There are a lot of words that come to mind in describing Donald Trump, but intelligence has never entered the list. With his tendency to skip over presidential briefings, put his vested interests ahead of U.S. policy, and his campaign manager promising that Trump will be inserting “his own people” into the intelligence agencies, there are good reasons to worry.
President-elect Donald Trump's ongoing feud with U.S. intelligence agencies over alleged hacking by Russia is unnerving outside national security experts, some of whom fear the frosty relationship could impact Trump's ability to govern. ...
But what separates Trump, some experts say, is his unusually harsh public criticism of the intelligence community's basic worth and and a lack of clarity on how he plans to gather facts if he refuses their counsel.
Ah. There’s the problem. The intelligence community gathers “facts.” And as we’ve been told by the Trump team, facts do not exist.
“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts,” said CNN commentator Scottie Nell Hughes.
The election of Donald Trump has created a realignment in the political world that’s been shaping up for decades. It’s not left, right. Not progressive, conservative. It’s those who believe in facts vs. those who don’t. And there is no doubt which side of that line is occupied by Trump.
"I'm, like, a smart person," [Trump] told Fox News Sunday. "I don't have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years."
Is there intelligent life in the United States? If there is, Donald Trump means to put an end to it.
Trump isn’t the first president to have an innate dislike for intelligence agencies. When you’re doing things that are underhanded and duplicitous, it sort of makes you get snippy about the guys assigned to ferret out what’s happening.
President Richard Nixon actively distrusted the CIA, refused intelligence briefings during his transition, and relied on close aides like Henry Kissinger to act as a buffer between himself and the intelligence community during his White House tenure.
But Nixon was surrounded by people who had both government and foreign policy experience and while he wasn’t willing to listen to the intelligence community himself, some of those in his White House were willing to play the role of intelligence translators. Donald Trump is surrounded by the caviar gang: a gold-plated crew of Trump-a-likes whose idea of a hard day is having to take the limo because the helicopter is in the shop. It’s a crew whose worldview is limited to their own view, because of course the world shares their view.
On Russian hacking, Trump has offered little explanation as to why he disagrees with the intelligence consensus and what evidence has led him to a different conclusion. He has kept a relatively small circle of advisers and said last year he gets his information primarily from "the shows" and believed he was more knowledgeable about topics like ISIS than military leaders.
It’s not just a matter of Donald Trump substituting his “good brain” for the inside knowledge gained through technology, analysts, and assets on the ground. It’s Trump being convinced that what he picks up from Alex Jones and Sean Hannity is better than what he’s getting from the CIA. While the intelligence community has been profoundly wrong in the past, they have rarely determined that America is menaced either by lizard men or underground pizza-based sex cults.
With Trump threatening to put his people in charge, the danger to the United States goes well beyond ignoring Russian actions in the 2016 election.
"Intelligence has enormous implications for keeping the military safe, preventing threats against the homeland, and foreign diplomacy," Susan Hennessey, a Brookings fellow and former attorney at the NSA, said. "What happens when it goes away, I don't know. We could have a president who is governing based on instinct instead of evidence."