My little email universe was steadily lit up in the spring and summer of 2016 with commentary on the Trump campaign. That universe comprised a lot of people with backgrounds like mine: intelligence, security, military, diplomatic, and related fields. We had lots of issues, but the key themes of truth, inclusion, and lawfulness quickly emerged.
The most intense buzz was about telling the truth, or, more specifically, about Donald Trump not telling the truth. Or at least not bothering to find the truth in order to speak accurately.
We noted to one another that Russia really wasn’t fighting ISIS in Syria; that American alliances were a national competitive advantage, which Russia and China, which didn’t have any friends that mattered much, actually envied; that defending Latvia or Estonia wasn’t just a matter of their having paid their bills; that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was really an alignment of twelve nations bordering the Pacific (none of them named China) in an American-facing rules-based order, not a rip-off of American workers.
We had a long list of out-and-out lies, too, like the candidate’s claim that there were pan-Islamic legions celebrating wildly on the streets of New Jersey as the Twin Towers were aflame and collapsing. And then there was the moment Mr. Trump, hammering Obama-era political correctness, departed from prepared remarks to say that the neighbors of the San Bernardino terrorist couple, beyond seeing suspicious behavior, “saw bombs on the floor,” a claim for which there was absolutely no evidence.
In March he defended the intentional killing of terrorists’ families because “they knew what was happening. . . . They left two days early, with respect to the World Trade Center, and they went back to where they went, and they watched their husband on television flying into the World Trade Center, flying into the Pentagon.”
None of that really happened, of course. Few of the 9/11 hijackers were married. None had family in the United States. We know of no family members, even overseas, who were flown anywhere before or after 9/11.
Before election day, candidate Trump had also managed to insinuate that Ted Cruz’s father had a hand in the Kennedy assassination and that Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia had been murdered at a Texas hunting lodge. He also “clarified” that he had put to rest Hillary Clinton’s scurrilous accusation that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States.
I think it fair to say that the Trump campaign normalized lying to an unprecedented degree, and when pressed on specifics it routinely tried to delegitimize those who would disagree with countercharges about the “lyin’ media,” “intelligence” (in accusatory quotation marks), “so-called judges,” fake news, Washington insiders, and the deep state.
One undisclosed CIA location in the United States has T-shirts emblazoned with the words Deny Everything. Admit Nothing. Make Counter-Accusations. But it is meant to be a joke.
The candidate himself had earlier suggested that in real estate, a little stretching—what Mr. Trump called “truthful hyperbole”—never hurt. In our view, though, it would really hurt him in the job he was pursuing. The day would come when the president would need others to take him at his word about something he would not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. For us the bottom line was clear: the Oval Office was no place for routine exaggeration, much less for “alternative facts.”
There may (and I emphasize may—I have only undergraduate psychology courses in my portfolio) have been something more involved here as well, something even more troubling: the candidate often didn’t know what he was talking about, and he may not have known that he didn’t know.
Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, laments the post-truth world in his 2017 book The Death of Expertise. Nichols is pretty aggressive: “The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance . . . Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog sodden . . . [with] an insistence that strongly held opinions are indistinguishable from facts.”1 Early in the work he introduces the concept of metacognition, essentially the ability to think about thinking, which leads to the “ability to know when you’re not good at something.” He cites a singer knowing when she has hit a sour note, a director knowing when a scene isn’t working. If you lack metacognition, those discoveries are beyond you.
Nichols credits a 1999 study by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, research psychologists at Cornell, with driving home this point. Nichols writes, “The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop in which people who do not know much about a subject do not know when they’re in over their head . . . and there is no way to educate or inform people who, when in doubt, will make stuff up.”
I was not terribly familiar with the concept of metacognition when I heard candidate Trump talk about celebratory Muslims in New Jersey on September 11 or fleeing terrorist family members on September 9, but incidents like that came to mind as I read and reread Nichols’s words.
The concept came to mind again when after a year in office the president riffed on climate change with British journalist Piers Morgan: “There is a cooling, and there’s a heating. I mean, look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming. That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place. The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records. They’re at a record level.”2 For the sake of history and science, I should add that arctic sea ice levels were at record lows as the president spoke (a generally well-known and accepted fact regardless of your views on human-caused climate change).
None of which explains why the American people would accept post-truth, alternative-facts narratives. The answer to that lies elsewhere. A decade ago, long before “post-truth,” comedian Stephen Colbert had coined a new word, “truthiness,” while criticizing the Bush administration. He said, “We’re not talking about the truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth—the truth we want to exist.” The Wikipedia entry for the word (word of the year in 2005!) characterized it as a truth “known” intuitively by the user without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
Trumpism was a long time coming.
Beyond the lack of truth telling, there was the question of inclusion, with the campaign’s emphasis on the politically convenient but somewhat amorphous “other”—immigrants, illegals, Mexicans, Muslims, and so on—as the root of our problems. The campaign broadcast a palpable sense of America less as a welcoming Madisonian “we the people” than a nation defined by blood and soil and shared history. If the campaign hadn’t been conducted in English, we would have routinely heard words that evoked blood and soil like the German Volk or the Slavic narod. Lacking a good English equivalent, the campaign settled on “hardworking Americans” as an adequate dog-whistle equivalent. The label preferred by some in the alt-right was “awakened whites.”
There were lots of reasons why we worried about the nativism: alienation of a friendly and important neighbor to the south; limiting the bounty we harvested from the youthful, entrepreneurial vigor of new arrivals; distancing ourselves from important allies and cooperative foreign sources; even redefining the essence and values of the nation.
