If the White House were a hockey goaltender, it would would be the worst hockey goaltender in the world. The place is a total sieve. It is as unable to keep information in as an empty net is able to keep slapshots out.
Few important White House discussions and decisions stay private for long. The D.C. info-colander has been a boon to journalists, and to the many opponents of President Donald Trump, who have been able to stay one step ahead of the President on some important files.
For Mr. Trump, the leaks are agonizing and embarrassing. His constant accusatory refrain of "fake news" is undermined by leaked revelations that demonstrate that what the media publishes is, in fact, not fake at all.
The leaks turned into a flood this week when The Washington Post got its hands on White House transcripts of telephone calls Mr. Trump made with two world leaders after his inauguration in January.
The transcript of a call to Malcolm Turnbull, the Prime Minister of Australia, belied Mr. Trump's contention that their exchange had been cordial. It was anything but: Mr. Turnbull refused to back out of a deal on refugees made by the Obama administration, and Mr. Trump ended the call curtly.
The other call, to Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, saw Mr. Trump confessing that his signature promise to build an immigrant-blocking wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was empty politics. Mr. Trump effectively admitted that the wall wasn't a priority, and that he didn't really expect Mexico to pay for it. All he wanted was for Mr. Pena Nieto to stop talking about it, so that the issue of the unbuilt wall would die down in the media.
Given their usefulness as a check on Mr. Trump's false assertions, leaks like that are in the public interest. In the long run, they will corrode the effectiveness of the President's "fake news" strategy.
And let's be frank – there is entertainment to be had in watching this surreal White House soap opera unfold. It's never boring.
But there is a disturbing side to the leaks, as well. They are symptoms of the gross dysfunction that reigns in the White House under Mr. Trump. Leaks of the frequency and magnitude of the ones pouring out of Washington simply don't occur in healthy administrations.
In a normal government, advisers, spokespeople and cabinet ministers share the leader's vision. They have a common goal to which they remain loyal, and to which they dedicate their energies and abilities. The last thing they want to do is throw the government off course by leaking damaging information, or by expressing anonymous dissatisfaction with their boss.
Yes, this happens in every government to some degree, especially ones that have been in power for more than a term or two. But it rarely occurs in the honeymoon period of a new administration, when the excitement of taking office normally bonds a leader and his or her staff, and gives them an urgent sense of mission.
The Trump White House, six months in, is nothing like that, and it never has been. To call it a snake pit is an insult to snakes and pits.
Mr. Trump has let his administration fall into a state of amoral chaos. His style of leadership, if you can call it that, amounts to forcing his underlings to struggle in mortal combat to gain access to his brief attention span, and then ignoring those who do.
He undercuts his people with his ill-conceived tweets, such as the one on July 26 in which he announced a ban on transgender people serving in the military without informing his secretary of defence.
His biggest preoccupation seems to be other people's opinions of him, to the point that he will fabricate implausibly positive ones whenever he screws up. The President of the United States of America was busted this week for falsely claiming that he had received "a call from the head of the Boy Scouts" saying his inappropriate campaign-style speech at a jamboree last month "was the greatest speech that was ever made to them." This ridiculous and doomed lie was instantly refuted by the Boy Scouts of America.
The people who work for Mr. Trump seem cut from the same cloth as him. They come off as more interested in their own agendas, or their careers, than in the well-being of their country. The idea that White House staff would work in harmony for the good of the nation – a notion that has its hubris, but which is nonetheless critical in a democracy – doesn't exist.
No, in Mr. Trump's world, it's every man and woman for themself, their backsides a target for the next knife if they don't stick one in first. It's more Game of Thrones than Camelot.
The message in this week's episode of the White House's soap opera was twofold and chilling: that nothing is off-limits – not even documents as sensitive as the transcripts of private phone conversations between the President and foreign leaders; and that the arrival of John Kelly, a former Marine general named chief of staff this week, isn't going to change anything.
Mr. Kelly began his job on Monday. He was brought in to impose discipline. According to a report in The New York Times, he has tried to do that by limiting access to the President, including that of Mr. Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner.
He also apparently supported the firing of a White House ally of Mr. Kushner and Stephen Bannon, the rarely seen strategist who masterminded Mr. Trump's election victory.
That was on Wednesday. The leaked transcripts were published on Thursday. Classic. Less than a week on the job, and the new chief of staff has already been cut off at the knees in a White House that runs on malice and manipulation.