It’s sometimes lost amid Donald Trump’s endless affronts to the Republic, but the undermining of American intelligence capabilities is one of the overarching stories of his administration.

So CNN’s scoop on Monday about the exfiltration of a top American intelligence asset in Russia is, like so much in the Trump era, both staggering and not at all surprising. According to CNN, in a secret mission in 2017, America “extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government,” partly because of worries that Trump’s cavalier handling of intelligence information could expose the person. On Monday evening, The New York Times added to the story, reporting that the source was a Russian official whose job provided “access to the highest level of the Kremlin.”

“The secret removal of the high-level Russian asset has left the U.S. without one of its key sources on the inner workings of the Kremlin,” reported CNN’s Jim Sciutto. The C.I.A. gave CNN a carefully worded denial, and The Times cited former intelligence officials who said there’s “no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the source.” It’s hard to know exactly how to parse the word “directly,” or how much to credit the insistence, by some current administration officials who spoke to The Times, that news media scrutiny alone put the source at risk.

Even the possibility that Trump jeopardized America’s most important intelligence asset in Russia should be a very big deal, though I’m not sure it will be. The pundit class has mostly grown bored of the story behind Trump’s corrupt relationship with Russia. And too many in power, including almost all of the Republican Party, have grown used to the president deploying national security secrets in the same way he once traded tabloid gossip. He discloses American intelligence to deflect attention from unflattering stories, suck up to people he wants to impress, or simply on a whim. He treats it, as he treats everything else in American government, as a private tool of self-gratification.