In one particularly divisive campaign shtick, Trump would dramatically read a poem about a kindhearted woman who responds to the plea of a nearly frozen snake and nurses it back to health. Revived, the snake bites and kills her. It was an anti-immigrant crowd pleaser, and when Trump reprised the act in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a hundred days into his presidency, David Gergen called it “deeply disturbing . . . the most divisive speech I’ve ever heard from a sitting American president.”3
Concerns about this clearly went beyond my narrow band of American internationalists to include a cross section of American and global society. Candidate Trump, as the old Catholic joke goes, was so exclusionary he “pissed off the pope” . . . literally. Trump’s rhetoric on illegal immigration, particularly a wall on the Mexican border, prompted Pope Francis to bluntly counter, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel.” The pope later warned about leaders who exploit fear, and cautioned the faithful not to rely on “the false security of walls—physical or social.”4
The influential Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica continued the skirmish well after the election, accusing some American Catholics and evangelicals of becoming a “community of combatants,” fostering an “ecumenism of conflict” with a “xenophobic and Islamophobic vision that wants walls and purifying deportations.”5 The authors, close to Pope Francis, suggested that exclusionists were fostering a latter-day Manichaean vision of the world, with the forces of darkness now including “the migrants and the Muslims.”6
As a practicing American Catholic, I have never experienced the counterimmigrant narrative in my faith community. Never. I have occasionally stumbled across a more general them-versus-us, as when the last prayer at Sunday mass—the one right before we leave church—is a call for Saint Michael the Archangel to defend us in battle. I actually like the prayer; it is the oft-used entreaty for Catholics in the armed forces. But in a civilian parish, it is admittedly a bit distant, at least in tone, from Saint Francis’s call to be an instrument of the Lord’s peace.
And I fear that among even my coreligionists there is a minority that views Islam as part of a hostile world: “Some Muslims may be tolerant, but one cannot meet the definition of being a good Muslim and be tolerant at the same time,” is how one put it to me. This is all discomforting enough on a human basis, but folks like me zero in on what such attitudes might mean for America’s relationship with the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, one-fifth of the globe’s population and a majority in some fifty countries.
During the campaign Donald Trump suggested that he would create a database on Muslims and would “certainly look at” the idea of closing mosques. He called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” all because “Islam hates us. There’s something there that—there’s a tremendous hatred there. There’s a tremendous hatred. . . . There’s an unbelievable hatred of us.”7
I don’t think that Mr. Trump needed any help getting to his “Islam hates us,” clash-of-civilizations paradigm. Certainly his base seems to welcome it. During the discussion in that back room in Pittsburgh, there were moments when Islam and terrorism were dangerously close to being viewed as synonyms by some in the group.
And there were plenty of civilizational warriors on team Trump. In 2014, strategist Steve Bannon said that “the Judeo-Christian West” was “in the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict . . . an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism” that threatened to “completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.”8 The candidate’s favorite soldier, former defense intelligence director Mike Flynn, once famously tweeted, “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”
I thought that was dangerous. For me, the center of gravity of this conflict is not a war between civilizations (Christians versus Muslims), but rather a war within a civilization, within Islam itself. Brussels, Berlin, Manchester, Barcelona, San Bernardino, and other attacks invite the former conclusion, but the reality is that the victims of jihadist terrorism have overwhelmingly been Muslim and to confine our understanding of this conflict to the former (a war between civilizations) will make the resolution of the latter (a war within a civilization) delayed, tougher to achieve, and less satisfying.
And until the latter is resolved, all the killing continues.
Islam is experiencing a conflict that parallels Christendom’s struggle in the seventeenth century, trying to arbitrate a balance between faith and reason, between the sacred and the secular. Christendom’s Thirty Years’ War, the last great war of religion in the West, was incredibly bloody—the death rate in Germanic lands approached 20 percent—and led to the separation of the secular from the sacred, broadly divorcing the coercive power of the state from matters of faith.
George W. Bush’s senior speechwriter, Michael Gerson, summarized it this way: “Over time—at least since Calvin’s Geneva and Cromwell’s England—Christians have learned that too close a relationship between church and state is highly damaging to both. Associating the reputation of the Christian gospel with the fortunes of any politician or movement is bound to dishonor sacred things.”9 That principle has been unevenly applied over the past three and a half centuries, but the principle remains.
The three great monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all revere and profess to be children of Abraham, and all come out of the same desert. Islam traditionally refers to adherents of the other two faiths as “people of the book,” a nod to the Torah and the Bible that Mohammed allegedly perfected.
Despite these parallels, it may be more difficult for Islam to approach Christendom’s compromise of separating church and state since, at least in its fundamentalist forms, Islam is a more transcendental faith, allowing human reason less space to interfere with the purported will of God. Men are capable of terrible things when they believe they are doing his will.
The British academic A. C. Grayling, a frequent commentator on religion in modern society, agrees that there are parallels between modern Islam and seventeenth-century Christendom. He told me that the ferocity of today’s fundamentalists is a marker of the depth of distress within Islam and that what we see in the West is a sad “splash over” from Islam’s internal struggle.
