Mr. Grenell has shown perhaps a little more finesse. In a 2016 Fox News opinion piece, he merely minimized Russian meddling in American political processes as a longstanding practice that should come as no surprise and was not especially significant.

The practical upshot, however, is the same: Mr. Grenell, like Mr. Trump, does not rate Russian efforts to manipulate American elections a pressing national security concern. From this perspective, Mr. Grenell’s appointment as the country’s highest-ranking intelligence officer looks intended to ensure that any U.S. intelligence assessments and warnings of Russian meddling in the 2020 election are downplayed and withheld from Congress, if not completely suppressed.

Mr. Trump was reportedly angry for political reasons that intelligence analysts briefed the House Intelligence Committee last week, telling them that Russia was interfering in the 2020 election in an attempt to get him re-elected. The president feared that Democrats would weaponize the information and registered his displeasure with the outgoing director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire.

The fox-in-the-henhouse metaphor may be a tired one, but Mr. Trump has revitalized it, implicitly tasking one appointee after another to subvert the very agency he or she is supposed to oversee and sustain. Mr. Grenell is only the latest example. Having thoroughly politicized his position as a diplomat, he is now poised to do the same for the entire U.S. intelligence community.

In terms of process as distinct from substance, the outlook is similarly bleak: Mr. Grenell recently applauded the president’s unrestrained tweeting after Attorney General William Barr — considered one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest bureaucratic allies — had criticized the practice. It’s hardly fanciful to imagine the president commanding his new acting DNI to provide tailored intelligence that he can include in a provocative tweet, and readily getting it.

To make matters worse for the national security bureaucracy, Mr. Grenell will continue to serve as ambassador to Germany while trying to direct and coordinate the United States’ vast and complex array of intelligence agencies. Thus, in a single stroke, Mr. Trump has appointed an official who is unsuited to the job and has rendered it circumstantially impossible for him to do that properly, even if he had the ability.

This absurdly cavalier arrangement, even if it lasts just a few months, manages to denigrate the role of both the State Department and the intelligence community. Mr. Trump’s contempt for and evisceration of the interagency process putatively coordinated by the National Security Council staff — serially showcased, last month with the strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani — are again on display. And his increasingly autocratic inclinations ominously shine through.