New Republic: Trump’s War on the Intelligence Community Is All About Ego

By Jeet Heer:

Still, that’s par for the course when it comes to Trump’s tweets. But now we’re learning that his feud with the intelligence community goes beyond Twitter. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Trump believes the nation’s top spy agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has become “bloated” and “politicized.” Trump and his advisors are “also working on a plan to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency, cutting back on staffing at its Virginia headquarters and pushing more people out into field posts around the world.” An anonymous source close to the Trump transition told the Journal, “The view from the Trump team is the intelligence world has become completely politicized. They all need to be slimmed down. The focus will be on restructuring the agencies and how they interact.”

As president, Trump would be perfectly within his rights to question findings by the intelligence community and restructure it to suit his needs. He also wouldn’t be the first president to feud with the intelligence community—at his own risk. “No president has ever taken on the CIA and come out looking good,” an unnamed White House official told the Journal. This is perhaps too sweeping a judgement, but there is definitely a troubled history.

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On CNN on Wednesday, former CIA official Philip Mudd said Trump “can question the intelligence. He cannot humiliate the people who have offered their lives to collect that intelligence.” The word “humiliate” is key. The president-elect, as always on Twitter, is playing a game of dominance, asserting his alpha-male right to rule. The problem is that a humiliated intelligence community will also be a hobbled one, much more likely to tell the president what he wants to hear and not offer the critical analysis that informs good decision-making. Such an intelligence community might also seek a more receptive audience, in the form of leaks to the press, and then Trump himself would be the humiliated one.

The Full Story (January 5, 2017)