In a blessedly rare Sunday show appearance, Donald Trump took a break from complaining about his enemies in the nation and in the press to clarify why he has been so insistent in dismissing the United States intelligence community's assessment that Iran had in fact been complying with a nuclear nonproliferation treaty crafted by the Obama administration but nullified by Trump.
As it turns out, the reason is that he wants to.
"I am going to trust the intelligence that I'm putting there, but I will say this: My intelligence people, if they said, in fact, that Iran is a wonderful kindergarten, I disagree with them 100 percent," Trump said in the interview with CBS News' "Face the Nation." [...]
"So when my intelligence people tell me how wonderful Iran is — if you don't mind, I'm going to just go by my own counsel," he said.
Part of the problem here, and there are several, is Trump's apparent inability to even characterize the argument. Nobody in the intelligence community is calling Iran "wonderful"; they are merely pointing out what Iran has or has not been doing, according to the billions of dollars’ worth of intelligence our nation pays for to find out these things. Trump, however, is, in this as in every other context, seemingly unable to process nuance. A country is either Wonderful or Our Enemy; politicians are either for A Wall or for Open Immigration; news that makes him feel good is True and news that makes him feel bad is Fake.
It's that last one that seems key. Trump was and is politically invested in declaring Iran to be pulling a fast one on the United States; evidence to the contrary is personally inconvenient to him. The same dynamic is at play in Trump's declarations that his nuclear negotiations with North Korea have resulted in breakthroughs, even though intelligence experts and his own diplomats have seen no such thing. The man operates via ego. He sees the world only as enabler or inhibiter of his own personal greatness, and makes all decisions accordingly. He does not concern himself with being wrong, because no matter how many experts in whatever field you can name you might throw up against him, he can never be wrong.
A weekend report from Time emphasized Trump's consistent—but alarming—behavior in this regard, citing "senior intelligence briefers" who "are breaking two years of silence to warn that the President is endangering American security".
What is most troubling, say these officials and others in government and on Capitol Hill who have been briefed on the episodes, are Trump’s angry reactions when he is given information that contradicts positions he has taken or beliefs he holds. Two intelligence officers even reported that they have been warned to avoid giving the President intelligence assessments that contradict stances he has taken in public.
This behavior, an irrational anger at receiving facts at odds with his own personal beliefs, is consistent with malignant narcissism and with many manifestations of dementia. It is also consistent with being an irredeemable asshole, a clod, a dolt, or an ignoramus; it would take a medical diagnosis to suss out the proportions of each. What is evident, however, is that Trump thinks his personal beliefs about the world outweigh the facts of the world, and is conducting both foreign and domestic policy based on those delusional versions. This is ... not good.
We have seen presidents dismiss the conclusions of the intelligence community before, of course. The most famous example was the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld efforts to craft an entirely separate intelligence structure that would give them the ideologically convenient answers they required rather than the ones they had previously been presented with. Trump's behavior is, however, structurally different. He has no ideology to pursue, only reflex, impulse, and self-satisfaction.
He is also dumber. The Bush clan may not have chosen to believe the intelligence they were presented with, but they understood it. Trump does not, and, according to these reports, he becomes irate when top officials attempt to explain it to him. The man is manifestly unfit, we say again. If he leaves office without causing an international catastrophe, it will be solely due to luck.