Day 741: Trump tells intelligence community to ‘go back to school’ two sentences after using wrong form of ‘there’
For all of the “law and order” professing and military-touting and flag hugging that the GOP professes to do, the past two years have been strange, to say the least. Relentless attacks on the FBI and the intelligence community as a whole have come from Donald Trump and tacitly — if not emphatically — backed up by the rest of the party.
Wednesday was Exhibit 24,408 of that idea when Trump decided to attack the intelligence community for, what he believes, to be ignorance about Iran and the Middle East.
Trump is insulting non-partisan career intelligence officials who have spent decades studying the geopolitical situation in the region. If anyone is far from naive about the issues and history, it’s them. Meanwhile, over the past decades, Trump has been studying the goings-on of the real estate market, bankrupting casinos and trying to figure out whether Lil Jon or NeNe Leakes effectively created a hair styling campaign on Celebrity Apprentice.
It’s also positively Trumpian to tell someone to “go back to school” when discussing Iran’s economy immediately after saying “there economy” instead of the grammatically correct “their economy.”
The message of Trump’s tweets is illogical, too. In one breath he’s claiming that ending the Iran deal was a good thing because Iran was “making trouble” in the region (though by all accounts they were actually following the parameters of the deal). However, in the next breath he says that the Iranians are now firing rockets and creating turmoil. Trump wants to claim that ending the Iran deal was good and that the current situation is bad. He also wants to pretend that the current situation — of which his characterization isn’t really borne out by publicly-known facts — has nothing to do with ending the deal.
His rant came after he was challenged by intelligence chiefs when they were questioned about national security issues.
America’s top intelligence officials on Tuesday appeared to challenge some of President Donald Trump’s most prominent claims about global national security issues, warning lawmakers that ISIS is still a serious threat to U.S. interests around the world, acknowledging that Iran has — at least temporarily — abandoned its efforts to build nuclear weapons, and insisting that North Korea is “unlikely to give up” its own nuclear arsenal.
The testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee coincided with the release of the U.S. intelligence community’s latest “worldwide threat assessment,” which noted that even “some U.S. allies and partners are seeking greater independence from Washington in response to their perceptions of changing US policies on security and trade.”
In classic Trump fashion, he didn’t actually read or watch the testimony, but seethed when he saw television chyrons indicate that he had been contradicted.
Trump is woefully overmatched on a number of vital issues, but perhaps nowhere more so than on foreign policy and national security. In an especially dangerous combination, he’s confident in his own knowledge, while having remarkably little of it.
741 days in, 721 to go
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