It’s disconcerting for the Republicans to have Trump jeering at the intelligence agencies.

Though Mr. Trump has wasted no time in antagonizing the agencies, to carry out priorities like combating terrorism and deterring cyberattacks he will have to rely on them for the sort of espionage activities and analysis that they spend more than $70 billion a year to perform.

At this point in a transition, a president-elect is usually delving into intelligence he has never before seen and learning about C.I.A. and National Security Agency abilities. But Mr. Trump, who has taken intelligence briefings only sporadically, is questioning not only analytic conclusions, but also their underlying facts.

“To have the president-elect of the United States simply reject the fact-based narrative that the intelligence community puts together because it conflicts with his a priori assumptions — wow,” said Michael V. Hayden, who was the director of the N.S.A. and later the C.I.A. under President George W. Bush.

Wow, yes, but it’s what he’s done all along. He’s a liar and a denialist. He makes up his own facts, and disparages other people’s evidence-based fact claims. That’s Trump epistemology in a nutshell.

Mr. Trump’s team lashed out at the agencies after The Washington Post reported that the C.I.A. believed that Russia had intervened to undercut Mrs. Clinton and lift Mr. Trump, and The New York Times reported that Russia had broken into Republican National Committee computer networks just as they had broken into Democratic ones, but had released documents only on the Democrats.

What to do? Blow smoke.

Mr. Trump casts the issue as an unknowable mystery. “It could be Russia,” he recently told Time magazine. “And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

That’s what he said in that debate – it was some guy in a basement. Jersey, basement – it’s all the same thing.

Even one of Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican, said on Friday that he had no doubt about Russia’s culpability. His complaint was with the intelligence agencies, which he said had “repeatedly” failed “to anticipate Putin’s hostile actions,” and with the Obama administration’s lack of a punitive response.

Mr. Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that the intelligence agencies had “ignored pleas by numerous Intelligence Committee members to take more forceful action against the Kremlin’s aggression.” He added that the Obama administration had “suddenly awoken to the threat.”

Like many Republicans, Mr. Nunes is threading a needle. His statement puts him in opposition to the position taken by Mr. Trump and his incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has traveled to Russia as a private citizen for RT, the state-controlled news operation, and attended a dinner with Mr. Putin.

Now that that pesky communism is dead, they like Russian authoritarianism. I bet they wish they had some Cossacks too.