A Foreign Intelligence Analyst Report on President Trump

[GeoWilliam750]

From Lawfare

"In our previous jobs as CIA analysts, we wrote analyses on foreign countries, leaders, and other political figures for senior U.S. policymakers like the President and a small number of Cabinet-level officials. Current developments in the United States strike many as “through the looking glass,” and it might be a useful exercise to go all the way and consider American politics from the outside looking in. Using the fundamentals of intelligence analysis and “open source” reporting for our source, below we have prepared what a foreign intelligence service analysis of our country might look like. These types of analyses—for example the Presidential Daily Brief—are prepared as a dispassionate product but include the substantive judgments and assessments of the author’s analytic bottom line. We’ve attempted to approximate the types of information foreign analysts would be likely to include, as well as the nature in which such information might be characterized."

https://lawfareblog.com/foreign-intelligence-analyst-report-president-trump

[roscoeroscoe]

1. Dispassionate

Sad state of affairs, to say the least.

Their brief appraisal is a bit different from what you or I might write, but on the whole quite worth reading

[Hortensis]

2. Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded the United States from

a “full democracy” to a “flawed” one after Trump's election.

From The Economist

Democracy Index 2016
According to the 2016 Democracy Index almost one-half of the world’s countries can be considered to be democracies of some sort, but the number of “full democracies” has declined from 20 in 2015 to 19 in 2016. The US has been downgraded from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” because of a further erosion of trust in government and elected officials there.

The "democratic recession" worsened in 2016, when no region experienced an improvement in its average score and almost twice as many countries (72) recorded a decline in their total score as recorded an improvement (38). Eastern Europe experienced the most severe regression. The 2016 Democracy Index report, Revenge of the "deplorables", examines the deep roots of today's crisis of democracy in the developed world, and looks at how democracy fared in every region.