Donald Trump has put John Brennan at the top of a new 'Enemies List' President Donald Trump revoked John Brennan's security clearance as political revenge. This sets a dangerous precedent that defies the Constitution.

Tom Nichols | Opinion columnist

Our political days now go something like this: President Trump does something outrageous, and his defenders and handlers rush to explain his actions. The gaslighting begins, as complicated rationalizations and cries of “what about” fill the air. Then, the President himself blows up all the hard work of his enablers by confirming that the truth is as simple and appalling as it appeared all along.

And so it is with the current scandal over the president pulling former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance. Brennan is not a sympathetic case, which is perhaps why Trump went after him: the former career CIA official’s critics have argued that Brennan is a hack who should never have been one of the nation’s top spies. Others have complained that once Brennan accused the president of treason — a claim Brennan tried to soft-pedal when asked about it by Rachel Maddow — he had lost the privilege of holding a highly sensitive clearance. (That no Republicans called for pulling Michael Flynn’s clearance while he was in Cleveland chanting “lock her up” is a reminder that hypocrisy is now the oxygen that sustains the GOP hothouse.)

Revoking clearances are political revenge

The problem, of course, is that the president himself is not making any of these arguments.

Instead, President Trump has made it clear that John Brennan is at the top of a new Enemies List, that his clearance revocation is about political speech, and that there are more such clearance denials to come. He has resolutely refused to make this about one former intelligence officer, and instead has added the names of a group of men and women who all share the same sin of having exercised their constitutional rights to free speech by criticizing one Donald J. Trump.

This list includes well-known senior figures from the intelligence community such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former National Security Agency and CIA director Michael Haydon, as well as lesser-known officials such as Justice Department lawyer Bruce Ohr, whom the president apparently thinks was part of a conspiracy against him. Predictably, it includes fired FBI officials James Comey and Andrew McCabe — although yanking Comey’s clearance will be tough, since he no longer has one.

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This whole fiasco combines the last days of Nixon with the first years of McCarthyism in a hurricane of smear and innuendo. The White House’s offensive against these professionals, as always, has multiple objectives, first and foremost among them to bully any other senior officials into silence. As conservative writer (and attorney) David French wrote recently, the president “views his authority over security clearances not as power held in trust to protect our nation’s security but rather as a weapon to wield against political foes in violation of the very Constitution he’s vowed to defend.”

The other goals are related entirely to Trump’s base, and are aimed squarely at exploiting their lack of political literacy. As the Washington Post reported, the clearance revocations are ammo to be expended at will to change the news cycle (which itself is the very definition of an abuse of power). It is also about Trump’s obsession with attacking the legitimacy of the federal intelligence and law enforcement communities, which is why his surrogates have been hammering the message that this is really just about the greenbacks, arguing that the only reason these senior people hold clearances is to make money. By denying them those clearances, they say, Trump is just draining the swamp.

Trump may be trying to protect himself

Maintaining eligibility for a clearance, however, is not the same thing as having access to classified material. Shutting off a clearance makes it more difficult for people currently in government to talk to their predecessors, but not impossible. No one at Clapper or Brennan’s level is going to go broke over having a clearance revoked, although the threat against Ohr could be a harbinger of using clearances to fire less senior people Trump thinks are politically opposed to him.

Perhaps most important, President Trump may be trying to delegitimize anyone associated with the words “clearance” or “classified information” as a way of inoculating himself against the revelations that continue to come from the Mueller investigation. The average person has no idea who gets a clearance, or why, and if the president tells his base that the CIA, the NSA, ODNI, the FBI, and other organizations are just nests of disloyal political enemies, and that only he can protect our nation’s secrets from these traitors, they will believe him.

This is astonishingly dangerous, even by the standards of the current administration. If Americans embrace this kind of win-at-all-costs nihilism, it will accelerate the ongoing destruction of the norms and traditions that sustain our republic. The administration is fighting for its survival, and perhaps trying to stave off prison for some of its inner circle, by embarking on a relentless campaign of blowing the fuses and tripping the breakers built in to our constitutional system. The Brennan case is just one more moment in this campaign, and the only thing we can be sure of is that there will be more.

Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School, is the author of "The Death of Expertise." The views expressed here are solely his own. Follow him on Twitter: @RadioFreeTom.