You can’t blow it any worse than Donald Trump just blew it with James Clapper
In a hasty, small minded, and poorly researched move today, Donald Trump floated the idea of revoking the security clearances of half a dozen former U.S. intel community leaders. This stunt immediately blew up in his face when two of them, James Comey and Andrew McCabe, revealed that they don’t even have security clearances – meaning Trump is making an imaginary threat. But the real damage Trump did today was in going after James Clapper.
James Clapper has served in the military or intel community under every United States President since John F. Kennedy. Clapper was named the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency by Republican President George H.W. Bush. Clapper was named the Director of National Intelligence by Democratic President Barack Obama. Clapper has always worked well with both sides of the political aisle, he’s never shown any partisanship of his own, and he appears to know all our nation’s biggest secrets. This is the guy Donald Trump decided to make an enemy out of today.
It’s not that Clapper was on good terms with Donald Trump to begin with. Clapper has used previous CNN appearances to harshly criticize various moves that Trump has made. But even in those moments, Clapper has always tried to choose his words very carefully. Today Clapper simply stated that Trump was being “very, very petty” with the security clearance stunt.
It’s clear that Donald Trump came up with this security clearance stunt on a whim and didn’t bother to run it past anyone with any knowledge of these things (or any willingness to google them) before rolling it out today. It would have only taken a moment or two to figure out that some of these people don’t even have security clearances, and that there is thus nothing for Trump to revoke. But as much of an amateur-hour screw up as this was, making an enemy out to James Clapper may prove to be an even bigger mistake.