Grayling stressed to me that the core of Christendom’s transformation—the Reformation and the Enlightenment—was less about shifting religious doctrine than it was the growth of tolerance. Unable to enforce orthodoxy because of the fracturing caused by the Reformation, Christendom made a virtue of necessity. We tolerated because we had to. He suggests that pushing similar concepts of pluralism and toleration would do more to heal the Muslim world than any effort to reinterpret the tenets of Islam.10
That will be a heavy lift, but before we too quickly condemn our fellow monotheists, we should remember that the Western democracy that most allows the “will of God” into the public square is our own. Believers of many faiths (including members of my family) march for life in Washington to overturn what the Supreme Court says is a constitutional right, and they do so on largely religious grounds. American Catholicism in effect set up its own justice system in the recent priest sex abuse scandal. Opting for ecclesiastical judgment while avoiding criminal courts is not quite the same as imposing sharia, but there are parallels. And American evangelicals make up the biggest pro-Israel bloc in the United States, supporting the Jewish state not for reasons of policy but because of biblical teaching. One evangelical leader (Reverend John Hagee, pastor of a San Antonio megachurch) labeled support for Israel “God’s foreign policy”11 and personally lobbied President Trump to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
None of which should tempt anyone to equate American belief with jihadist fanaticism nor to suggest that we should tolerate or condone violence. We must do what we need to do to defend ourselves. The physical destruction of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their affiliates is a short-term necessity and a crucial precondition for long-term success since these groups claim to represent both the hand and the will of God and they have pointed to battlefield victories to buttress those claims. Battlefield defeats, on the other hand, undercut their jihadist credibility as well as their tactical situation. Those defeats cannot come quickly enough as we mourn the destruction of ancient civilizations.
Three summers ago, shortly after the fall of Mosul, my wife and I attended mass in Aspen on the margins of a rather despondent Aspen Security Conference. There the priest reminded the local faithful that, for the first Sunday since the time of the apostles, holy mass would not be said that weekend in Mosul (ancient Nineveh), a characterization that saddened me more deeply than anything I had heard over the preceding three days at the Aspen Institute.
The human terrain of the Middle East is being irrevocably altered as Christian communities that have existed there for more than a millennium (often under tolerant Islamic rulers) are being eradicated or simply depopulated as those who can, flee from ancestral homes that predate the birth of Islam. Jihadists painting the letter N (for followers of the Nazarene) on local homes have accelerated a broader decline in the Christian population of the region from 14 percent a century ago to only 4 percent today. Iraq’s Christian population is estimated to be a third of what it was shortly after the American invasion, and Christianity has all but disappeared from Iran and Turkey.
Still, grief and righteous anger are thin reeds on which to base policy, and we need to keep the big ideas straight or the limited power we have to influence outcomes will be misplaced at best and destructive of our purposes at worst.
When we describe this struggle—as the Trump campaign did—as a struggle between civilizations, we adopt the narrative of ISIS and al-Qaeda that there is undying enmity between Islam and the West. We strengthen the hand of our adversary. I said publicly during the campaign that the candidate’s language as a candidate already had made us less safe as a nation.
The Obama administration erred in the other direction, I think, refusing even to say the words “radical Islam,” seeming to suggest that today’s violent extremists were just self-generating free electrons or something. That’s just silly. As the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood (author of the highly acclaimed 2015 article “What ISIS Really Wants”) has said, terrorist groups take strength from some authentic narratives within Islamic history. They do have something to do with Islam. It’s just not by any means all of Islam and all Muslims.
President Obama’s own life experience exposed him to the complexities of Islamic history, both the good and the bad, and should have positioned him for a rather nuanced public discussion of this topic. That never came, perhaps because he did not want to offend Muslims; perhaps he felt it dignified the terrorists too much; perhaps he feared feeding the worst instincts of some on the American right. In any event, it was an opportunity lost and it practically invited the harsh rhetoric of candidate Trump and, in the eyes of some, gave it legitimacy.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a former CIA analyst, a keen observer, an unabashed hawk on questions of terrorism, and a friend. He dismisses the Obama approach that “needlessly got itself into trouble by avoiding an adult conversation about the problems in the Muslim world. Muslims aren’t children. They don’t need Western affirmative action programs.”
But he saves his strongest language for the religious warriors on team Trump, saying he has “a really big problem when certain individuals attempt to paint Islam, in all its 1400-plus years of glorious complexity, as a deranged civilization and faith, whose denizens and practitioners are somehow uniquely capable of violence because they are hard-wired to do so, via the Koran, the holy law, and whatever else the anti-Islam crowd thinks makes Muslims tick. This is just historically atrocious. It is often obscene.”12
Put me down as voting with Marc, as would most American intelligence professionals I know. Which is why a counterterrorism strategy defined solely by the promise to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS frankly scares the shit out of us and was one of the most frightening things to come out of the Trump campaign.
Then there was the question of lawfulness, with candidate Trump promising to push past traditional restraints on American behavior, bringing back waterboarding “and a lot worse” while killing not just terrorists but their families. The campaign also explicitly regretted that earlier presidents had passed on another war crime, plunder: “We should have kept the oil in Iraq. . . . In the old days, when we won a war, to the victor belonged the spoils.”
As this was playing out, in the spring of 2016, I was on a book tour for Playing to the Edge, my unapologetic account of Bush-era tactics that included electronic surveillance, metadata collection, renditions, detentions, interrogations, and targeted killings. I expected that with those topics and that attitude, I would be spending a lot of time playing defense as I traveled the country, that I would have to explain why we thought we had to play to the legal and ethical edge given the circumstances we were in after 9/11.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to do much defending. In fact, given the tone of the Republican primaries—mostly set by Trump, though Ted Cruz did have a “carpet bombing” moment—I spent more time explaining that there were edges, that there were things we should not do, that there were lines beyond which we should not go.
