The intelligence community did its job, but Trump didn't do his
Opinion by Samantha Vinograd
April 29, 2020
Samantha Vinograd is a CNN national security analyst.
Follow her
@sam_vinograd. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.
(CNN) We can't pretend to get inside of President Donald Trump's head and to know his real motivations for downplaying the virus and failing to prepare or appropriately respond to it. But we do know that it wasn't for lack of intelligence briefings.
Day after day, during his daily press "briefings," tweet storms and other public displays of disaffection, Americans hear Donald Trump's oft-epeated claims that the coronavirus
"came out of nowhere"; that he acted quickly; and that
"nobody could have predicted something like this."
Well, as much as Trump may want to try to deny or dance around it, streams of reporting indicate that experts did predict it, and they tried to tell him. The "enemy" wasn't invisible to the intelligence community,
administration officials like Peter Navarro,
health experts and more.
The
Washington Post recently reported, citing current and former US officials, that more than a dozen of the President's Daily Brief (PDB) in January and February -- a period when Trump continued to downplay the threat -- had warnings about the novel coronavirus.
On Tuesday, Trump said that he would
"have to check" to see the "exact dates of warnings." (
CNN has reached out to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for comment.)
Trump to America: Don't blame me
The PDB -- prepared by the intelligence community (IC) -- contains the analyses that the IC assesses the President needs to know to start his day. It's where the IC can sound the alarm on both near-term and longer-term strategic threats facing the country, along with intelligence updates on critical national security issues.
Preparing the PDB is a complex process -- managed by the Director of National Intelligence -- and it undergoes the highest level of scrutiny before it reaches the President's desk. Presidents have digested the PDB in different formats -- including hard copies in a thick leather bound binder
and iPads. Typically, the President also receives an oral briefing on the PDB from a senior member of the IC. That oral briefing is an opportunity for him to ask questions and to probe analyses.
But you can't lead a horse to water and force him to drink. The intelligence community did its job, but Trump didn't do his.
The PDB, like other intelligence assessments, is meant as an input to policy-making. If the PDB is produced, but ignored or discounted, the intelligence doesn't get integrated into policy decisions or presidential statements. The buck stops with the President in that respect.
Trump reportedly fails to
regularly read the PDB and only gets an oral briefing two-three times a week, according to the Washington Post. On a basic level, this reporting raises the real question of just what President Trump is doing during the times he should be paying attention to his PDB.
Amid criticism that the President spends his days doing the Trump version of Netflix and chilling (watching TV and tweeting), White House staffers
told the New York Post that Trump works so hard that he often doesn't even have time to eat lunch. But if Trump isn't digesting intelligence -- nor integrating it into policy decisions and consulting with his national security team -- it's even clearer why he has free time on his hands to destabilize our national security rather than enhance it.
Dr. Birx is struggling with a nearly impossible choice
His disregard for intelligence is longstanding: He's a fair-weather fan.
He's a cheerleader for intelligence when it suits a personal narrative. He's insulted the intelligence community and then asked the American people to
believe in intelligence when he has a project he favors, like the killing of commander Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force unit.
Cherry-picking intelligence is the opposite of acting intelligently. It pollutes the intelligence community by turning it into a partisan, political tool for the President which is antithetical to the I
C's core values of speaking truth and being an apolitical, unbiased group of experts.
Trump's ravaged the intelligence community as we know it. That's one of his core national security legacies. But another one of his administration's key attributes is also in the limelight: The world now has even more reason to believe that Trump's team doesn't have sway with him.
His marginalization of his intelligence chiefs has been longstanding. But the fact that the IC warned about the virus so many times in the PDB speaks volumes about how his other cabinet officials fare with him.
Although the PDBs are delivered to the President, there's also an official list of high-level officials who are authorized to get a copy of them. It typically includes officials like the vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, national security adviser and, for at least awhile,
Jared Kushner, despite his serious security clearance issues.
In practice, this means that several members of Trump's inner circle had access to the same warnings as he did. People that he handpicked heard the alarm bells -- unless they too failed to digest the PDB which they too received daily.
