The republicans have completely destroyed the concept of national security. I was in the industry for a chunk of my career, and I could not have imagined a situation where the president would be denied a briefing based on their being a security risk.

There are things that are far too little to waste the president’s time on. The president, up until Trump, would receive the Presidential Daily Brief, which summarized into bullet points what had been hundreds of pages of reports, news articles, and analysis. Trump famously had Jared Kushner take those briefings - the guy who failed his background check multiple times and was finally only granted a clearance under a direct presidential order.

So if something was not important enough to require a presidential decision, it would boil up to whatever level of management was appropriate, just like at any private company. There was also the concept of “plausible deniability, where the president or his handlers wanted to stay out of the decision making process, but that didn’t happen (in my experience) very often, with the biggest exception being Reagan.

In any case, we know from the previous Trump administration, that intelligence agencies and the national security departments intentionally removed information because Trump had a reputation for deliberately leaking top secret information to foreign heads of state. It wasn’t even because he was being paid necessarily (although he was handsomely paid because foreign governments rented real estate from him at exorbitant prices), but often just to attempt to show off how much he knew and the kind of power he wielded.

And yes, I blame all republicans for this. The handful that stood up to him were drummed out of the party. And I mean voters as well as politicians.