There was a moment on Bill Maher’s HBO comedy/commentary show Real Time when the host asked me about Trump’s promise to intentionally target and kill the families of suspected terrorists. The candidate had actually said on Fox and Friends, “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.”13
In answering Maher, I really didn’t think I was making news. It was more like an observation, akin to saying that things that are dropped tend to move toward the center of the earth. “God no,” I said. “If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act.”
“That’s quite a statement there. I thought the whole thing was, you had to follow orders,” Maher replied.
“You cannot—in fact, you are required not to follow an unlawful order. That would be in violation of all the international laws of conflict.” Although I quickly dismissed Maher’s comedic overstatement about “a coup in this country,” I was serious that the U.S. military’s traditional deference to civilian control would not include agreeing to or committing such a blatant war crime.
During a Republican debate the following week, Fox News’ Bret Baier asked Trump specifically about my comments on the armed forces’ unwillingness to do such things. The candidate responded, “They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse, believe me. . . . I’m a leader, I’ve always been a leader. I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”
I quickly translated candidate Trump’s words in my own mind: “I’m going to use the power of my office and the force of my personality to direct twenty-somethings in America’s armed forces to commit war crimes.”
The Trump campaign uncharacteristically walked that back the next day when they tossed a written statement through the transom to the Wall Street Journal claiming that the candidate understood “that the United States is bound by laws and treaties” and that he would “not order our military or other officials to violate those laws and will seek their advice on such matters.”
It wasn’t really much of a walk back. It was a press release, after all, not the candidate personally saying it. At rallies Trump quickly returned to the theme that we had to be tougher, much tougher. And at the first opportunity, he chafed at the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “Let me explain something. We are playing at this level and they don’t care. . . . [I]t’s interesting what happens with the Geneva Convention. Everybody believes in the Geneva Convention until they start losing.”
Then there was Mr. Trump’s promise to bring back waterboarding. He said to loud approval during a rally in Ohio, “Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would—in a heartbeat. . . . Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.”14
I objected to that, too, although the argument was a little harder to make. After all, my book Playing to the Edge defended those who had done waterboarding and maintained that it had worked. But neither I nor the Agency were calling for its return. It had last been used in early 2003 (under circumstances far different from those of 2016), and it was the Bush administration that had formally taken the technique off the table in 2006. Besides, we never did it “because they deserve it,” and certainly not with the enthusiasm the candidate was exhibiting. It was done reluctantly (on a total of three detainees) to get information about possible future attacks, not to punish for previous ones.
Ben Wittes, curator of the redoubtable Lawfare blog, approached me later to coauthor a piece for the site on “The Special Obligation of the Advocates of Strong National Security Measures.” Ben and I noted that we had spoken out against some of the rhetoric of the Trump campaign and some people had seemed surprised. We were surprised that they were surprised. We admitted to a certain comfort level with legitimate surveillance, detention, interrogation, and targeted killings, but quickly added that that gave us a special duty to speak up about policies that were neither necessary nor beneficial. Indeed, we felt a burden that civil libertarians and human rights advocates—who opposed such policies across the board—did not have.
If you believe, as we did, that the national security community had formed a consensus around certain tools because they were effective, and that part of that effectiveness lay in the rejection of more extreme measures, then candidate Trump’s words were particularly harmful. We concluded that because we believed in a series of hard measures, we had “a special obligation to rigorously and publicly distinguish between the tools we advocate and measures we abhor.” We believed that opposition to what the candidate was saying was in “no sense a recalibrating of our judgments or a revisitation of our values. It [was] an expression of them.” And we resolved to continue to express them.
By early March 2016, Eliot Cohen had done enough suffering in silence. Eliot’s no shrinking violet, but he’s not a bomb thrower either. So I was a little surprised when he emailed me (along with scores of others) to “join in an effort to inform the American people of our concerns about Mr. Trump’s candidacy and our resolve not to support him.”
He attached a pretty hard-hitting draft letter describing the candidate as, among other things, “unmoored in principle . . . fundamentally dishonest . . . [and] a distinct threat to civil liberty.” Eliot also set a pretty tight timeline, requesting “a clear statement of support within the next 72 hours . . . [and] because of the speed with which this effort must proceed, we regretfully cannot submit the statement to additional editing.” The latter was likely intended to avoid the editing nightmare certain to occur with a group that loved nothing better that to tinker with somebody else’s prose.
In the end, Eliot got 122 signatures, a pretty powerful list of security professionals who had served in Republican administrations. It was a disparate list, too—for and against the Iraq War, for and against intervention in Syria. The roster included several folks with intelligence experience, like David Shedd (deputy director, DIA), Fran Townsend (head of Coast Guard intelligence before becoming homeland security adviser), and Reuel Marc Gerecht (CIA).
I was not among them. I told Eliot that I agreed strongly with the thought, but had a personal and a larger concern. The personal concern was that I was on the book tour and feared that going public might be viewed as a commercial move on my part. Possibly bad for me, but certainly bad for our objective.
I also feared that Trump would use this as just another talking point about how Washington insiders reflexively opposed him and needed to be swept out. Our public opposition could actually make this worse. Although the Trump campaign ultimately was surprisingly (and wisely) subdued about the whole thing, one influential (but unidentified) Republican did point out the obvious: “The people signing that letter will be the establishment—the very people that Trump is running against. It will make Trump’s day.”15
Finally, I conceded to Eliot that if anyone deserved an ad hominem attack, it was Donald Trump (who certainly was not above making them: “Lyin’ Ted,” “Crooked Hillary,” and so on). Tactically, though, I suggested it might be more productive to hammer him on specifics, rather than make an outright rejection of the man.
