A Former CIA Director Describes the Dangers of 'Trump Unleashed'
Source: The Atlantic
You sense that the stakes are high, and the circumstances exceptional, when the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency issues the kind of rebuke of a sitting president that John Brennan did on Friday, in an interview with The Atlantic.
“There’s never been a previous president, at least in my lifetime and experience, who had the impulsivity that Mr. Trump exhibits,” said Brennan, who spent nearly 30 years at the CIA. Before leading the agency during Barack Obama’s second term, Brennan served as a high-ranking intelligence official under George W. Bush and was the architect of Obama’s drone policies against suspected terrorists. He left office in a huff as Trump compared intelligence agencies investigating Russia’s election interference to the Nazis and bragged about crowd sizes in front of a CIA memorial to fallen officers. And he hasn’t exactly warmed to the president since then.
In contrast to his predecessors, Brennan told me, Trump often “acts and speaks before thinking” and appears to make national-security decisions based on “what’s in the best interest of Donald Trump” rather than what’s in the best interest of the United States. He is “woefully inexperienced in international affairs,” Brennan argued, and so far has shown little interest in learning on the job. His “bullying tendency … compounds all of the other deficiencies,” and he does not seem “competent in international brinkmanship.”
The upshot, according to Brennan, is that whether the scenario is an imminent terrorist threat or an impromptu clash in the air above the Korean peninsula, “Trump unleashed is a dangerous thought.” That’s why Brennan places so much stock in the “governors” of the president’s impulses, including Defense Secretary James Mattis and Joint Chiefs Chairman Joe Dunford, and why he’s so disturbed by the “enablers” of Trump’s “bad instincts,” who on occasion have included Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. In making political statements about the failed policies of the previous administration, McMaster, an active-duty general, “does a disservice to the uniform,” Brennan said.
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Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/john-brennan-cia-trump/544445/
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We're already half-way there. If we go full Banana we'll never go back. It will be the end of us.
Thankfully there are still some people in Washington who believe in the Constitution, and believe it or not, some of them are Republican. It's the pendulum that's already gone too far, it will swing back as long as it doesn't go completely off the track.
He meant it in the logical sense, the things that control a situation.
Unfortunate term, given the circumstances.
Trump thinks? 
