Last week, intelligence community (IC) officials presented their annual threat assessment to Congress. All of this information was known to the President and his cabinet, but the IC officials were quickly scolded for the "differences" between their assessment and the President's ideas on what the nation should do in terms of national security. While I don’t want my views to interfere with my thoughts on this topic, the situation that occurred with this annual threat assessment is no surprise to me. The word that first came to my mind upon reading President Trump’s tweets criticizing the IC officials for being "passive and naive" but then saying that the media "distorted" the testimony last week was “contradictory,” which I believe summarizes a lot of this President’s term.
In this most unbiased way possible, this is exactly what our current President is notorious for doing – contradicting himself, and ruining his relationships with those who he should be closest with, like the intelligence community.
Although I do not know the stresses of being the United States President, I do understand what it is like to oversee a group of 5,000 students in my capacity as Student Body President – and from that, I understand the importance of trusting those who are “experts” in their realms, since it is absolutely impossible for me to have in-depth knowledge on everything I must deal with on a daily basis. As we have learned in class, the intelligence community is essential to the executive branch. When I learned about this, I thought about how important it is for the President and his (and potentially her!) cabinet to maintain a close, positive, and communicative relationship.
We, as the general public, have seen that this certainly is not the case with President Trump, and that is deeply concerning. I can only imagine that the disconnect and mistrust between the IC and the executive has caused concern for many Americans, especially those who may not fully look into what the news media puts out there and thus they believe whatever they read on either side of the story.
There has been real damage done in this scenario based on what I have explained above regarding the public’s reliance on news media and apathy towards finding out the “real story” (which, in this case would be the fact that the IC leaders delivered their assessment in a straightforward manner while the media hyped up the differences). In Shane Harris’s post on The Washington Post, he says “the distance between the intelligence community and the White House extended to areas that have ignited fierce political debates in Washington,” and that, in my opinion, is damaging. One of the other interesting quotes I pulled from this post was the issue regarding the “security crisis at the US-Mexico border,” which as we have seen with the most recent shutdown since Trump believes there is a national emergency to build his wall, but none of the IC officials said there was a crisis.
Another difference that stood out to me was the warning from the IC that the Islamic State is capable of attacking us, but Trump is adamant about withdrawing troops from Syria because the group has been “defeated.” When the President took his anxious fingers to Twitter to say that the intelligence chiefs were passive and naïve, I believe he did so because he didn’t want to be embarrassed by his rather extreme views on what we should do as a nation versus what we realistically can accomplish based on the IC’s threat assessment. I feel sad for those officials who get up there and present everything that they have worked so hard on only to be completely embarrassed and discredited by their own President. They are the experts, not Trump.
While the press may have distorted these differences, who is to blame - them, or our President?
That's all for now.
Lynds
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