Eliot fully understood all my concerns, but pressed ahead. For him, he said, it was really pretty simple. “This is really drawing a bright moral line and saying that if we’re going to keep our souls, we can’t cross it.”16 He reminded me that he had three grandchildren and “when they ask me what I did when Donald Trump ran for president, I want to have a good answer.” He conceded, “Tactically it won’t make a particle of difference to the outcome, which I fully accept.”
Quixotic or not, the letter actually did make a splash. The site on which it was originally posted, War on the Rocks, promptly saw its server crash.17 There was plenty of press commentary drawing attention to the letter, too.
The issue simmered throughout the summer. I tried to cabin my public commentary by simply observing that if Mr. Trump governed in a way consistent with how he spoke during the campaign, we had a lot to worry about. Inserting the if was my trying to leave some room for hope, at least publicly.
I also made it clear that my choice for president was former Florida governor Jeb Bush and made no secret that I had joined a small group to brief him on national security matters in Coral Gables. That was a pretty straightforward session. There were things the governor thought he knew and things he knew he did not know. He tested the former and inquired about the latter.
When Bush dropped out, I endorsed fellow Pittsburgh native John Kasich, now governor of Ohio, and pretty much the last centrist standing, although I never met with the candidate.
Some clear lines were now being drawn and folks were being challenged to decide on which side of them they wanted to be. In midsummer, I received a call from a retired senior colleague who had been invited by a friend of his—a close, near-original member of the Trump team—to come help expand the candidate’s thinking on security matters.
The close adviser making the request understood the candidate’s obvious limits on security questions. There had been a few examples of embarrassing ignorance when, for instance, he seemed unaware of the substantial contribution NATO forces were making against terrorism in Afghanistan.
My friend could surely help. But my friend wasn’t sure that he wanted to help, and so he asked my advice. I simply said that there was a difference between helping a man who wanted to be president of the United States and helping a man who had been elected president. In other words, if there was a time to help Mr. Trump, it would be after he had won an election, not before. I think I said something like “helping a badly flawed man to become president was one thing, trying to fix those flaws post-election was another.”
Maybe that should have been a tougher call for me to make. Aren’t all candidates entitled to advice and preparation? In this case I doubted that the advice would have made a difference, and, despite promises made to guarantee the anonymity of my friend (promising anonymity to entice someone to advise a candidate suggests how weird this whole campaign was), I warned that this could be played as some kind of endorsement of the candidate. He thanked me for my counsel. I don’t think he signed on before the election, but I don’t know for sure. He is not currently in government.
It really wasn’t clear that Mr. Trump actually wanted much advice anyway. He told MSNBC’s Morning Joe in March, “My primary consultant is myself and I have a good instinct for this stuff, I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain.”18
He had earlier identified the source of his foreign policy thinking to Chuck Todd of NBC: “Well, I really watch the shows. You really see a lot of great, you know, when you watch your show and all of the other shows, and you have the generals and you have certain people that you like.”19
Indeed, there were only a few military or national security officials close to the Trump campaign. Lebanese-born Middle East scholar Walid Phares was a well-known hawk in counterterrorism circles. Keith Kellogg had had a successful Army career, commander of a division and of U.S. special operations forces in Europe, before retiring as a three-star general. Keith and I shared time in the headquarters of U.S. European command in the early 1990s and occasionally saw one another at the Fort Myer chapel in retirement.
The rest of the “team” prompted observers and journalists to go the web to help identify them: energy consultant George Papadopoulos; former Defense Department inspector general Joe Schmitz; managing partner of Global Energy Capital Carter Page, who had done work in Moscow. None of these could be considered leading figures in the Republican foreign policy establishment. Most of that group had preemptively thinned the bench available to Trump by signing that March letter declaring that he was unfit for the office he was seeking.20
Mike Flynn was one security expert in the Trump camp who was already well known. Mike had more than thirty years in the Army, much at the operational level, and built the innovative intelligence engine behind Stan McChrystal’s relentless counterterrorist raids in Iraq and Afghanistan. Flynn was aggressive, iconoclastic, intolerant of bureaucracy, and impatient with people and institutions he saw as dated.
Translating those traits to running a large D.C.-based organization like the Defense Intelligence Agency proved difficult. Flynn’s creative mind spun out far more ideas than his bureaucracy could digest, and his inventive interpretation of events (dubbed “Flynn facts” by his workforce) taxed his analysts’ credulity as well. DIA—the blue-collar, steady-as-you-go, workmanlike element of the intelligence community—was in turmoil being run by a self-described “maverick, an atypical square peg in a round hole.” The director of national intelligence and his Defense Department counterpart jointly requested that Flynn resign about a year earlier than he or most people had expected.
Mike left angry. Over time he contributed to the story that he had been canned by the Obama White House because his take on Iraq, Syria, and ISIS had less of a happy face on it than the administration preferred. DIA had indeed taken a darker view of the battlefield (a somber view with which I agreed) than much of the rest of the IC, but that was not the cause for his dismissal. This was about management, pure and simple, and the decision was made within the Pentagon and within the intelligence community, not in the White House.
Conservative media also struck up the theme that in two years at DIA, General Flynn had never once had a chance to express his more pessimistic views personally to President Obama. Some have read that as political suppression of intelligence dissent. I and most of the intelligence community wondered why anyone would expect the head of DIA (who worked for the secretary of defense) to ever have a meeting with the president. That’s just not how it works.
