I see pundits and politicians trying to attribute some rationality to what I continue to view as behavior based on his personality dysfunction and only understandable if we grasp the inner workings of his psyche. However, it seems some of our top spies have him figured out.
When Biden says “grow up, Donald, grow up, it’s time to be a president” which he did today, he is still expressing the wishful thinking that it is possible for Trump to change. Trump in my humble opinion creates chaos because that’s just the way he is.
The breaking news tonight is that the CIA Director under Bill Clinton, James Woolsey, has quit his role as a member of the Trump transition team. We probably will never know why.
“I’ve only seen him in person a couple of times, talked to him on the phone a little bit. So I was not at the center of the advisory function. But I was pleased to be included and I just felt like things had come to the point that I oughta make sure that nobody gets a false impression. I didn’t want to be claiming that I’m something I’m not.”
He continued: “The selections have largely been made. My background in defense and national security and intelligence is probably not relevant to more decisions that need to be made in the next couple of weeks.”
But in recent days, Woolsey publicly split with Trump on allegations of Russian election-related hacking. from www.huffingtonpost.com/…
This doesn’t pass the smell test. After all, if ever Trump could use a former CIA director as an advisor it is now. Perhaps Woolsey just didn’t feel he was being taken seriously, or — and we can only guess at this — perhaps he realized that Trump had a mental disorder. The straw that broke might have been Trump’s escalating disparagement of the intelligence community over the past few days.
Another former CIA director and NSA director, General Michael Hayden, is “stunned” by Trump’s reaction to the intelligence findings about Russia (talking to Nicole Wallace on MSNBC tonight). As I watch him I try to see what he is thinking as he carefully chooses his words. I can see him taking great care so not as to suggest Trump is mentally ill when he gives the opinion that Trump seems to believe only what he wants to believe. He said, to paraphrase, that Trump has some very powerful a priori assumptions … very hard for the fact guys to impose their fact based view of the world…. He said “if you give me facts to which I disagree I will ridicule you publicly.” He also likened Trump’s Tweets to the trash talk football players used to intimidate their opponents before a game.
Other’s interviewed by Nicole Wallace, including another former high level CIA official used the word “sensitive” to describe how Trump is when it comes to any information that he thinks delegitimizes his presidency. “Sensitive!” A better way to put it would be the he’s defensively and angrily reactive, just as he is to any mockery and criticism.
She just replayed Hillary saying “I will leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his affection for tyrants.” She ran that up the flag pole, and a lot more about Trump’s mental status in that one speech:
“Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different. They are dangerously incoherent. They not even really ideas. They’re a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies,” she said to cheers. “He is not just unprepared. He is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility. This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes because it’s not hard to image Donald Trump leading us into war because someone got under his very thin skin.”
Throughout her 35-minute speech, Clinton repeatedly came back to the risks that come with a Trump presidency: a global economic meltdown would flow from a Trump-led trade war, terrorism could spread like wildfire and America’s allies would back away from the country. Decades of foreign policy would find itself unraveling, Clinton said, and America’s image would crumble as it engaged in war crimes.
“He praises dictators like Vladimir Putin and picks fights with our friends, including the British Prime Minister, the mayor of London, the German Chancellor, the President of Mexico and the Pope,” Clinton said. “He says he has foreign policy experience because he ran the Miss Universe pageant in Russia.” Clinton seems to have learned what Trump’s GOP rivals did not: that to beat Trump, you have to play by his rules, and that means belittling opponents. from time.com/… June 2, 2016
Unfortunately the only follow-up from the media was to have the National Enquirer say she was crazy.
As for the psychiatrists, self-restrained by adherence to the (I think ridiculous) Goldwater Rule, they stayed silent. Too bad. This would have been a perfect cue for the mainstream media to find some gutsy psychiatrists to explain carefully why Trump was mentally unfit to be president.
Another thought about the recent revelation that US intelligence monitored Russian diplomates congratulating themselves on the election of Trump: I think Putin and the Russians wanted Trump to win not because they could manipulate him and this couldn’t happen with Hillary, but because they had their psychologists study him and knew he was mentally unbalanced.
I don’t know how Russian psychologists diagnose psychiatric disorders, but I would be very surprised if they haven’t been studying Trump ever since it looked like he might run for president. Maybe they use a serious of the DSM-V familiar to therapists like me and most readers.
I expect that if Russian intelligence agencies were doing their job they would have implanted actual spies to get close to him. Just some thoughts.
Just a hunch, folks, but I think Putin’s intention was to create havoc in our government by trying to elect someone that his top psychologists said was deranged. Not only that, but because it makes Trump feel good to get his way no matter what, he has all the makings of a despot. Putin knows that the United States in not like Russia.
The public and Congress, and the military, would never tolerate a Putin.
Once Trump’s behavior convinces both the public and Congress that he is a dangerous megalomanic, that he is unpredictable, that his behavior has no rhyme nor reason about it, he will prompt the most serous American crisis since the Civil War.
Related, my story about the intelligence committee hearing this morning.
What has it come to? In discussing the briefing with the intelligence committee in Congress this morning on MSNBC the host commented that if the conclusion of the final report was that it was Russia’s intent to help Trump win he wouldn’t react well because this would make him personally look bad.
She said this with a straight face.
She’s talking about the president-elect.
She’s talking about a president so easily insulted and so volatile that his own advisors have to explain away his Tweets and make them seem rational.
On Capital Hill rational people, intelligence professionals, Democratic senators, Republican senators (and Independent Angus King) are grim faced and are taking the Russian cyber-attack seriously. The words are powerful and will be replayed all day.
We’ll have to watch Twitter to see whether Trump is even watching this.
This is a direct assault on his credibility.
I don’t have much to say about the context of the briefing except to sum it up by quoting what Lindsay Graham just said:
“I think Obama threw pebbles, it’s time to throw rocks.”
A slam at Obama, but also a throw-down aimed at Trump.
I think these pictures show just how seriously our intelligence professionals and several Republican senators are taking this.
Live streaming from The Hill
More of my recent Kos articles
Tuesday, Nov 7, 2017 · 4:53:57 AM +00:00
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HalBrown
Nov. 6, 2017
Months later from when I wrote this, Woolsey’s name turns up again in relation to Michael Flynn and his trying to get the Turkish cleric extradited to Turkey. ...
A former senior law enforcement official said that in the weeks after Trump's inauguration the FBI was asked to conduct a new review of Turkey's 2016 request to extradite Fethullah Gulen, an elderly Muslim cleric living in the U.S. whom President Erdogan blames for orchestrating a coup to overthrow him.
The FBI pushed back on the request because Turkey had supplied no additional information that could incriminate Gulen following a review of the case during the Obama administration, the official said. It is unclear whether the request to investigate Gulen came from Flynn or through the typical diplomatic channels at the State Department.
The FBI is also investigating former CIA Director Jim Woolsey's account to The Wall Street Journal — which he confirmed to MSNBC — that Flynn and Turkish officials discussed a potential plan to forcibly remove Gulen from the country in September 2016, according to sources close to Woolsey, who say the former director has spoken to FBI agents working for Mueller about the matter. From Mueller Has Enough Evidence to Bring Charges in Flynn Investigation, NBC News