Donald Trump Is a National-Security Risk
The GOP candidate should not be given intelligence briefings.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Since 1952, the White House has allowed major-party candidates access to classified intelligence briefings so that they will be current on important issues if they win the election. Trump should be denied this courtesy.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
An Insider Threat
According to reports last week, the U.S. intelligence community is preparing to give Donald Trump classified intelligence briefings, a courtesy every White House extends to major-party candidates to ensure an effective transition. An excellent tradition—but not one that should be observed this year.
The decision rests, as always, with the sitting president, and Joe Biden is likely to continue this practice so that he will not be accused of “politicizing” access to intelligence. Such accusations need not be taken seriously; they would only be more meaningless noise from a GOP that has already stumbled in a clumsy attempt to impeach Biden after leveling charges of corruption at both him and his son. And although denying Trump access to classified briefs would produce squawks and yowls from Republicans, it would also serve as a reminder that Trump cannot be trusted with classified information.
The risks of denying Trump these early briefings are negligible. As we learned from his presidency, Trump is fundamentally unbriefable: He doesn’t listen, and he doesn’t understand complicated national-security matters anyway. The problem with giving Trump these briefings, however, isn’t that he’s ignorant. He’s also dangerous, as his record shows.
Indeed, if Trump were a federal employee, he’d have likely already been stripped of his clearances and escorted from the building. I say this from experience: I was granted my first security clearance when I was 25 years old—Ronald Reagan was still president, which tells you how long ago that was—and I held a top-secret clearance when I advised a senior U.S. senator during the Gulf War. I then held a clearance as a Department of Defense employee for more than a quarter century.
Government employees who hold clearances have to attend annual refresher courses about a variety of issues, including some pretty obvious stuff about not writing down passwords or taking money from a friendly Chinese businessman wearing an American baseball cap. (No, really, that’s a scenario in some of the course materials.) But one area of annual training is always about “insider threats,” the people in your own organization who may pose risks to classified information. Federal workers are taken through a list of behaviors and characteristics that should trigger their concern enough to report the person involved, or at least initiate a talk with a supervisor.
Trump checks almost every box on those lists. (You can find examples of insider-threat training here and here, but every agency has particular briefs they give to their organizations.)
In general, clearance holders are told to watch their co-workers for various warnings, including expressions of hostility to the U.S. government, erratic behavior, unreported contact or financial dealings with foreigners, unexplained wealth (or severe financial problems), an interest in classified material beyond the subject’s work requirements, or evidence of illegal drug use or substance abuse. Every case is different, but rarely does a government employee raise almost every one of these red flags.
Opposing U.S. policy, for example, is not a problem for people with clearances—I did it myself—but Trump’s hatred of the current administration is wedded to a generic contempt for what he calls the “deep state,” a slam he applies to any American institution that tries to hold him accountable for his behavior. This kind of anti-establishment rage would put any clearance in jeopardy, especially given Trump’s rantings about how the current government (and American society overall) is full of “vermin.”
Meanwhile, a federal worker who had even a fraction of the cache of classified documents Trump took with him after he left Washington would be in a world of trouble—especially if he or she told the Justice Department to go pound sand after being instructed to return them. And by “trouble,” I mean “almost certainly arrested and frog-marched to jail.”
Trump’s knotty and opaque finances—and what we now know to be his lies about his wealth—in New York before he was a candidate would likely also have tanked his access to highly classified information. (Government workers can have a lot of problems of all kinds, but lying about them is almost always deadly for a clearance.) Worse, anyone seeking even a minor clearance who was as entangled as Trump has been over the years with the Russian government and who held a bank account in China would likely be laughed right out of the office.
Trump’s open and continuing affection for men such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korean Maximum-Weirdo Dynasty Boss Kim Jong Un would also be, to say the least, a matter of concern for any security organization. (Or, I should say, for any American security organization. Russia’s FSB, I’m sure, would see no issues here.)
But even if Trump could explain away his creepy dictator crushes and clarify his byzantine finances, he is currently facing more than half a billion dollars in court judgments against him.
That’s a lot of money for anyone, and Trump’s scramble to post a bond for even a small portion of that suggests that the man is in terrible financial condition, which is always a bright-red light in the clearance process. (Debt trips up a lot of people, and I knew folks who had clearances suspended over their money troubles.)
Whether Trump is too erratic or volatile for elected office is a judgment for voters, but his statements and public behavior have long suggested (at least to me and many others) that he is an emotionally unstable person. Emotional problems in themselves are not a disqualification; we all have them. But Trump’s irrational tirades and threats are the kind of thing that can become a clearance issue. The former president’s lack of impulse control—note that he has been unable to stop attacking the writer E. Jean Carroll, despite huge court judgments against him for defaming her—could also lead him to blurt out whatever he learns from his briefings during rallies or public appearances if he thinks it will help him.
As to the other major category considered in granting clearances, I have no idea whether Trump uses or abuses substances or medications of any kind. But what I do know is that Trump encouraged an attack on the U.S. constitutional order and tried to overturn a legal election. He has now vowed to pardon people who were duly convicted in courts of law for their actions in the January 6 insurrection—he calls them “hostages”—and are now serving the sentences they’ve earned.
In sum, Trump is an anti-American, debt-ridden, unstable man who has voiced his open support for violent seditionists. If he were any other citizen asking for the privilege of handling classified material, he would be sent packing.
If he is elected, of course, government employees will have no choice but to give the returning president access to everything, including the files that are among the holiest of holies, such as the identities of our spies overseas and the status of our nuclear forces. Senior civil servants could refuse and publicly resign, and explain why, but in the end, the system (despite Trump’s “deep state” accusations) is designed to support the president, not obstruct him, and a reelected President Trump will get whatever he demands.
If the American people decide to allow Trump back into the White House, President Biden can’t do anything about it. In the meantime, however, he can limit the damage by delaying Trump’s access to classified material for as long as possible.
Related:
Today’s News
- The House passed a bill that would either force TikTok’s Chinese-founded owner, ByteDance, to divest from the app or have it banned in the United States.
- The judge in the Georgia criminal case against Donald Trump and his allies dismissed six charges from the 41-count indictment for lacking sufficient information about the defendants’ alleged efforts to solicit public officials to violate their oaths of office.
- Last night, Biden and Trump secured the delegates needed to clinch their parties’ nominations for the presidential election.
Dispatches
- The Weekly Planet: Climate change threatens to make summer stone fruits smaller and less sweet, Zoë Schlanger writes.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
‘Some Damn Fine Shoes’
By Steven Kurutz
In 1989, the American workwear brand Carhartt produced a special clothing collection to mark its centennial. While shopping with my wife at a vintage store in New Jersey a few years ago, I came across one of these garments—a cotton-duck work jacket with a patch on the chest pocket that read “100 years, 1889–1989.” The same was stamped on each brass button. Intrigued, I took the jacket off its hanger. The inside was lined with a blanketlike fabric to provide extra warmth when working outdoors. “Crafted with pride in U.S.A.” read the neck tag, and the underside bore the insignia of the United Garment Workers of America, a now-defunct labor union founded around the same time as Carhartt itself.
Nineteen eighty-nine doesn’t seem that long ago. But holding this jacket in my hands, I began to have the feeling you get when looking at a very old photograph. I was holding an artifact from a lost world.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Listen. Ariana Grande’s new album, Eternal Sunshine, puts a musical spin on her divorce drama that’s beautiful—and a little poisonous, Spencer Kornhaber writes.
Read. In Percival Everett’s latest book, James, he imagines Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s enslaved sidekick.
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.