In civilian life, Mike quickly hit the usual speaking and TV commentator circuit and also teamed up with Michael Ledeen, a controversial neoconservative historian, to write The Field of Fight, which aligned radical Islamists with North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba, and Venezuela in an axis of hate against the United States. The work’s harsh tone (one of my students described it as a book-length blog post) and its central premise that “Islam is a political ideology based on a religion” converged easily with the tone and substance of the Trump campaign, and Mike soon became the candidate’s toughest and most enthusiastic surrogate.
And he apparently could not see how people like me could stand on the sidelines with such important issues in play. He tracked me down through my George Mason University email account in August 2016 to ask, “Mike, Seriously, you believe HRC will make a better President?” He continued, “I have been disappointed in the ‘national security experts’ and the entire republican establishment to date for their lack of character and disloyalty to the tens of millions of Americans who want to see DT win and who desperately want change in our country (as do I). The ‘experts’ and ‘establishment’ must take those Americans for idiots.”
I simply responded with a caution about the lack-of-character accusation. “Honest people can have honest differences,” I replied. I declined to add that at that point many more millions of Americans had voted for somebody other than Donald Trump and that supporting someone else was not actually “disloyalty” to Trump voters.
Trump campaign outreach had better success with some other retired generals and admirals. In early September the campaign published a letter of support with eighty-eight such signatures. I recognized some names, considered a few on the list as friends, and also noted that fully three-fourths of the signatories had retired before the 9/11 attacks. The letter reflected the larger Trump following in demographics (trending older) and issues: rebuild the military, secure the border, defeat Islamist supremacists, restore law and order. Their letter certainly echoed Trump’s dystopian view of the current world.
Not to be outdone, there was another “never Trump” letter brewing, this one organized by John Bellinger. John had been senior legal adviser to Condoleezza Rice when she was national security adviser and again when she became secretary of state. He was always considered a moderate in the Bush White House and often had the unenviable task of squaring the circle between our tough response to the 9/11 attacks and our allies’ views of international law.
John had not participated in Eliot Cohen’s earlier effort because he thought it was too overtly Republican, but he kept the idea of a separate letter in his head and was now strongly motivated by what he called Trump’s continued “over the top comments.” He had also been put off by Trump’s audacity in criticizing candidate Ben Carson’s ignorance about foreign affairs.
John told me that he talked to a lot of folks who had similar views. A few sympathized but were reluctant to sign on, fearing that this played into Trump’s hands and would effectively be dialing themselves out of the game. Most were more enthusiastic. There was a growing consensus to do something together and not just continue the individual, private grousing in our email exchanges.
Like Eliot Cohen in March, John knew that this would not affect many of Trump’s supporters, but his goal here was to affect the middle, the folks who were saying things like, “I like a lot about what Trump is saying, but I hope he doesn’t get us into a war.”
Word of the effort leaked to the Democrat side and John Podesta quickly asked if this could be parlayed into an endorsement for Hillary Clinton. Bellinger responded that it could not, and although the ultimate letter explicitly said, “None of us will vote for Donald Trump,” some of us insisted that it include as well, “We also know that many have doubts about Hillary Clinton, as do many of us.”
The thrust of the letter was the candidate’s general unfitness for office (would be the “most reckless president in American history” was the macro judgment). In making his case Bellinger researched literature from President Reagan’s advisers on what it takes to be president. He highlighted virtues like the ability to listen and to exhibit trust.
John felt that the best timing for the letter would be to wait until after the convention when Trump would have formally been made the candidate and more people were paying attention. By the end of June, though, he felt he had to move. He characterized it to me as an ethical and moral decision. The unanswered language of the campaign had already done enough damage.
John originally sent his draft to about twenty people, eighteen of whom said they were in. In early August he sent it to a larger group and again the response was positive. When he got to fifty, he figured he had enough and was ready to publish.
John compiled an impressive list of signatories. Although there were a few like me who had clearly done their last stint in government, many were younger folks who had just approached senior status at the end of the Bush administration and would be prime candidates for the next Republican White House—but not this one. The team back at Trump Tower was keeping book. There were no illusions that a President Trump, who valued loyalty above all, would ever forgive, forget, or reconcile with anyone whose name was at the bottom of this letter.
One of the complaints that we cataloged was that Mr. Trump “has shown no interest in educating himself. He continues to display an alarming ignorance of basic facts of contemporary international politics. Despite his lack of knowledge, Mr. Trump claims that he understands foreign affairs and ‘knows more about ISIS than the generals do.’”
A little more than a week after we published those words, candidate Trump was scheduled for his first formal intelligence briefing. These briefings after the nominating conventions are American political ritual. They were started by Harry Truman in 1952 and are usually seen as signs of our stability and maturity as a democracy: all candidates get the same briefing. Governor Romney got two in 2012 and would have had more had Hurricane Sandy not intervened. His vice presidential pick, Paul Ryan, actually got four.
In 2016 it was different. There was absolutely unprecedented media attention, including press stakeouts. Then there were grand debates on cable news over whether or not Mr. Trump should be trusted with classified information; former Senate majority leader Harry Reid suggested that Mr. Trump be given “fake” information during briefings because he couldn’t be counted on. Some Republicans raised the identical question for Secretary Clinton.
My view was simple: get the nomination, get the briefing. No need to make it more complicated than that. Just brief.
The morning of the first Trump briefing on August 17, he was asked on Trump-friendly Fox News whether he trusted U.S. intelligence. He replied, “Not so much from the people that have been doing it for our country. I mean, . . . look what’s happened over the years. I mean, it’s been catastrophic. In fact, I won’t use some of the people that are standards—you know, just use them, use them, use them, very easy to use them, but I won’t use them because they’ve made such bad decisions.”
That last was probably a reference to the people like me who had signed the early August letter, but it still set off some alarm bells within the intelligence community.
Since Mr. Trump had no background in national security, this would be his first real impression of intelligence. The IC wanted to get off on the right foot. The DNI’s transition team hoped the pessimistic Fox News exchange had just reflected Trump’s habit of reacting to questions without much thought.
The intelligence folks had been preparing for this moment since at least mid-July. They had gamed out potentially difficult scenarios that might arise before, during, and after the candidate briefing. They put the briefers though a “murder board,” a mock session where every imaginable unpleasantness was thrown at them.
One senior intelligence official began calling friends of the candidate. They conceded that he had little background on global affairs or on the structure of the intelligence community, but predicted that he would be attentive. The official also pulsed the community on the role that Mike Flynn might play in the session. One official formerly close to the departed DIA director warned, “If he starts talking, he’ll never shut up.” In the event, Flynn was active but far from obnoxious, and appeared to be most interested in impressing Trump.
By all accounts, the August intelligence briefing went well. These are generally broad overview briefings, “scene setters” in the language of the community, and there appears to have been a good give-and-take. Admittedly, the bar is low here. Just getting acquainted is a pretty good day.
Mike Flynn went out onto Fifth Avenue after the session to give the briefers high marks in front of the press, probably to blunt Trump’s extemporaneous criticism of the intelligence community that morning on Fox.
In fact, the second time around, in September, Mr. Trump went out of his way to tell the briefers himself that the sharp things he had said earlier didn’t apply to them, at least not personally. In essence, he seemed to be saying that he had been caught off guard by the Fox News reporter and that he respected the briefers and wanted them to know that.
The second briefing on September 7 seems to have gone well, too, but then the wheels started to fly off. That evening Matt Lauer interviewed the two candidates (sequentially) aboard the USS Intrepid in the Hudson River on NBC’s “Commander-in-Chief Forum.” Lauer asked Trump about the intelligence briefing earlier in the day. “Did you learn new things in that briefing?”
The candidate started well: “I have great respect for the people that gave us the briefings . . . they were terrific people.” Indeed, one of the IC participants later told me that the candidate walked into the September 7 meeting with a decidedly respectful air, the way a layman would walk into a conference of experts or specialists. But then Mr. Trump alleged that despite the great advice these professionals had given them, “President Obama and Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who is another total disaster, did exactly the opposite.”
When pressed on how he knew that, the candidate responded, “In almost every instance. And I could tell you. I have pretty good with the body language [sic]. I could tell they were not happy. Our leaders did not follow what they were recommending.”21
From an intelligence point of view, there was just so much wrong with that exchange. First, it broke the seal of the sacrament, so to speak. Candidate briefings are not required. They are offered by the incumbent as a matter of good governance, good faith, and courtesy. Prior to this night, it was unimaginable that such a meeting would be used against the one who had offered it.
Second, it turned the candidate’s intelligence briefers into political props and campaign tools.
Third, it was almost certainly wrong. I know the kind of people who do these briefings (I actually know some of the people who did this briefing). They never would have allowed their body language to betray any internal views, even if they had them. They’re too professional. They do this all the time. Trump’s commentary was pure bullshit.
Finally, the candidate’s comments set off a press feeding frenzy for the “inside baseball” account of that day’s meeting at Trump Tower. And, unhappily, some of the subsequent articles appeared to be sourced, at least in part, to current intelligence officials—an extremely troubling component of the 2016 race.
As someone might have tweeted: “Sad.”
And then there were the Russians. Lurking in the background of what was always going to be a difficult candidate–intelligence community relationship was the specter of Russian involvement in the American electoral process.
We now know that American intelligence was consumed by this well before it became public knowledge. Analysts started to pick up troubling indicators in the spring, part of a broader pattern of Russian assertiveness in Crimea, eastern Ukraine, Syria, the Baltics, and even in European elections. By late July there was mounting evidence that Russian meddling in the American election, especially in the theft and weaponizing of data, was different in quantity and quality from previous efforts, that it was more coherent in design and was being directed from the very top of the Russian government. And there were growing fears about how much the intelligence community was not yet seeing.
The director of national intelligence and the director of CIA worked to impose urgency about the issue on a reluctant incumbent political leadership. In early August, John Brennan got White House permission to phone his Russian counterpart, FSB22 director Alexander Bortnikov, and deliver what John later described to me as a “brushback pitch—high, hard and inside,” a warning that the Russian behavior was unacceptable.
President Obama issued another warning to Putin in September on the margins of a G20 meeting in China, and in early October Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson publicly announced that they were “confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations” and they did so “to interfere with the U.S. election process.”23
Candidate Trump would have none of it: “I notice, anytime anything wrong happens, they like to say the Russians are. . . . Maybe there is no hacking. But they always blame Russia. And the reason they blame Russia is because they think they’re trying to tarnish me with Russia.”24
Rejecting a fact-based intelligence assessment—not because of compelling contrarian data, but because it was inconsistent with a preexisting worldview or because it was politically inconvenient—is the stuff of ideological authoritarianism, not pragmatic democracy. And for the American intelligence community, seeing that from someone who could be president would have been very discomfiting.
And this was against the backdrop of other, difficult-to-explain behavior. I know I wasn’t the only one to notice, but candidate Trump really did sound a lot like Vladimir Putin. There was always a sympathetic authoritarian chord between them. Both were on record as admiring a strong leader. They’ve even complimented one another on the trait. Putin could have been humming along when Trump was claiming, “I alone can fix it,” during his Cleveland acceptance speech.
