It’s not “intelligence” as most would think of it, but I would say Trump is probably one of the “most successful” (so far, anyway) all-time Con Men, especially of the contemporary media era. He literally conned his way into the Oval Office. With a lot of crooked help, obviously. It’s a talent, I suppose.
In The Cult of Trump, the author (a cult specialist and deprogrammer) does ascribe this to Trump and those like him. Acting like he’s always just a blabbering idiot when he repeats things, says things that are internally incongruent, etc. etc. – they are all literal techniques of cult leaders and programmers, and the author says Trump absolutely knows what he is doing, even if he’s so good at it it’s on auto-pilot. All of the confusion, says the author, is what actually causes a good number of people to go into a haze, and become highly susceptible to, well, whatever Dear Leader tells them to think and feel. He argues that it is absolutely happening at the level of the so-called “reptilian brain.” This isn’t happening in the neo-cortex, so-to-speak – it’s limbic.
I can imagine scenarios in which George W. Bush might have benefited from Bill Clinton’s thoughts on developing intelligence regarding Al Qaeda or JFK would be interested in hearing Dwight Eisenhower’s take on events in Southeast Asia.
I have a much harder time imagining why any President would want input from Trump on any topic, ever, except maybe to confirm that they were doing the opposite of whatever he would do in the same situation.
Actually I think Biden should just trolley and go for the lulz and make every single briefing a status report on the impeachment and how much better a job the current president is doing with COVID, the economy, and just basic human decency.
A steady briefing of the progress of the SDNY case should also be worth at least a bullet point or two.
I was thinking similar. There’s no way he’d actually consume any of the information in the format it’s likely being presented to Biden (you know, nuanced written documents) so they’d either have to make a special coloring-book version, or it’d just be passed on to foreign intel for profit, or both.
The former moron in chief set the precedent. This is a step toward righting a wrong. We should NEVER FEAR DOING WHAT IS RIGHT just because the assholes on the other side might do what is wrong and use our actions for cover.
Yeah, my understanding is that DJT’s “intel briefings” were literally reduced to a few pages of bullet points and pictures. Beyond astonishing/catastrophic, but so much falls into that category…
I’ll add that listening to NPR this evening, their coverage of this issue really did make it sound like it was getting shut off. It wasn’t relayed definitively, but seemed to imply the decision was in Biden’s hand, and he was making it.
I suppose so long as GW Bush is still around, if the next Republican president threatens to cut off Intel briefings to the Democratic predecessor, there could be a very public disowning and threat that he or she is jeopardizing their own membership into the President’s Club.
Or GWB just shrugs and says, “I guess I’ll jus’ be busy behind the Xerox machine every week.”
It really isn’t.
“we should give a literal traitor classified info when they have no conceivable reason to have it, because we don’t want to make our sworn mortal political enemies dislike us” is a much worse precedent to set.
That’s actually a pretty brilliant idea. Keep up the ruse of giving him intelligence briefings, filled with bogus info, and closely monitor the deep back-channels around the world to see if the “classified information” pops-up somewhere. It would pretty much be a smoking gun that Trump is funneling information to foreign governments. We sometimes call that treason.
The White House has already clarified its statement.
honestly, this news item seems like an investment in burnishing the aura of the presidency. Kind of like “residents of the White House need to follow these 59 weird rules—number 12 is shocking!”
Classic spycraft tactic. Like how Tyrion Lannister told each member of the Small Council he was marrying of Cersei’s daughter to a different kingdom to see which one was leaking information to Cersei.
Totes. I would assume this kind of thing also might be done with steganographic techniques, embedded in digital documents in non-obvious ways. Corporations have got to do this for highly sensitive docs, probably? I think I learned about it mostly from William Gibson in Pattern Recognition.
