Last week I watched with dismay the discussion on the Charlie Rose Show about the ongoing fight between President-elect Donald Trump and the U.S. intelligence community. Rose and his guests (David Ignatius of the Washington Post, Michael Shear of the New York Times and Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor of The Atlantic Magazine) kept trying to identify substantive (and erroneous) reasons for Trump’s denigration of the intelligence community and his apparent admiration of Russia and Vladimir Putin.
The real reason for Trump’s disparagement, in my judgment, however, is his fundamental character flaw that has been identified by Michael J. Morell, the acting director and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2010 to 2013. In his January 6 New York Times article, Morell, wrote that Trump’s disparagement was damaging the intelligence community and would continue to do so. But it opened with this statement, “When I wrote in August 2016 . . . that Donald J. Trump’s character traits posed a national security threat, I didn’t imagine that the first manifestation of that dynamic could play out” with the CIA.[1]
Morell’s August 2016 article directly made the character flaw point.[2] He said, “the character traits [Mr. Trump] has exhibited during the primary season suggest he would be a poor, even dangerous, commander in chief.” Morell added, “These traits include his obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights, his tendency to make decisions based on intuition, his refusal to change his views based on new information, his routine carelessness with the facts, his unwillingness to listen to others and his lack of respect for the rule of law.”
These character flaws, according to Morell’s earlier article, were obviously seen by Mr. Putin who was “a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.”
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[1] Morell, Trump’s Dangerous Anti-C.I.A. Crusade, N.Y. Times (Jan. 6, 2017).
[2] Morell, I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton, N.Y. Times (Aug. 5, 2016).