Only two years after Republicans made rigid adherence to information-security protocols the centerpiece of their successful pitch to voters, Americans were shocked to learn on Tuesday that the party's leader, Donald Trump, uses unsecured cell phones that make sensitive White House communications vulnerable to hacking by foreign intelligence services. Although the president receives a new call-capable device each month, according to Politico, he has refused to do the same with his Twitter-enabled phone on the grounds that it would be "too inconvenient."

White House staffers, no doubt shaken to learn that their leader's near-constant calls for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be locked up for her occasional use of a private e-mail server might not have stemmed from his bona fide concerns about illicit surveillance of high-level American diplomats, scrambled to downplay the story's significance. A "senior West Wing official" told Politico that it doesn't matter that Trump's voice-enabled phone, unlike President Obama's, is equipped with a camera and microphone of which nefarious actors might be able to seize control, since "inherent capabilities and advancement in technologies" mean that his devices are "more secure than any Obama-era devices." The "Obama era," if my math is correct, ended all of 16 months ago.

Sadly, this revelation is not the first of its kind for this administration. Last year, the Indianapolis Star reported that Vice President Pence—who, following his running mate's lead, would lambaste Clinton for "placing classified information in a way that exposed it to being hacked and being made available in the public domain, even to enemies of this country"—routinely used a personal e-mail address to conduct official business while serving as governor of Indiana. In October, White House chief of staff John Kelly learned that his personal phone had been compromised, possibly for months, by hackers whose identities remain unknown to authorities to this day.

At this point, it is hard to deny that a disturbing pattern has emerged: While Trump ran on a solemn commitment to maintaining the integrity of all electronic devices that may be used in the administration of the federal government, today he appears to have no interest in a subject about which he was once so passionate that he threatened criminal charges for anyone who refused to take it as seriously as he does. In fact, his proffered explanation for this discrepancy—"convenience"—is the very same one offered by his former political rival when asked about her infamous e-mail habits.

Painful though it may be, we now must ask the hard question: Did Donald Trump mean what he said on the campaign trail? Or were his unsparing attacks on Hillary Clinton perhaps motivated by something else?

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