Words fail to capture the increased risks to national security that Donald Trump has triggered since winning the November 8 election. He’s assured the president of Pakistan that he is “ready and willing to play any role that [he wants].” He’s announced that the United States is not bound by the One China policy, a 44-year diplomatic understanding between the U.S. and China that has helped keep peace between the nuclear powers. And he’s dismissed as “ridiculous” U.S. intelligence conclusions that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. But Trump’s refusal to receive daily intelligence briefings may present the most significant threat to our physical safety.
Writing for The Atlantic last week, Rebecca Friedman Lissner, a Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, explained that the practice of making intelligence briefings immediately available to incoming presidents was put in place to avoid catastrophes like the Bay of Pigs. As of Inauguration Day in 1961, President John F. Kennedy had yet to receive a full briefing on the covert plan developed by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration to overthrow Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro. A mere eight days after assuming office, Kennedy was faced with having to decide between killing the operation or letting it continue. He couldn’t lean on his foreign policy advisors for advice, because none of them had been briefed on the plan. We all know what happened.
But mitigating risk by sharing intelligence with an incoming administration only works if the new guy is paying attention. Recent history shows what can happen when he isn’t.
The CIA warned George W. Bush 36 separate times “in less than eight months,” as Barton Gellman writes in Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, that al-Qaida was planning an attack on the U.S. Although it’s nearly verboten to suggest that the 9/11 attacks could have been averted, they most likely could have been if Bush had heeded intelligence warnings.
Consider what President Bill Clinton did in 1999 in response to learning that al-Qaida was planning multiple terrorist attacks to disrupt New Year’s celebrations at the turn of the new century. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian to promote his memoir Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, former National Security Council counterterrorism “czar” Richard Clarke recalls that Clinton “ordered daily meetings with the attorney-general, the CIA, [and] FBI” at the White House.
“When the head of the FBI and CIA have to go to the White House every day, things happen,” Clarke said, adding that the pressure on field offices to “find out everything they can find” led to the arrest of an Algerian travelling to Los Angeles by way of Canada with the intent of blowing up Los Angeles International Airport.
Last year, in response to assertions that Bush could have prevented the 9/11 attacks by, of all people, Donald Trump, political journalist and author Elizabeth Drew devastatingly catalogued all of the information available to intelligence agencies in advance of 9/11. No one ever connected the information, Drew writes, because of Bush’s failure to order “a root and branch search of information government agencies had on potential strikes by al-Qaida in the U.S.”
Drew adds that the bipartisan 9/11 Commission “avoided assigning individual blame in order to get a unanimous report, and it deliberately avoided saying whether the attacks could have been prevented though it was apparent that some commissioners believed this to be the case, and the evidence gathered in the report strongly suggested as much.”
Aside from catapulting into a paralytic stupor of fear, how are we to respond to Trump’s reckless behavior?
There are two ways. The first is by continuing to pay attention. Washington Post public editor Margaret Sullivan acknowledged in a recent column that it can be overwhelming to keep up with all of the Trump news, but she warns that now is not the time to tune out. “Keen awareness — and critical thinking — will matter more than ever in the days ahead,” she writes.
The second is by insisting on oversight of Trump by Congress. Over the weekend, four senators, two Republicans and two Democrats finally announced that they would hold hearings about Russia’s involvement in the election. Better late than never, given that there has been plenty of evidence of Russia’s involvement since July.
But we need intense scrutiny of Trump’s actions on foreign policy, too. Just as the heads of intelligence agencies do not take on the extra work of comparing intel without orders to do so from the president, Congress does not take on the extra work of oversight hearings without demands from the public. Keep calling your own representatives in the House and Senate, and call the majority and minority leaders of each body as well. We lost our opportunity to stop Trump through the simple act of voting when 40 percent of eligible voters stayed home on November 8. Let’s not fail now to simply pick up the phone to insist that Congress does its job.
Susan Ryan-Vollmar, a communications consultant, was formerly editor-in-chief of Bay Windows and news editor of the Boston Phoenix.
