“Wholly appropriate” was a phrase that H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, used more than half a dozen times in a press briefing on Tuesday morning, in describing what President Donald Trump revealed to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in an Oval Office meeting last week. The Washington Post, followed by other media organizations, had described the conversation in a way that was wholly dismaying. The various accounts had Trump boasting about his intelligence (perhaps in both senses of the word) and showing off the most sensitive information in the same way that he showed reporters who visited his Trump Tower office the framed magazine covers on his wall, each one bearing a picture of Trump. Worse, the Post reported that the intelligence Trump bragged about came from a Middle Eastern ally that had not given permission to share it, and that might not want the Russians, in particular, to know the sources and methods by which it had learned that information—information which, according to press reports, Trump may have put at risk. (According to further press reports, the ally in question is Israel, raising the possibility that what Trump did was roughly the fun-house-mirror image of what Jonathan Pollard was convicted of doing.) One of the Post’s sources, a former official, called it “all kind of shocking.” Not even Republicans seemed to know what to do with the story when it broke on Monday; many of them, like Senator Bob Corker, repeated worried comments about the need for order in the White House. Others muttered about national security—like Paul Ryan, who sent out a spokesman to say that “protecting our nation’s secrets is paramount,” and then went into hiding.

McMaster hadn’t hidden, or not successfully. On Monday afternoon, after first being caught with no answers when he ran into some reporters who were looking for Sean Spicer, McMaster came out with one, saying that the Post story, at least “as reported, is false.” McMaster knew that it was false, he said, “because I was in the room. It didn’t happen.” He said that the Secretary of State and another official were there, too, and that they would back him and the President up. (The other official was Dina Powell, who has moved, in Trumpian short order, from Goldman Sachs to Ivanka Trump’s side to the National Security Council.) McMaster’s denial came after a series of Tuesday-morning tweets from Trump, in which the President said, basically, that he had an “absolute right” to tell the Russians anything he wanted because he was President. His tweets referred to “facts pertaining . . . to terrorism and airline flight safety.” As a legal matter, Trump is probably right; as President, he gets to declassify information at will. But, as with the firing of James Comey, he made it sound as if his aides—including McMaster, a highly respected general—might have been proffering something less than the full or accurate story. As a rule, Trump doesn’t care whom he humiliates. So, on Tuesday, when McMaster appeared again, at a briefing that had been scheduled to talk about Trump’s first international trip as President, one of the first questions was whether he had any regrets about disparaging the Post’s story. Did he maybe want to take those words back?

“No, I stand by my statement that I made yesterday,” McMaster said. “But what I’m saying is really the premise of that article was false, that in any way the President had a conversation that was inappropriate or that resulted in any kind of lapse in national security.” McMaster portrayed Trump as getting tough with Lavrov about Russia’s “behavior,” which had to change, and then pulling him back in with a reminder of how ISIS shot down Russian planes, as if this were the art of the foreign-policy deal. McMaster also dodged the question of whether Trump had mentioned the particular city from which the intelligence emerged—an element that would concern whether sources and methods were compromised—by saying that any reporter in the room could probably come up with a list of cities occupied by ISIS. Perhaps most remarkable, he said that Trump had not known the source of the information that he was conveying to Lavrov. Trump had met with the Russian foreign minister the day after firing the F.B.I. director, James Comey, a move that the President, by his own account, made while mulling over what he regarded as a ridiculous investigation into the connections between his campaign and Russia. A meeting between the President and the Russian foreign minister is not in itself inappropriate, but, considering the timing, it was unwise.

“Appropriate” is a useful term, sometimes. It is supposed to convey a sense of standards, as well as legality—of respectable behavior. The corollary is that propriety depends, to an extent, on circumstances, and this was an idea that McMaster leaned on heavily in his recitation of rationalizations for Trump’s behavior at the meeting. What Trump said was “wholly appropriate to that conversation” and, “in the context of the conversation,” “wholly appropriate with what the expectations are of our intelligence partners,” and it is “wholly appropriate for the President to share whatever information he thinks to advance the safety of the American people. That’s what he did.” It was also “wholly appropriate given the purpose of that conversation and the purpose of what the President was trying to achieve”—whatever purpose he might have, it seems, and whatever he might be trying to achieve.

McMaster, at the beginning of his press briefing, laid out the itinerary for Trump’s trip—the royal banquet in Saudi Arabia, the dinner that the President and the First Lady will have with the Netanyahus, the meetings with the King of Belgium and the new President of France. Reporters asked whether the meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak and the attendant uproar made McMaster, or anyone else involved in the planning of the trip, more sensitive about the President’s “discretion.”

“There are no sensitivities in terms of me,” McMaster said. He tried to return the reporters to what he, personally, considered the “real issue”: leakers. They were the ones endangering national security, McMaster said. It sounded like the coming attractions for the next episode of White House chaos: the bitter hunt for whoever on the inside was talking to the Post.

And yet it might be the leakers who are keeping the country safe. Government officials turn to reporters when there is something that strikes them as not right. The events of this week and last have gone to the heart of what it means to work for Donald Trump. The likelihood that one will be publicly humiliated may be the least of it; participation in policies that are not good for this country is a grimmer prospect. And so is the possibility that we might forget what we expect from a President, or from the people who work for him. It might be seen as improper for a member of the intelligence community to meet with a journalist, or out of line for a national-security adviser to publicly break with his boss. But there are times when it is appropriate to do so; there are even moments when it is necessary.