American military and intelligence agencies must assume from now on that the president of the United States is a security risk. He cannot be trusted to protect state secrets.

In a parliamentary system, a head of government who did what Donald Trump has done would already have resigned. There is no sign of that from the 45th president. Instead, the remainder of the U.S. government must cope with a president who has proven himself unable to understand the significance of the secrets shown him—proven himself a compulsive blurter and blabber—and added new urgency to the fear that he is somehow under the thrall of Russia.

Would the president have so abjectly tried to impress representatives of any other country? He blabbed because he bragged, and he bragged because he values Russia’s and Putin’s goodwill so bizarrely much. As the economist Justin Wolfers noted, if officials had not revealed the truth to the media, the Russians would now genuinely have damaging kompromat on Trump: the secret of a dereliction of duty that would have gotten anybody else in government fired, if not indicted.

So what happens now?

When officials at one agency of government become convinced that another cannot be trusted to preserve secrets, they slow the flow of information to that agency. Can they do that when the distrusted agency is the White House; the distrusted person, the president of the United States?