....At one point, Matt Lauer, the moderator and host of the Today Show, asked Trump about his secret briefings. Was there anything surprising about them?

“Yes,” Trump said. “Very much so.” He hinted at a secret so vague and tantalizing that it almost sounded like a clickbait headline. “There was one thing that shocked me.” But Trump couldn’t say what it was. What he could say was that the White House had ignored its experts, turned around, and done “exactly the opposite. … Our leaders did not follow what they were recommending.”

Trump knew this, he said, because he could read his briefers’ body language. Through decades of experience making real-estate deals, apparently, Trump believed that he could discern his interlocutors’ feelings about President Obama, even if they were not revealed by their words.

Trump’s claim violated one of the major articles of faith held by the U.S. intelligence community. American spies may answer to politicians, but they pride themselves on the belief that they themselves are not political.

It took less than 24 hours for the intelligence establishment to accuse Trump of indiscretion. Michael Hayden, the former head of the CIA and NSA, said his behavior was “awful.” Michael Morrell, the former deputy CIA director, questioned Trump’s claim that his briefers disagreed with Obama’s policies. By wrongly impugning his briefers by accusing them of political bias, Morrell said, Trump had “crossed a long-standing red line.” The red line didn’t stop two briefers from giving their own anonymously sourced version of how Team Trump rocked the SCIF — Flynn repeatedly interrupting; Christie telling him to settle down.

In fact, Trump was singing a familiar refrain, one that is heard whenever classified information touches political ambition. It goes like this: Trust me. You don’t know what I know. I was in the room. I heard some scary things. I can’t tell you any more.