In yet another article about the Tiny Tyrant turning sour and dark, and turning on everyone, including the beloved prince, Kushner, this was noted by aides:
Along with sources decrying the president’s temperament, the report also suggests that some aides believe Trump doesn’t understand his intel well enough to have leaked anything serious to the two Russian officials he met with in the Oval Office last week.
“In private, three administration officials conceded that they could not publicly articulate their most compelling — and honest — defense of the president: that Mr. Trump, a hasty and indifferent reader of printed briefing materials, simply did not possess the interest or knowledge of the granular details of intelligence gathering to leak specific sources and methods of intelligence gathering that would do harm to United States allies,” the report claimed.
I certainly don’t find that remotely difficult to believe; however, incompetency does not necessarily rule out leaking something of great value to others. I honestly can’t decide if this makes things better, worse, or simply more surreal. Surreality is grand and great in art. In every day life, not so much. I do think there is a great wellspring of malice in Trump, which is bubbling and frothing right now, as he seeks convenient people and places to blame for all and sundry. I don’t think malicious narcissism combined with incompetency is going to make anything better, and it worries me, along with the spreading idea that Trump is simply so incompetent he’s harmless. I’m afraid of people becoming complacent, considering him to be nothing more than a bumbling fool, and finding reasons to handwave his behaviour and actions. I don’t think we can afford to do that.
There’s that sneaky phrasing again. Note how that doesn’t cover the actual intel. They’ve been pulling this switcheroo since their first denials. That more than anything convinces me that there was something important leaked. If not, they’d just say so.
Oh, that’s a good catch, slid right past my nose, it did. Yeah, you don’t have leak sources and methods to leak the intel.
Things can be both not much better and so very much worse, I suppose.
It went from “Fake news!” Monday night to “Trump has every right to do it” on Tuesday morning, all while scrambling with the CIA and NSA to minimize the damage. There’s no doubt the intel was leaked. Given it looks to be Israeli intel, leaked to Iran’s biggest ally, Trump’s meeting in Jerusalem later this week should be interesting. Regardless, the US won’t be getting a lot of important intelligence from them again any time soon.
Imagine if, prior to 9/11, a Russian diplomat had leaked to Bush that there was something in the wind. There would be some opportunists in Russia calling for their head for leaking classified material, and others would shrug.
It’s complicated, of course. I did a posting over at stderr about it. It’s complicated by the fact that everyone involved in this little shit-show is utterly scummy manipulative liars -- or stupid. The only people who come out looking good are, once again, the Russians.
A very relative term in this case, of course.
Yes, Trump is too stupid to be consciously evil. The problem is that he’s so powerful that he can wreck utter havoc with petty maliciousness.