The Trump administration has been racing ahead so fast that it’s getting caught in its own careless backwash. That’s one of the lessons from this week’s bizarre disclosure that a journalist was accidentally included in a highly sensitive but insecure chat group.

“Move fast and break things.” That’s the Silicon Valley ethos of Elon Musk and many of the Trump operatives who have been driving the pell-mell attempt to remake U.S. foreign and domestic policy over the past two months. They’ve been all too successful, tearing through the bureaucracy at high speed and leaving a lot of wreckage in their wake.

But you can’t move so fast without cutting corners. So, senior officials take short cuts. They ignore cumbersome procedures. They bypass Congress and the courts, and when judges raise objections, they threaten the judges. They cut agency budgets with a chain saw, metaphorically speaking, rather than a scalpel.

And they use the Signal encrypted messaging app rather than trudging into a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.

Trump and his team want fast results. In many instances since the inauguration, they’ve treated rules for handling sensitive information as a time-consuming obstacle - something for the foot soldiers but not the change agents. They vacuumed information from intelligence agencies, the military and civilian departments with little apparent regard for security, privacy or precedent.

This disdain culminated in this week’s astonishing “Signal-gate” story. National security adviser Michael Waltz has the daunting job of coordinating the disparate strands of Trump policy to satisfy a boss who wants results yesterday. As he organized internal debate about bombing raids against Houthi rebels in Yemen this month, he evidently needed a quick fix for communications. The normal national security process - meetings in the Situation Room of a “deputies committee” followed by the top-level “principals committee” - would be time-consuming. Perhaps it seemed “too Joe Biden.”

Instead, Waltz created the meeting venue online. He called it “Houthi PC small group.” Included in that group, inadvertently, was a person with the initials “JG,” who turned out to be Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic. One theme that emerges from the chat is that the “small group” isn’t sure what its positions are - beyond a visceral dislike of Europe.

A message from “JD Vance” admonishes the group that defending Red Sea shipping from the Houthis is “inconsistent … with [Trump’s] message on Europe right now,” because only 3 percent of U.S. trade transits the Suez Canal vs. 40 percent for Europe. “Pete Hegseth” responds, “I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC,” but he supports the bombing “given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes.” Hegseth is certain about two points regarding the Houthi threat: “1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

Finally, the decider arrives, in the person of “S M,” an account that presumably belongs to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff: “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return.” The commissar has spoken. End of discussion.

What’s most troubling is that Waltz and the others had to understand that using the messaging app for such a sensitive discussion was wrong. Most have been working with classified information for years. They know the drill with Signal. The app might be encrypted, but the devices that carry it can be hacked. It’s “secure enough” for civilians, but it’s not airtight. “If this was the case of a military officer or an intelligence officer … they would be fired,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said bluntly on Tuesday.

Serving as national security adviser is always something of a juggling act, but Waltz faces unusual stresses in an administration where the key negotiators change week to week. Lately, the top intermediary on Russia, Iran, Hamas and Israel has been the president’s close friend for 40 years, billionaire real estate developer Steve Witkoff.

The Signal chat opened a rare window into the president’s inner circle. They speak to each other like members of an elite vanguard. They’re willing to express internal disagreements, but they stay focused on what Trump wants - and how that will play with the mass movement that he leads. There’s an almost Leninist discipline.

The great journalist Michael Kinsley has observed that “a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.” I have the same feeling about this week’s astonishing Signal revelation. It was a blunder, but it revealed an important fact about the Trump administration: It’s flooding its own zone.