WASHINGTON — Just five days after taking the oath of office in 2017, making him commander-in-chief of the most powerful armed forces in human history, President Donald Trump held a social dinner at the White House with, among others, son-in-law Jared Kushner and aide Steve Bannon.

One of the topics that came up that evening was a proposed raid on a terrorist cell in Yemen. It was risky — in fact, it had been nixed by predecessor Barack Obama because he believed the risk outweighed the potential rewards. But the fact that Obama had refused to green light it was, in Trump’s mind, proof that it was worth doing.

Three days later, Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens was killed and four others wounded when their team encountered far more resistance than expected in their assault on the village of al-Ghayil.

Eight years later, Trump’s decision-making on another Yemen-related matter has added more evidence to the voluminous and growing trove demonstrating his carelessness with service members’ lives.

No, this time Trump was not directly to blame for the screwup. Rather, it was the people he chose for key roles in the national security apparatus who exhibited a lack of seriousness on a deadly serious issue.

Pete Hegseth, whom Trump plucked off the Fox News weekend set to manage the sprawling and complex Defense Department, sent to a group text chain a detailed timeline of an imminent military strike against Iran-backed Houthi militants. Mike Waltz, who had been a Florida congressman when Trump made him national security adviser because he liked how Waltz defended him in TV interviews, gave the group-chat participants real-time results from the raid, including the death of a top target who was seen walking into his girlfriend’s apartment building before it was successfully flattened.

That we know about any of this is only because journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally invited to the chat by Waltz, and many Trump defenders and critics alike have focused on Waltz’s error as the sole miscue of the entire episode.

That is a mistake. American taxpayers spend many millions of dollars every year to ensure that top government officials at the National Security Council, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and so forth can communicate without worrying about getting hacked or overheard. Waltz, Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance and a dozen others opted not to bother with that existing and expensive system and instead went with the free Signal app, which, while encrypted, is specifically not approved for discussing classified material. This choice was apparently made for the sake of their convenience, notwithstanding the sensitivity of the topic.

Had Hegseth’s timeline been known to Iranian intelligence, for example, it could have resulted in the deaths of American Navy fighter crews flying that night over Sanaa. As for Waltz’s boast of their positive identification of that top target, it turns out that may have endangered the life of an Israeli spy on the ground there.

More worrisome, we really do not know whether others — including foreign intelligence agencies — were also getting real-time access to the Houthi attack plans chat or any other Signal text chat that Trump administration officials have held. There is a reason national security experts advise against using Signal, or any other commercially available app, for sharing classified material. Malign actors have no incentive to advertise whose personal phones they may have hacked and what they might have learned.

So far at least, Trump has continued to claim that his people did nothing wrong, apart from mistakenly inviting Goldberg into the discussion. Trump, Hegseth and others argue — absurdly — that nothing classified was discussed.

That Trump would do this probably should come as no surprise, coming from someone who famously used the excuse of “bone spurs” on his heels to avoid military service. Since he first ran for president in 2016, Trump has regularly denigrated and disrespected the military, starting with his claim that Sen. John McCain, who as a Navy pilot spent nearly six years getting tortured in a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, was not a war hero because he was captured, and Trump preferred people who weren’t captured.

After Ryan Owens’ father berated Trump for recklessly sending his son into harm’s way at the ceremony for his body’s return to Dover Air Force Base, Trump did not attend another “dignified transfer” for two years. When he did start going to them again, he turned them into a sort of MAGA field trip, inviting pro-Trump actor Jon Voight on one occasion and participants at one of his rallies on another.

When a Republican-run Congress refused to fund the border wall that Trump had repeatedly claimed he would force Mexico to finance, Trump raided a Pentagon account that pays for service members’ housing and schools for their children.

In France for the commemoration of Armistice Day, he refused to go out in the rain to an American cemetery for World War I soldiers because, according to his then-chief of staff, those who died for their country were “suckers” and “losers.”

Throughout those first-term years, though, Trump had a national security team that was largely competent. Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis would have been a respected defense secretary in any mainstream administration, Republican or Democratic. John Bolton, Trump’s second national security adviser, actually had served in top roles in previous GOP administrations. It would have been unimaginable for either of them to have taken part in something as casually careless as the recent Signal attack plan chat.

With Trump’s return to the White House, however, personal loyalty to him far outweighs experience, knowledge, competence and, as we have just seen, common sense. This is the reason both Waltz and Hegseth got their jobs. It is the reason they are likely to make it through what would have been an unsurvivable scandal in a normal presidential administration.

Which means we can likely expect to see more of these episodes in the months and years to come.