In a fit of braggadocio
Eliot Cohen spells out the harms that will ensue from Trump’s treasonous blurting of secret information.
The repeated spectacular breaks into the American security system by the Russians, among others, coupled with the ubiquity of personal information in the smartphone age, has caused some Americans to assume that secrets do not exist. They most certainly do. If someone finds out how you have gathered information, that artfully planted bug may go dead. Or a human agent may go dead. In the normal course of events, Donald Trump would never have been given a high-level security clearance because of his psychological profile and personal record, including his susceptibility to blackmail.
That’s a chilling sentence. The truth of it is self-evident, but seeing it put into words is still sobering. It’s the same point as the one Evan Osnos made about people who have anything to do with firing the nukes:
Bruce Blair, a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security, at Princeton, told me that if Trump were an officer in the Air Force, with any connection to nuclear weapons, he would need to pass the Personnel Reliability Program, which includes thirty-seven questions about financial history, emotional volatility, and physical health. (Question No. 28: Do you often lose your temper?) “There’s no doubt in my mind that Trump would never pass muster,” Blair, who was a ballistic-missile launch-control officer in the Army, told me. “Any of us that had our hands anywhere near nuclear weapons had to pass the system. If you were having any arguments, or were in financial trouble, that was a problem. For all we know, Trump is on the brink of that, but the President is exempt from everything.”
None of this makes any sense. Everybody else in the system is subject to rules and filtering – but there’s just this one Special Person who is exempt from everything. This is no longer tenable. I’m not sure it ever was, but it sure as hell isn’t now.
Back to Eliot Cohen:
To a remarkable degree, the United States relies on liaison relationships with other powers with whom it shares information. If Trump has indeed compromised a source of information, it is not merely a betrayal of an ally’s trust: It is an act that will jeopardize a whole range of relationships. After all, the Director of Central Intelligence cannot very well say, “Don’t worry, we won’t share that with the president.” So now everybody—even our closest allies like the United Kingdom—would be well-advised to be careful with what they share with us.
So he’s put us all at greatly increased risk, either because the Russians are blackmailing him or because he’s too stupid and lazy to read his briefings and remember what they say.
If any foreign government harbored lingering illusions about the administration’s ability to protect any information, including sensitive but non-intelligence matters like future foreign-policy initiatives or military deployments, they no longer do. They will be even more apprehensive about sharing sensitive information of any kind because…
He gave it to the Russians. In the Oval Office. In a fit of braggadocio.
Russia is antagonistic to the United States, although Trump has repeatedly indicated his desire to be chummy with the Russians—after all, as he notoriously said during the presidential campaign, we are both killers, and so on the same moral plane. He apparently divulged the information to show off, which not only shows a lack of self-discipline: It shows, yet again, how easy this man is to play, particularly by veteran manipulators like his two experienced, talented, and thuggish guests. The crisis is made worse by virtue of Trump having just fired the FBI director, apparently for having pushed that Russia investigation too far.
Quite apart from making himself and the country a laughingstock around the world, the president has now practically begged Vladimir Putin to toy with him, tantalize him, tease him, flatter him, manipulate him. He has shown the Russians (and others, who are watching just as closely) just how easy that is to do, and he has shown the rest of us that his vanity and impulsiveness have not been tempered by the highest responsibilities.
They’ve been augmented by the highest responsibilities. Now he gets to prance around the White House and eat extra ice cream in front of his guests. Now he gets to approve raids over dinner, discuss emergencies in the public restaurant at Mar a Lago, keep US reporters out of meetings with the Russians while letting the Russian ones in – and share highly classified information with those same Russians, officials of a hostile foreign rival.
He needs to go. Now.
Too many people have relied too long on the ability of democracy to keep patently unqualified individuals out of the office of president. I don’t know why anyone thought that would happen – though I will admit the writers of the Constitution never anticipated our current electorate, because they set it up for landowners, who were typically well-educated, to be the only electors.
I would point out, however, that nearly every Trump voter I know is well-educated and owns property. (That’s mostly because that is the circle I travel in – there are plenty who don’t fit that description). So even in the world they inhabited, a Trump could have happened. They believed too much in the rationality of humans, something the Enlightenment got horrifically, and it now appears lethally, wrong.
I think the unwillingness of the founders of the US to excise the cancer of slavery from the body politic at the very beginning of the American experiment is a blatant and perfect example of a failure of the human rationality on which they were counting. I only hope that America survives so it can work out the flaws that the Trump regime has exposed and exploited.
I’m not sure that’s really true, or at least true without complications, true all the way down. The founders did and didn’t believe in the rationality of humans. That is, they were well aware that humans could be staggeringly irrational and reckless and destructive. It’s complicated. (“Nobody knows that.”)
“a fit of braggadocio” sounds like some delicious ice cream? Two scoops please.
I know, gallows humour. But what to do?
Are we into Amendment 25 territory yet? Because this sure as hell seems like reckless incompetence to me.
The Republican presidents in my lifetime has been a narrative of going from bad to worse. We had Nixon the crook, Reagan the actor, George Bush Jr. the frat boy, now Trump the indescribable. The only reliefs from the sorry parade of incompetence and corruption were Ford and George Bush Sr., who at least seemed to know how to run a country, even if I might not like how they ran it.
The 25th Amendment? It’s a great amendment, the best. I have tremendous respect for that amendment, tremendous respect. It’s been doing some great things, believe me. Nobody knows that amendment like I do, trust me. It’s a very, very big amendment. One of the biggest, if not the biggest amendment. Nobody knows about this amendment; nobody’s ever heard of it, you know? It’s incredible.
@Steve Watson #5
YES. Please.
I know, right? And yet they keep getting elected.
Please let this one be the nadir for all time. Please.
Of course we’re into 25th Amendment territory already. We’ve been there since the Republican primaries at a minimum. But as noted in a recent article that way, it’s a political question, handled by political operatives, in political terms. And politically, he’s too dangerous to people who themselves have to go through Republican primaries to keep their jobs. He’s running an 80% approval rating among Republican likely voters, still. Eighty percent. Someone wanting to fire him for being a reckless, stupid, malevolent, criminal, bigoted, hateful turd-souled wretch isn’t going to want to start 30 points down when it comes to their next performance review – and these are people who’ve been willing, for their entire careers, to do precisely what those voters and those donors require of them to do.
So it’s going to take those voters changing their minds – or ceasing to be voters; or him being bad enough that the Republicans in the House (and enough in the Senate to get a 2/3rds supermajority) to say, finally, beyond some line that even President Pussy-Grabbing Putin-Lover has not managed to cross yet, THIS is too far, even at the price of their jobs; or so many voters being so angry that these guys figure they are never winning another election as a member of Trump’s party anyway, so they’re free to experiment with consciences – for the 25th to be relevant. Similar remarks would follow if it’s implemented through the Cabinet – they’re not elected and needn’t worry that much about it, but they’re also all picked in order (2) to carry out their own pet policies sabotaging the nation, and (2) to back his plays.
We’ve reached a point, with gerrymandering and the structure of the Republican Party, that we’re governed by people who like the way Trump thinks and operates. They’re not a majority – not near it – but they’re a majority, of a carefully crafted majority, of a carefully crafted majority and that’s all it currently takes.
It’s a strange day: first I linked to Erick Erickson, and now I’m telling you to read Ross Douthat:
Skipping ahead a bit:
And now, brace yourself for another dose of Douthatbaggery: