Not the deep state

Yesterday’s testimony in Congress by America’s intelligence elite was dramatic: it contradicted President Trump’s ill-founded opinions on Iran, ISIS, North Korea, Russia, and China. Iran, the intel chiefs said, is still observing the nuclear deal. ISIS is not gone from Syria or Iraq. North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons, which Kim Jong Un views as vital to regime survival. Russia not only interfered in the 2016 election but is expanding its efforts. China’s economic difficulties are not due to America’s tariffs. It is almost as if they decided, with Ben Franklin, that we all hang together or we all hang separately.

Trump remained unimpressed. He denounced them all for failing to agree with their master. The President thinks he knows better. He is unwilling to entertain even the possibility he might be wrong. This is ignorance compounded with lack of intelligence. Only a profoundly stupid and lazy person would fail to ask himself why so many well-informed and manifestly intelligent people disagree, even at peril of losing their jobs. The notion that they would do it to protect their country from its greatest security risk–the man in the Oval Office–is anathema to Trump. He recognizes only egotism as a motive, since that is the only one he knows.

Fortunately, the Congress is moving for good reason to hem Trump in. You don’t have to think the US should stay in Syria or Afghanistan forever to believe that Trump’s tweeting and leaking of precipitous withdrawals is unwise. American diplomats needed more time than the President gave them to get a decent price for shipping out and making sure that whoever fills the vacuum will not put the US at risk. Pretending that North Korea will exchange its nukes and missiles for Trump-like hotel developments is silly.

Trump’s meeting with President Putin in Buenos Aires last November with no US officials present was revealed today. This is not just a breach of protocol. It is profoundly dangerous, since Moscow knows more about the meeting than Washington. Only a neophyte maverick would allow himself to be trapped into such a meeting, unless of course the purpose was to get instructions from Putin. Which do you prefer, a President who is embarrassingly unsophisticated or a President who qualifies as a Russian dupe or maybe even agent?

There is another explanation: that Trump enjoys defying convention and is happy to see his name in the headlines, no matter the occasion. No publicity is bad publicity for him and Roger Stone, who is blabbering himself into a lifetime in prison. Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., looks set to follow him soon, as he was also enmeshed with Wikileaks during the campaign and lied to Congress about it. The missing link is evidence that the President was privy to or even ordered the contacts with the Russians that led to the publication of the Democratic National Committee’s emails. But there too doubts are hard to harbor: he appealed to Moscow in public to hack Hillary’s emails. Putin gave Trump the closest approximation within his control, in precisely the time frame Don Jr. favored.

President Trump really is America’s greatest security risk today. The intelligence people I know would find that proposition appalling but incontrovertible. Are they aiming to unseat him before he does much more damage? Their well-founded, professional testimony to lawmakers who have that power is one more step in the right direction: removing a president who is endangering the United States.