Thursday morning, President-elect Donald Trump used his favorite tool, Twitter, to blame the media (of course) for making it appear that he’s not getting along with the CIA and its peers.
“The media lies to make it look like I am against ‘Intelligence’ when in fact I am a big fan!” Trump tweeted—along with an explanation that the “dishonest media” has falsely portrayed him as “in Agreement with Julian Assange.”
Tut, tut, how could those devils in the media have possibly gotten the idea that Trump was siding with Assange of WikiLeaks who claims the Russians have no involvement in the hacked and leaked Democratic emails? Perhaps it was because one day earlier, he tweeted this: “Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’—why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!”
And how might those evil scribes and broadcasters possibly have given anyone the impression that the president-elect was not a “fan” of the U.S. intelligence community? Perhaps it was to quote his actual reactions—often highly critical, dismissive and defensive—to the intelligence community’s persistent findings that the Russians are behind the hacking.
Surely no incoming administration has ever signaled such overwhelming disdain for the 16 federal agencies that together gather information about what’s happening in the world as this one has.
Trump appears wholly incapable of perceiving representatives of the intelligence community as anything but adversaries because they’ve had the temerity to write reports contradicting his favored narrative—that the recent election was untainted, that Putin is a good fellow and not a strongman dictator, and that the hackers, whoever they are, did the voters a favor.
It would be one thing if Trump’s fight with America’s spies was grounded in an informed or at least objective assessment of the intelligence community’s credibility, but it isn’t that at all. It’s a narcissist hearing things he doesn’t like, worried about his “ratings” with Americans and lashing out at the messenger. That’s no way to manage the White House cleaning staff let alone such a critical function of the federal government.