To Russia with Love
The Trump administration has responded aggressively to CIA reports that conclude that Russia attempted to intervene in the recent American election in an attempt to influence the outcome. In a strongly worded statement Trump harshly condemned the actions of the Russia and the Putin government and called for a thorough investigation of state sponsored interference in the American electoral process.
Just kidding!
The Trump team’s actual response? They defended Russia against the CIA’s charges by releasing a public statement calling into question agency’s competence and professionalism. Stop and think about this for a moment: when forced to choose between which version of reality he was going to embrace, Russia’s or what his own intelligence service was telling him, the President Elect of the United States publicly took the side of Russia. This on top of reports that his Orangeness is only taking one intelligence briefing a week. I guess he thinks he understands foreign intelligence better than the CIA just as he believes he “knows more about ISIS than the generals”. That or he lacks the intellect and the attention span to assimilate any information that won’t fit on a fortune cookie.
As was repeated over and over again during the election cycle by thoughtful people from across the political spectrum, Tump’s disconnection from reality combined with his resistance to new information, his instability, and his profound narcissism renders him not just completely unfit to serve as the leader of a country; it makes him a clear and present threat to global stability in that role. And the echo chamber of sycophants, panderers, enablers and conspiracy theorists that he has surrounded himself with only magnifies that danger.
This is as bizarre as it is sobering. And of course it is only going to get worse...