Both seemed to have a pretty conspiratorial view of the world. Putin comes by his naturally. He’s a product of a KGB Marxist philosophy in which the other—any other—is reflexively identified as hostile, created by immutable forces of history, something to be feared and ultimately crushed.
Sounding a little bit the conspiratorial Marxist himself, Mr. Trump claimed that there were forces that could rig the U.S. election. It’s a theme that Putin was happy to echo. Indeed, it’s a theme that his intelligence services were always happy to propagate.
And the American presidential candidate routinely came to the defense of his Russian soul mate. He echoed Mr. Putin when it came to Syria and ISIS. His second debate formulation—“I don’t like Assad at all, but Assad is killing ISIS”—was precisely the one that the Russian and Syrian presidents had been attempting to craft. “It’s me or the terrorists” has been Assad’s false choice. It’s hard to explain how the candidate of a major American political party could have gotten there, especially after receiving classified intelligence briefings.
Perhaps some of this could be explained by the murky ties of some on team Trump to things Russian. There is certainly a history there, and perhaps a comfort level as well. Former campaign manager Paul Manafort did consulting work for the ousted pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, and revelations from Kiev stoked questions about whether he should have registered here as working on behalf of a foreign power. Before 2017 was out, Manafort and a protégé would be indicted for conspiracy, money laundering, failure to register as an agent of a foreign power, and failure to report foreign bank and financial accounts—all linked to Manafort’s ties to Putin’s man in Kiev.
Manafort denied any role in suppressing a Republican platform commitment to send lethal defensive weapons to the Ukrainians in their battle against separatists and the Russian army. Although it’s clear that the suppression was initiated by Trump staffers, Trump has denied any personal responsibility for it. The whole episode begs explanation.
Then there was Carter Page, an adviser with intermittent contacts with the campaign, but with deep ties to Russian money, oil, and gas, who blamed aggressive Western policies for the mess in Ukraine and what he described as the “so-called” annexation of Crimea. So-called?
And what about the money? Although Trump claimed that “I have zero investments in Russia,” his son boasted in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. . . . [W]e see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Absent more detailed data (like tax returns), who knows?
We’ve really never seen anything like this before. Former acting CIA director Mike Morell said that Putin had cleverly recruited Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation. I preferred another term drawn from the arcana of the Soviet era: polezni durak. That’s the useful idiot, some naïf, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited. That’s the term I used in the Washington Post the Friday before the election. I admitted that it was a pretty harsh characterization and conceded that Trump supporters would be offended, but offered that it was the most benign interpretation of all this that I could come up with.
We didn’t know it then, of course, but that now infamous June meeting at Trump Tower that had Jared Kushner, Donald Trump, Jr., and Manafort on one side and two Russian lawyers, an interpreter, and two representatives of the Agalarov family (the Russian fixers for the meeting) on the other perfectly fits the useful idiot scenario. The Trump team had accepted the meeting expecting Russian government dirt on Hillary Clinton.
For veteran CIA case officers, the offer constituted a Russian soft approach, using people who did not have “SVR”25 on their business cards, but whose historical connections to the Russian government were clear. That made the meeting easier to accept from the American side while allowing the Russians plausible deniability should they need that in the future.
And the Russians accomplished several things with the session. First, they established the willingness of the Trump campaign to deal with the Russian government for dirt on Hillary Clinton. Second was confirming that the Trump campaign would not report such approaches and meetings to the U.S. government (otherwise they would have detected increased counterintelligence activity from the FBI). Third, since the two Russian negotiators had made a career of fighting for sanctions relief, I think the Russians would have fairly assessed that the Trumps were open to that linkage. Finally, the Trumps’ accepting the meeting created a potential point of leverage on the campaign and the later administration. It was the first down payment on a bit of Russian kompromat, as it were.
We now also know that another “adviser” to the campaign, twenty-nine-year-old George Papadopoulos, was approached by a Maltese academic fronting for the Russians and offered email dirt on Hillary Clinton. President Trump later dismissed Papadopoulos as a bit player in the campaign, a “coffee boy” according to one campaign official. But it was Trump who, when pressed by the Washington Post to name anyone advising him on foreign affairs, volunteered Papadopoulos as “an energy and oil consultant” and an “excellent guy.”26 I suspect that Papadopoulos was a bit player, but his actions put the lie to earlier categorical denials by the campaign about contacts with Russia, and the episode displays the costs of Trump’s “say anything” response to queries, a near-nonexistent vetting program, and the perils of chaos as a campaign organizing principle.
Then there was Donald Trump Jr.’s sporadic contacts via Twitter Direct Messaging with WikiLeaks, likely Julian Assange himself. The younger Trump spread the word throughout the senior campaign staff and seemed to synchronize campaign actions (Trump Sr. shout-outs for WikiLeaks; complaints about the press not following WikiLeaks’ exposés; directing followers to a WikiLeaks website) with the actions of WikiLeaks. Some of the synchronizing came even after American intelligence had publicly linked WikiLeaks to Russian efforts to interfere with the election.
There seemed no limits for the campaign with regard to propriety, appropriateness, or acting in a way consistent with American political values.
Those with more political or security experience might have warned team Trump about the Russians and told them that WikiLeaks was a “non-state hostile intelligence service” (as Trump CIA chief Mike Pompeo later put it), but this was a campaign and a candidate with an almost preternatural confidence, disdain for experts or expertise, and contempt, not just for their political opponents but also for much of the government they would eventually inherit.
That suggested some serious challenges for American intelligence as the news networks began to paint Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin a deep red late on the evening of November 8.
It was going to be a challenging transition.