I have said this many times, that history is a great teacher and those that fail to learn from history are apt to repeat it. Here is something to think about as it pertains to factual past US history and factual recent history concerning Donald Trump.

In 1943 in the heart of the USA’s war against Japan our nation’s submarine fleet was having great success against the Japanese merchant fleets. The Navy had determined that our latest subs, the GATO class, were able to submerge to a depth of just over four hundred feet which was one hundred feet deeper than the Japanese believed they could dive. Therefore, the Japanese set their depth charges to a maximum depth of three hundred feet. This diminished the damage they could do to our country’s subs. In that year, 1943, US Congressman Andrew May toured our Pacific fleet headquarters in Pearl Harbor Hawaii and was provided the information on the depth our subs could dive and how that benefited them when attacked by the Japanese. Representative Andrew May served as Chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs in 1943. Afterwards Representative May held a press conference where he told the gathered press the Japanese were setting their depth charges to shallow.

Soon after this American sub losses increased in the Pacific. Vice Admiral Lockwood, commander of the U.S. submarine fleet in the Pacific, estimated that May’s security breach cost the United States Navy as many as ten submarines and eight hundred crew members killed in action. Loose lips sink ships, as the saying goes. Representative May was voted out of office in the next election.

How does this relate to current events?

In April of 2021, shortly after leaving office, Donald Trump shared classified information about US nuclear submarines with a billionaire Australian businessman at his Florida private members club, Mar-a-Lago. This has been reported by not just US news media (including Fox News), but also international news media.

The Australian businessman has been identified as Anthony Pratt, who heads one of the world’s largest packaging companies. It has been reported that Pratt later shared sensitive details about the US submarines with “scores of others, including more than a dozen foreign officials, several of his own employees, and a handful of journalists”.

American defense and intelligence authorities say this will endanger the country’s most critical defense resources, our nuclear submarine fleet, and endanger the country’s national security.

Federal prosecutors have now interviewed Pratt twice and he will likely be called by prosecutors to testify against Trump in Trump’s classified documents trial, which is due to start in May.

It is reported Trump revealed at least two critical pieces of information about the tactical capacities of US submarines, including “how many nuclear warheads the vessels carried and how close they could get to their Russian counterparts without being detected”.

For all of this…..Donald Trump swore in his oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. With his grandstanding for Pratt, Donald Trump has put our country’s security and that of our navy and our sailors at risk.

He is not worthy of another term in the White House where he can further harm our country, our citizens, our institutions, our agencies, our armed forces, and our allies. The saying “four and no more” was true in 2020 and even more true in 2024.