No one will stick his neck out for the president. One form of punishment that the intelligence community can mete out will likely come to gall Trump and his team most: passivity. Inevitably, there will be missions that Trump wants carried out secretly and effectively, so he can avoid deploying the military and suffering public criticism.
But it is an iron law of bureaucracy that no agency will knock itself out for a leader it deems capricious, especially one who cannot be relied on to defend his own if something goes wrong.
Considering the crowd around him, it may not be long before Trump asks, for example, for covert options to destabilize the Iranian regime. The answer from the intel community will never be no. Instead, the planners will brief the president on three different approaches. Then they will assess the risk of failure for each at 60-80 percent, providing the Oval Office with a dare it cannot possibly accept. For some, of course, this could turn out to be a silver lining in otherwise dismal story.
President-elect Trump has shown distinctive tastes in world leaders, quoting Benito Mussolini approvingly, openly admiring Putin and lauding Saddam Hussein’s counterterrorism efforts. Another figure who fits well into this lineup is the totalitarian Josef Stalin, who also ignored and disparaged the foreign intelligence that was brought to him, especially the assessments in 1940-1941 about a Nazi buildup on Soviet Russia’s borders. That didn’t work out too well for Stalin and his people. Trump might ponder that.
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