a detailed summary, even in classified files, of his five face-to-face exchanges with Putin has fueled speculation about secrets Trump divulged to the Russians.

In May 2017, Trump told Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte the location of two nuclear submarines patrolling the seas near North Korea.

In 2019, in a Twitter post, Trump included a detailed high-resolution image of an Iranian satellite launchpad. The disclosure confirmed that U.S. spy planes or drones had violated Iranian airspace. “We had a photo and I released it,” Trump stated, without addressing the diplomatic and national security implications, “which I had the absolute right to do.”

In August 2022, pursuant to a warrant approved by a magistrate judge, FBI agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, finding boxes and boxes of material belonging to the federal government, including four sets of documents marked “top secret,” three sets marked “secret” and three sets marked “classified.” Trump claimed, falsely, that the records were “all declassified” and “placed in secure storage.”

The investigation of Special Counsel Jack Smith has discovered two occasions, in addition to his conversation with Anthony Platt, during which the former president discussed secret information. At his golf club and summer residence in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump waved a document he said was “highly confidential” in front of an audience that included individuals working on Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s memoir, who audiotaped his comments. The document, Trump said, laid out Pentagon plans for a possible invasion of Iran. “See, as president, I could have declassified it, now I can’t,” Trump said. “Isn’t that interesting? It’s so cool.”

Trump also showed a member of his political action committee a classified map of another country, while indicating he should not be sharing it.

Given Trump’s loose lips, and the placement of classified documents in boxes in a ballroom, office and bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, with easy access to employees, members and visitors, these revelations are almost certainly the tip of a leaky iceberg. It’s worth noting that many Americans, including former CIA Director David Petraeus and former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, have pled guilty to mishandling classified documents; more recently, a retired Air Force general and a former FBI analyst were sentenced to three and four years in jail, respectively.

Trump’s conduct may or may not convince jurors to lock him up. Either way, on the attempt of America’s aspiring autocrat to return to the White House, voters have more than enough information to turn him down.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”