I think this message encompasses so much that is wrong in politics these days. I don't think anyone doubts that the president has the right to declassify any material he wants (although if memory serves, there's a procedure he is supposed to follow to formally complete the process). The question is, is it right to do so? During the Cuba missile crisis, JFK declassified several U2 shots which showed missiles being delivered to Cuba on a Russian freighter. I'm not going to defend Eisenhower's declaration of Cuba as a pariah state which Kennedy supported and which predated the missile crisis by a year or two and set the tone of the cold war for 40 years - but in that context those missiles were plausibly an existential threat and the American public needed evidence that their president had some rationale for his actions.The president seemed to resolve the question on Friday night on his way to Camp David when he told reporters, “We had a photo and I released it, which I have the absolute right to do.”
Trump has the right to declassify anything he wants. But was he right to do so in this case? I think it was an idiotic move, pretty much on a par with his normal behavior. But in a decent society, doesn't one know and observe a difference between one's rights and what's right? It's a shame that we use one word to cover both meanings. But to me, almost the definition of a liberal society (and there's another word which has, politically, two very different meanings) is that one has rights that one chooses not to exercise. And that's what Trump's statement fails to understand.
