On Wednesday evening, Donald Trump sat down for an interview with CBS anchor Jeff Glor, and while accounts of that interview have indicated that Trump expressed faith in US intelligence, the actual contents don’t agree. Throughout the interview, Trump shows that he’s unable to call Vladimir Putin a liar, as he savages a long list of U.S. intelligence figures and indicates he only has faith in “his people.” Trump’s statements also include an open claim that there is a secret plot within the U.S. government—a mysterious “they”—working against Trump from somewhere in the deepest deep state to take him down.
Far from walking back anything Trump said in Helsinki, his CBS interview did just what could be expected from Trump: It doubled down on his attack on intelligence officials, criticized reporters for reporting, and put forward again the idea that only someone who is a partisan for Trump can be trusted.
Glor: But he denies it, so if you believe US intelligence agencies, is Putin lying to you?
Trump: I don't want to get into whether or not he's lying. I can only say that I do have confidence in our intelligence agencies as currently constituted.
It’s the “as currently configured” part of this that renders everything else moot. Because what Trump is actually saying is that he likes Dan Coats and Gina Haspel—though obviously not enough to say that Putin is lying. But his “belief” in U.S. intelligence agencies stops as soon as it passes the people he personally put in place. And that includes disregarding everything he was told by everyone up until … Tuesday? Wednesday? That part isn’t quite clear.
What is clear is that Trump doesn’t trust anyone except Coats, because he rattles off a long list of people including James Comey, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, and of course Peter Strzok and Lisa Page who get labeled as untrustworthy. And that’s before Trump divulges his belief in a secret cabal within the intelligence community that is out to get him.
Trump: You know, Clapper wrote me a beautiful letter when I first went to office, and it was really nice. And then, all of a sudden, he's gone haywire because they got to him and they probably got him to say things that maybe he doesn't even mean.
They got to Clapper. They got him to ‘say things’ he doesn’t mean. Only … who is they?
Within the Trump White House, and reaching out into the websites and airwaves of the alt-Reich with the help of long-time Trump adviser Roger Stone, a theory of a vast conspiracy in U.S. intelligence has been growing since Trump took office. As Vanity Fair reported back in May, that conspiracy centers on one man.
Stone claims the anti-Trump conspiracy includes senior intelligence officials from the Barack Obama administration. "The guy who will end up burning in all this is [former C.I.A. director] John Brennan," Stone told me. "If I were him I'd break the capsule and swallow it now. That psychopath is going down."
Former CIA director Brennan, who joined the CIA under Reagan and served George W. Bush as the first chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, would seem an unlikely fall guy for the anti-Trump forces. But in Trumpist circles, Brennan has not only been built up into the spider at the center of the Deep State web, but a secret Muslim—a theory that was instantly created as soon as Barack Obama nominated him to head the CIA.
In his CBS interview, Trump was open in his Brennan attack.
Trump: I have no confidence in a guy like Brennan. I think he's a total low-life.
Trump’s evidence that Brennan is a low-life? Well … he’s been critical of Trump on Twitter. And that hasn’t stopped.
Which, unsurprisingly, is not Trump’s evaluation.
Trump: I think I did great at the news conference. I think it was a strong news conference. You have people that said, 'You shoulda gone up to him. You shoulda walked up and started screaming in his face.' We're living in the real world. OK?
That’s the guy who is talking about how “they got to” James Clapper and who believes John Brennan is running a web of Deep State spies telling the rest of us about the “real world.” Clapper is a former Air Force general who served two tours in Vietnam. Michael Hayden, who picked up a Bronze Star and a Meritorious Service badge along his way to becoming a four star general, was also on Trump’s untrustworthy list.
Perhaps both Clapper and Hayden have a suspicious lack of bone spurs.
But what’s clear out of this interview is not that Trump trusts the intelligence community. It’s that he doesn’t. He still won’t call Putin a liar, skates around accepting the ongoing nature of Russian attacks, and disowns every piece of intelligence he was given in the past. That’s not what “trust” looks like. Not in any world.