Today a former director of the CIA and a former national security adviser went on the Sunday talk show circuit to warn the nation that Donald Trump is a dangerous idiot. That is not something that former intelligence officials generally do, if you are wondering. But here we are.
Two top former U.S. intelligence officials said Sunday that President Trump is being “played” by President Vladimir Putin on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and accused him of being susceptible to foreign leaders who stroke his ego.
Which is the same conclusion almost every human being who has ever come into contact with Donald Trump has come to—flatter the man's ego, and he’ll agree with whatever you have to say—but having two of the top intelligence voices in the nation appearing on national television to warn that this makes the nation's current president an over-willing mark for other world leaders is, again, very damn not normal.
“By not confronting the issue directly and not acknowledging to Putin that we know you’re responsible for this, I think he’s giving Putin a pass,” former CIA director John Brennan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think it demonstrates to Mr. Putin that Donald Trump can be played by foreign leaders who are going to appeal to his ego and try to play upon his insecurities, which is very, very worrisome from a national security standpoint.”
In general, CIA directors do not sally forth to the Sunday news programs to warn that a sitting president's abject disinterest in a foreign power's espionage and propaganda campaigns against our nation is a "peril to this country."
“I don’t know why the ambiguity about this,” Brennan said. “Putin is committed to undermining our system, our democracy and our whole process. And to try paint it in any other way is, I think, astounding, and, in fact, poses a peril to this country.”
Yes, you would think it would. So we are now at the point where our nation's intelligence community is sending out extraordinary public alerts about the dangers posed by a president's continued unfitness—but we are still not at the point where national leaders are contemplating what the flying hell might be done about that.
Not yet. A few months back, we could not discuss it because Republicans were fervently attempting to carve up health insurance reforms; the current focus is "tax cuts." After that, no doubt, individuals like Clapper and Brennan will have their undivided attention.