The ongoing contretemps between President Donald Trump and the intelligence community forces a dismal and daunting question: Whose side must be taken in a power struggle between a legion of professional liars and a consummate bullshit artist?

Both the president and the spy agencies have mastered the arts of misrepresentation, self-righteousness, and Twitter (but perhaps I repeat myself). Both have extensive records of public statements that are demonstrably false, thoroughly misleading, or artfully deceptive. Both have the power to inflict violence on others, though as far as we know, Trump has not killed or tortured anyone. The CIA on the other hand….



To say the two dogs in this fight have credibility problems is unfair to the canine community and rather too polite for the rest of us. Trump and the intelligence community are credibility problems. It may, then, fall to a Democratic president to put this house in order. Should a Democrat succeed in supplanting Trump, that new commander-in-chief will face the overdue chore of steering the nation’s national security apparatus on to a new path. First, however, Democrats will have to beat back Trump’s attempt to wrest control of that apparatus.



The president and the spy agencies both entertain the Washington press corps by actively distrusting and demonizing the other. CNN reported this week that, in 2017, the CIA exfiltrated one of its most productive spies from Moscow out of concern about Trump’s handling of classified information. The leak of the story, based on classified information, was arguably just as criminal as anything convicted NSA whistleblower Reality Winner did, but the law didn’t deter the leaker(s) from spreading a story that highlighted the intelligence community’s mistrust of the commander-in-chief.



Meanwhile, the chief weapon in Trump’s arsenal is his bluster. In May of last year, he tweeted, “Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State. they go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!” That alleged scandal, since forgotten, was the unsurprising revelation that the FBI deployed an undercover informant in its investigation of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians during the 2016 campaign.

