In the rush of news over the last couple weeks, it was perhaps easy to miss the emerging voices of former national security officials finally speaking out about the dire threat that Donald Trump poses to U.S. national security. But a consensus, probably long held and kept under wraps, has definitely emerged as Trump lurches off the rails threatening to take the country with him.
“What is happening currently is not normal,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who served as a U.S. intelligence officer on Russia and Eurasia before leaving in 2018, told the Washington Post. “This represents a deviation from the way that these institutions regularly function. And when the institutions don’t work, that is a national security threat.”
Kendall-Taylor signed on to a letter co-signed by some 90 former national security officials who praised the actions taken by the original whistleblower.
But Trump's unilateral and impulsive decision to withdraw troops from the northern region of Syria was also a breaking point from some national security officials, including Brett McGurk, who resigned his post in the Trump administration after former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis tendered his resignation.
"The consequences of such unreliability from the Oval will reverberate well beyond Syria," McGurk tweeted following news of the withdrawal. "The value of an American handshake is depreciating. Trump today said we could ’crush ISIS again’ if it regenerated. With who? What allies would sign up? Who would fight on his assurances?”
Likewise, another former Trump official pushed back immediately on Trump's assertion that the Bidens should be investigated.
“It is completely debunked,” former Trump Homeland Security adviser Thomas Bossert said of Trump's Ukraine conspiracy theory. “I am deeply frustrated with what he and the legal team is doing and repeating that debunked theory to the president. It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again, and for clarity here, George, let me just again repeat that it has no validity.”
Bottom line: The stakes are just too high to for these officials to stay silent even at risk of becoming woven into the “deep state” conspiracy theory that has flourished during Trump’s presidency.