by Tom Maertens
Tom Maertens served as a White House National Security Council director during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
The latest White House memoir, by former National Security Advisor John Bolton, paints Donald Trump as ignorant, narcissistic and “stunningly uninformed.” Trump did not know, for example, that the United Kingdom had nukes and thought Finland was a part of Russia.
Carl Bernstein, of Woodward/Bernstein fame, interviewed a dozen present and former White House officials who concluded that Trump’s deranged phone calls with foreign leaders were a danger to national security because of his stream-of-consciousness ramblings, intuitions, guesswork, the opinions of Fox News hosts and social media misinformation (Esquire).
He is also alienating key allies, especially women. He reportedly told German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, who has a doctorate in quantum chemistry and worked as a research scientist, that she was stupid, and British Prime Minister Theresa May that she was “weak.” With Trump, you expect misogyny, along with his racism, xenophobia, and white nationalism.
Both Bolton and Bernstein, quoting former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, all agreed that Trump himself poses a “danger for the republic.”
He came close to withdrawing from NATO, the backbone of Western security for seven decades, with no planning or policy discussion, which would have been an enormous gift to Putin.
A new book, “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West” by former Financial Times Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton, makes hundreds of references to Trump’s 30-year relationship with the Russian mafia, which has long been controlled by the KGB/FSB, as Karen Dawisha (Putin’s Kleptocracy) has also reported.
Craig Unger (House of Trump, House of Putin) asserts that Trump is controlled by Russia and Putin, and is in fact, a Russian agent.
Trump is dismantling democratic institutions and firing anyone who can challenge his illegal actions, including five inspectors general and such prosecutors as Geoffrey Berman. He has the blind acquiescence of Mitch McConnell and Vichy Republicans in Congress like Jim Hagedorn.
Trump sees the press as more of an enemy than Russia, which is reportedly paying to have American troops killed. Bolton describes a summer 2019 meeting in New Jersey where Trump said journalists “…should be executed. They are scumbags.”
Trump has said that he wants to slow down coronavirus testing because the tests find too many sick people. That’s like saying you are going to stop weighing yourself so you don’t gain weight. And he thinks Angela Merkel is stupid? Meanwhile, the death toll has reached 130,000 people and rising and Trump is still telling lies and pretending he’s a hero.
At a recent campaign rally in Tulsa, Trump promised that he would “always protect patients with pre-existing conditions, always, always.” But two days later, his administration filed an 82-page brief with the Supreme Court to repeal Obamacare, which would deprive 23 million Americans of health care — in the middle of a pandemic.
The press has reported that Putin’s spy services secretly offered bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Bolton personally briefed Trump on the matter in March 2019, but Trump has taken no action. In fact, despite this information, Trump actually rewarded Putin by inviting him to the G-7, and then unilaterally announced a U.S. troop drawdown from Germany. Now he’s calling the charges a hoax, a sure sign they are true. Donald Trump defends statues of racists and traitors but won’t defend our troops against Russia.
Several sources report that Trump hates to hear criticism of Russia from his intelligence briefers, which can provoke a tirade or an “eruption that will send things off the rails.” Bolton says he still has scars from bringing up things about Russia to Trump; another briefer told the WSJ that when he would raise issues related to Russia, “Trump would flip out.”
Multiple sources including three former CIA directors have stated their conclusions (My View March 11) that Trump is a Kremlin asset who is controlled by Putin. This would explain why Trump got rid of the top FBI officers working on Russian organized crime and espionage, such as Comey, Peter Strzok, and Andrew McCabe; he wanted to disrupt U.S. counterintelligence before they unraveled his long cooperation with Russia.
Trump even publicly acknowledged seeking to cripple the investigation into Russia’s hacking-and-disinformation campaign when he fired Comey and bragged about it to the Russian ambassador.
Trump has clearly signaled that Putin can get away with anything; he is giving aid and comfort to our enemy, the definition of treason. The organization VoteVets proclaimed Trump America’s number one traitor.
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