But that message, Trump’s message, still worked in 2016. Voters saw Clinton as an ambassador of the failed old guard they no longer trusted and wanted something new. They didn’t have faith in Washington anymore.

This is healthy.

As Trump has noted countless times, our federal government under George W. Bush was wrong about the alleged threat to the U.S. posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. To this day some Republican hawks insist it was still the right decision. This is now a minority view.

But it was a popular view in 2002-03 when President Bush and Dick Cheney were amping up the country for war.

History proved the “experts”—the government—wrong.

Our federal government under Barack Obama was wrong about the alleged threat posed by Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. Learning nothing from Iraq, we toppled that regime too and in the chaos that followed the Islamic State gained a foothold. To this day, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — who was instrumental in the Libya decision — defends that intervention.

President Obama, on the other hand, considers it the worst mistake of his presidency. It is to the President’s credit that he admits he got it wrong.

Now the same political class seems to be itching for heightened U.S. tension with Russia. The CIA says they hacked our computers and the election. Some of the same government and media talking heads who thought intervening in Iraq and Libya were good ideas now automatically parrot the CIA.

Obviously Vladimir Putin is more powerful than a Hussein or Gaddafi were. But it’s not so obvious that the same government and intelligence officials who insist Trump is being naïve about the alleged threat posed by Russia are any more correct in their bluster than they have been in the past.

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald did an excellent job Saturday of explaining that the evidence of Russian hacking is not as evident as the CIA or media is leading people to believe: “Needless to say, Democrats — still eager to make sense of their election loss and to find causes for it other than themselves — immediately declared these … anonymous assertions as proof of what they wanted to believe all along: that Vladimir Putin was rooting for Donald Trump to win and Hillary Clinton to lose and used nefarious means to ensure that outcome.

“That Democrats are now venerating unverified, anonymous CIA leaks as sacred is par for the course for them this year,” Greenwald says, “but it’s also a good indication of how confused and lost U.S. political culture has become in the wake of Trump’s victory.”

Confused and lost is right. Those in Washington charged with protecting our national security or even responsibly informing the public have been abysmally wrong too often and in the most spectacular ways imaginable.

Americans, rightly, don’t know who or what to believe anymore. It’s part of why Trump won.

It’s also part of why it’s probably wise for the President-elect or anyone else in this moment to analyze the alleged Russian “threat” with studied caution.