Donald Trump started the morning with another of his copy/paste oh-so-inspiring just like every other endorsement endorsements. But of course, that was the perigee of Trump’s brush with normality. On either side of that post Trump was again on the track that not just security, but sanity, is measured in agreement with Trump.
Overnight, Trump attacked Phillip Mudd, who served as deputy director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center and headed the FBI National Security Branch, Mudd appeared on CNN over the evening where he grew fed up with conservative commentator Paris Dennard repeating the Trump idea that somehow having a security clearance is “profitable.” After Dennard took this even farther, stating that “consulting gigs” paid more for a high level security clearance because of access to information. This accusation—nothing short of a statement that former security officials were selling out their country—brought Mudd to a a boil as he repeatedly challenged Dennard to cough up any evidence, and Dennard just kept repeating the lie.
Fox News, conservative sites, and Donald Trump were thrilled that Mudd got worked up about these accusations. Trump gleefully asked if someone as “unglued and weird” as Mudd should have a clearance. In an attempt to support the idea that security equals money, Fox is now pointing out that many jobs at defense contractors require clearance. An entirely different type of clearance. And Mudd wasn’t working at one of those jobs. But … that’s good enough for the right to know they’re right.
Having taken a swing at Mudd—and hey, what was Donald Trump doing watching “fake news” CNN in the first place?—Trump then turned around to punch at John Brennan by saying that “Even James Clapper has admonished John Brennan for having gone totally off the rails,” which totally didn’t happen.
And finally Trump addressed the New Yorker story on his attempts to suspend security briefings for President Obama. That article makes it clear that the idea of revoking security clearance as a way to “punish” members of the Obama administration is something that came up very early after Trump’s election. The idea of cutting Brennan, Clapper, Sally Yates, and others—including President Obama—came first, before Trump’s erratic attacks drove even such apolitical figures as Brennan, who had not registered for either party in twenty-five years, to publicly challenge Trump’s lies.
Trump’s team perceived revoking security clearance as something hateful and demeaning. Then they set out to find excuses to make it happen. And in the end, Trump decided that the only excuse he needed was: Because I want it.
In his claim that “even James Clapper” went after Brennan, Trump makes it clear that Clapper still has his security clearance at the moment because Trump sees Clapper as “being nice to me.” Trump is utterly unable to break away from the idea that security-worthiness is equal to blind obedience.
It was just such a distorted attack that dragged Brennan off the sidelines in the first place. In a 2017 tweet, Trump accused President Obama of tapping his phones, of being worse than Nixon, and being a “bad or sick guy.” That was enough for the former CIA director to finally protest Trump’s statements. Which in due course led to Trump’s team declaring that Brennan also being declared “crazy” and being the first to actually lose his security clearance.