After the resignation of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats late last month, a move nudged along after Coats publicly rejected several of Donald Trump’s most favored but false intelligence claims, Trump quickly announced his chosen replacement would be conspiratorial nutcase Rep. John Ratcliffe, a devoted Trump acolyte with a history of professing belief in a host of the right’s most popular conspiracy claims. That nomination lasted only a few days before Ratcliffe bowed out following multiple claims in his record were proven to be exaggerations at best.
In the meantime, however, Trump has been doing his best to force the resignation of deputy DNI Sue Gordon, also a Trump appointee but one who earned the Trump team's ire for being "too close" to ex-CIA director John Brennan, now a vocal Trump critic.
It looks like that effort has been successful: According to multiple reports, Gordon resigned today.
Gordan posed a specific problem for Trump, whose nomination of Ratcliffe demonstrated a desire to restaff the nation's intelligence apparatus with figures more loyal to himself and more willing to back his own oft-false "intelligence" claims. By law, she would become acting DNI upon Coats' Aug. 15 departure. Now that she has been forced out, Trump is instead free to chose another name as acting director—presumably, another Ratcliffe-styled figure. Trump has increasingly staffed top government ranks with "acting" officials who lack Senate confirmation, and has expressed satisfaction with being able to evade that Senate-imposed oversight.
This is another significant blow to the intelligence community, and national security experts had been expressing alarm over Trump's efforts to push the career civil servant out.
Gordon is widely respected, and her departure leaves yet another gap as top national security voices are being steadily evicted and replaced with less expert, but more loyal, allies of Trump and ever-belligerent national security adviser John Bolton. As Trump's advisers steadily escalate tensions with Iran and Trump's desired North Korean deal drifts ever-farther from his reach, the hyper-politicization of top intelligence ranks does not bode well for the public's chances of learning which new world threats are real and which are Trump-created fictions.