Trump's Ego Is a Risk to National Security
One of the more comical episodes recounted in Robert Mueller’s report occurred in the summer of 2017 when President Trump, days after futilely ordering the special counsel fired, dictated a note to Corey Lewandowski. The president told his former campaign manager to copy down a speech for then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to read. Trump thought Sessions could effectively un-recuse himself from the investigation and clear the president all at once, declaring, according to Lewandowski’s notes, that “there were no Russians involved with him. I know it for a fact b/c I was there. He didn’t do anything wrong except he ran the greatest campaign in American history.”
Last Thursday, for the first time, we could read between the redacted black lines and understand for ourselves what Robert Mueller found out about Russia’s interference in our elections on Donald Trump’s behalf. Discussing it as theoretical, or affixing a “-gate” to it as if it is some kind of media-generated scandal is something I won’t do. Despite the tired protestations of an increasingly desperate few, it is clear that the Russian government did this, that the president and his campaign knew about it and were largely fine with it. I say “largely” only because it is clear that Trump’s ego couldn’t quite handle it. As he sat in the Oval Office dictating that letter to Lewandowski, he had to have known how much help he got from the Kremlin. But not only could he not admit it, he saw self-aggrandizement as a way out of his mess.
Trump’s job makes all of his psychological pathologies our problem, and that is why a Wednesday New York Times story about election security was so alarming. Apparently Kirstjen Nielsen, the former Homeland Security secretary whom Trump pushed out weeks before the Mueller report’s release, was busy with something other than gaslighting the nation about the administration’s grotesque family-separation policy. She was trying to prepare for the evolving ways that the Russians would try to interfere in the 2020 election, whether by further perverting social media, disrupting power grids, hacking election machines, or whatnot. Before she even could convene a White House meeting on the urgent topic, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney reportedly told her not to bring it up in front of the boss, lest he feel that his 2016 victory was delegitimized. She eventually gave up. Nothing got done.
Trump and those closest to him continue to live in a universe where Russia just bought “some Facebook ads,” as son-in-law Jared Kushner incorrectly put it during a TIME magazine event in New York on Tuesday. It would be one thing if that willful ignorance manifested itself merely as the occasional sound bite at a public event, quickly debunked and dismissed. But the report reminds us that John Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, eliminated the position of cybersecurity coordinator last year, even as Silicon Valley was helping DHS to thwart foreign attacks during the 2018 midterms. The job of minding the very problem that the Russians exploited has been left to junior aides while people like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo say such believable tough-guy things about Russia like, “We will make very clear to them this is unacceptable behavior.” I’m sure that Vladimir Putin will take that under advisement.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-ego-national-security-russia-826995/
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