Day 744: Trump doesn’t care about intelligence briefings if they contradict with his beliefs
Smart people are aware that decision-making stems from knowing what you know and knowing what you don’t know. A president must navigate stepping into a role where thousands of topics and subtopics are foreign to him or her. Making informed decisions is critical to success.
Donald Trump has chosen to eschew that natural understanding and pretend he knows everything about everything. This is laughable when he claims it about silly topics, but petrifying when it comes to others, like national security.
According to TIME, Trump ignores advice during intelligence briefings if the information contradicts his gut feeling about a topic or one of his previous talking points. He’ll quickly tune out if the information isn’t presented in a way that’s visually interesting or fails to use his name enough times.
Citing multiple in-person episodes, these intelligence officials say Trump displays what one called “willful ignorance” when presented with analyses generated by America’s $81 billion-a-year intelligence services. The officials, who include analysts who prepare Trump’s briefs and the briefers themselves, describe futile attempts to keep his attention by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences, and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible.
What is most troubling, say these officials and others in government and on Capitol Hill who have been briefed on the episodes, are Trump’s angry reactions when he is given information that contradicts positions he has taken or beliefs he holds. Two intelligence officers even reported that they have been warned to avoid giving the President intelligence assessments that contradict stances he has taken in public.
Believing he knows more than he does is especially striking considering he’s unfamiliar with basic facts, such as that Nepal and Bhutan are independent countries and are not part of India.
In another briefing on South Asia, Trump’s advisors brought a map of the region from Afghanistan to Bangladesh, according to intelligence officers with knowledge of the meeting and congressional officials who were briefed on it. Trump, they said, pointed at the map and said he knew that Nepal was part of India, only to be told that it is an independent nation. When said he was familiar with Bhutan and knew it, too, was part of India, his briefers told him that Bhutan was an independent kingdom. Last August, Politico reported on president’s mispronunciation of the names of the two countries during the same briefing.
Trump’s hubris is risking the safety of the U.S. On issues from troop withdrawal in Syria to nuclear proliferation in North Korea to espionage in China, intelligence officials are worried that Trump not only doesn’t understand the inherent risks, but he’s not even listening when they’re explained to him.
744 days in, 718 to go
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