Donald Trump attacked his own agencies, then claimed that their comments had been misrepresented by the media. Reuters. This week starkly illustrated a remarkable feature of Donald Trump’s administration: this president does not do policy; he only does politics.
Leaders always struggle to square sound foreign policy with the effective domestic politics that all governments require. This tension cannot be completely resolved, although its intensity varies, depending on circumstances and personalities.
This conundrum has now sunk to its American nadir. It’s not just that most current administration officials are internationalist hawks, while the president has neo-isolationist impulses.
It’s that Trump does not see international strategic problems as arising against a backdrop of verifiable realities. Instead of a photographic representation of circumstances as they really are, he sees a blank canvas, on which he can paint whatever surrealist landscapes best suit his agenda. Hence, this week’s bizarre confrontation between Trump and all 17 US intelligence agencies, led by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. On January 29, Coats, flanked by the CIA and FBI chiefs, presented their Annual Threat Assessment to Congress. The annual National Intelligence Strategy document, on which it is based, is usually published in a redacted public version and a classified one for those with clearance.
This year, intelligence chiefs took the extraordinary step of issuing their entire strategy publicly.
Coats said that they wanted to reassure the public that the agencies remain committed to producing “nuanced, independent, and unvarnished intelligence”, and not serving any other purpose.
That honesty and independence has been repeatedly questioned by Trump who routinely denigrates US intelligence services, dismisses their findings, has compared them to Nazis and even sided with Russia's Vladimir Putin over them. The intelligence chiefs were essentially saying that, in light of the accusations the president has levelled against them, transparency was their best defence.
They knew they were provoking an argument they needed to win.
Certainly, they will have anticipated howls of protest from the White House, given that so many of their “independent and unvarnished” findings contradict core assertions that the president frequently cites as political rationalisations.
While Trump constantly hypes the “progress” he has made with Pyongyang, the assessment finds that North Korea is “unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons” because its leaders view them as “critical to regime survival”.
It states that Russia has, indeed, engaged in election meddling, information warfare, and efforts to divide the West and undermine the post-Second World War international order. Trump disputes all of this. He welcomes the division of the West, denigrates the international order, and dismisses allegations of Russian interference. The assessment holds that, for all its malign behaviour, Iran has not yet violated the terms of the nuclear agreement, which the president cites as a major reason for withdrawing from the deal.
While Trump insists that ISIS has been thoroughly crushed to justify his order to withdraw all US forces from Syria, the assessment finds that it remains a potent threat.
And, most damningly, the assessment makes no mention whatsoever of the entirely fictional “national security crisis” that has prompted Trump to deploy thousands of US forces at the Mexican border and supposedly justifies building his wall.
The fact-based reality offered by the Annual Threat Assessment flatly refutes many fundamental claims Trump relies on to justify his actions.
After the gauntlet was thrown down by the intelligence community, Trump, naturally, picked it up and hurled a series of insults, via Twitter, back at what he refers to as the “deep state”. These included saying they were simply “wrong” and that they “should go back to school”.
This is a particularly disturbing aspect of the relentless campaign of deinstitutionalisation this column has been consistently tracking. Here, Trump can be clearly seen lashing out at yet another authoritative source of information and analysis that remains free of – or is actively resisting – his control. He has admitted that he denounces the “fake news media” to blunt criticisms or exposure of him by the press. He attacks his own intelligence services to rebut their contradictions of his ceaseless false claims.
As for the FBI and other police, Trump is evidently concerned about what they may uncover about his activities, and those of his associates who have not yet been arrested or imprisoned.
Astonishingly, but true to form, he then compounded his assault on reality by tweeting that the intelligence chiefs’ statements had been “mischaracterised”, that they never really debunked his fraudulent claims, and that this profound and serious dispute isn’t real and has been fabricated by the press.
Trump’s biggest advantage in political and rhetorical fights seems to be his unique shamelessness and boundless willingness to lie when almost anyone else would at least think twice.
The writer is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington