Former CIA Director Michael Hayden in an opinion piece for the New York Times calls President Donald Trump a liar and says his repeated slights on the intelligence community have taken a large toll.
“We in the intelligence world have dealt with obstinate and argumentative presidents through the years. But we have never served a president for whom ground truth really doesn’t matter,” says Hayden, who directed Intelligence under the last three presidents.
Intelligence work, says Hayden, is based on “gathering, evaluating and evaluating information, and then disseminating conclusions for use, study or refutation.”
Trump, though, reflects and exploits “post-truth” thinking, “a condition where facts are less influential in shaping opinion than emotion and personal belief,” writes Hayden.
Specifically, Hayden criticizes Trump’s executive travel order banning immigrants from six Muslim-majority countries because he is “trying to fulfill a campaign promise based on exaggerated fears about immigrants and unfair criticism of the refugee vetting system,” his plan to end the Iranian nuclear deal even “in the face of intelligence that Iran has not committed a material breach of the compact,” and his characterization of the Russia probe as a “witch hunt.”
“The president only recently and grudgingly agreed to impose sanctions on Russians believed to have interfered in the American election, and he continues to characterize the investigation as a 'witch hunt' while relentlessly attacking agencies of his own administration,” writes Hayden.
The Trump campaign has also “normalized lying to an unprecedented degree,” and the president is more committed to carrying out campaign promises than listening to his intelligence officers, he said.
Trump, though, did get it right one time, Hayden added – his speech on Afghanistan last summer.
“These are truly uncharted waters for the country,” writes Hayden. “We have in the past argued over the values to be applied to objective reality, or occasionally over what constituted objective reality, but never the existence or relevance of objective reality itself.”
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