When The Levee Breaks: Why President Trump is battling his own intelligence agencies

Not even finishing 100 days in office, President Donald Trump is facing a wave of body-line bouncers to fend off as he struggles to construct and protect his cabinet. However, the first victim of his government did not take too long to surface as the president’s National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign over his exchange of views with the Russian Ambassador to the US before taking over his position. Flynn became the shortest serving NSA in American history. 

But according to some analysts, this is only the start of the turmoil that the Trump administration faces in the near future as Washington’s own ‘establishment’ has seemingly started to leak information at a rapid pace in order to undermine, or remove, Trump’s appointees. All this unfolds, as the world still waits to get clarity on what the new, unorthodox administration in the White House means for the world’s only superpower’s role in global governance. 

The Indian government has been as cautious as any other country, waiting and watching what exactly the Trump presidency brings to the table. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already had a conversation with Trump, while India’s foreign secretary S Jaishankar has both conflicted Trump’s views on trade, saying that globalization does not end just because ‘someone somewhere calls for a time out’ and that one should not ‘demonize but analyze’ the new order in the White House, which in other terms could also be translated as ‘stand-back and quietly observe for now’. 

But what Trump is currently undergoing in Washington is not the simple case of a new leader shaking things up to stamp his own authority on the world’s most powerful political, military and economic systems. What Trump has managed to create, by his own design, is an environment of distrust between the White House and the various bureaucratic institutions that constitute any political system’s DNA. However, warring with America’s intelligence agencies, or the ‘deep state’ as some would like to address them as, is a whole different sport, a game that history has shown rarely ends well for the presidency. 

Trump’s mandate has always been that of an ‘outsider’, he has built his gusto and panache on the fact that he is not a politician, but a businessman (who hates politicians) and hence knows best how to deal with the complex world of global economics. Most of Trump’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s initial daily briefings at the White House were based on answering any and every question being fielded towards his administration with just one answer, that Trump is here to create jobs for the American people. 

The expulsion of Flynn was one of the largest fallouts of Trump’s mistrust, or disdain, for the US intelligence complex even though he blamed a cocktail of intel agencies and the media. He seems to believe that the US intelligence is either too powerful for its own good, or has managed to get its own way with The Oval office over the decades with unchecked impunity, and that this now needs to be reigned in. 

Trump has regularly taken to social media site Twitter to air his disdain against the likes of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) publicly. On January 11, Trump tweeted asking whether the Americans are living in Nazi Germany, after saying that intelligence agencies should have not allowed “fake news” against him to be leaked out. This comparison irked the CIA camp, with the then outgoing agency chief John Brennan publicly taking on the US president, a rarity for anyone in his position, by announcing that Trump had crossed “the line” during his reactions to the unsubstantiated, and unflattering dossier against him. 

Over the past 24 hours, the feud between Trump and the intelligence agencies seems to be only expanding. The president took to Twitter again, asking whether agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) were leaking information purposefully to The New York Times and The Washington Post newspapers. He compared this situation akin to being that to what happens in Russia, the very country blamed for aiding his accession to the White House. 

There are various reports doing rounds on how intelligence agencies have proof of unwarranted (yet, legal) communications between Trump’s team and Russians. On February 14, The New York Times ran a report accusing Trump’s campaign aides for having “repeated” contact with Russian intelligence officials in the year before the elections. To make it more damaging, there are reports also suggesting foreign Western intelligence agencies also hold evidence of such calls being made between the Trump camp and Moscow. The conflict of interest between the Trump administration and US intelligence is not something that can be brushed under the carpet, with it coming out glaringly as the days go by for a government still struggling to settle into Washington D.C. 

However, this is not the first time a US president has come at odds with the US intelligence apparatus and historically, the outcome of such conflicts have been more damaging for the presidency than the intelligence agencies. On a very superficial explanation, the mandate of an intelligence agency in most cases and most countries would be, by nature of the mandate, more powerful than that of a head of state. Loyalty is what would come in between the two entities to build a bridge of trust, collapse of this one institution…loyalty…could be damaging for even the most powerful chair on the planet. 

Former US President Richard Nixon, who took office in 1969, was perhaps the biggest example of a president that took on the US intelligence establishment head on. Nixon came into office believing that the CIA was responsible for his previous campaign loss to former president John F. Kennedy. Nixon believed that the agency’s refusal to put down the ‘missile gap myth’, where the 1957 Gaither Committee inflated the threat perception of Soviet Union’s ballistic missile program in comparison to the American program, inflating Moscow’s actual strengths relating to its missile programs, was them acting against him. JFK coined the term ‘missile gap’, and used it as a campaign tool to bolster his bid for the presidency, similar to Trump’s tactics on immigration and terrorism. However, Nixon held a grudge, developed over a period of time where he believed the intelligence community was against him. After winning the elections and taking over as America’s 37th president, Nixon tested the waters with the CIA, making them work for his trust and even access to The Oval office. This included the CIA, against its wishes, falsely modeling Soviet nuclear capability estimates and even keeping close tabs on anti-Vietnam War protesters in the US despite the CIA charter prohibiting it from operating on domestic soil (which, however, did not stop it from doing so previously under President Lyndon B. Johnson over war protesters).  

Nixon later on became the only US president having to resign from office, after the infamous Watergate scandal which involved a planned break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s offices at the Watergate complex in Washington D.C. and the Nixon administration’s subsequent attempts at a cover-up. Watergate was a series of information leaks provided to The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein by a source called ‘Deep Throat’, who was only in 2005 identified as former FBI agent and later FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt. This happened with Nixon’s comparatively good relations with the FBI, and even as he kept on testing the CIA under its then director Richard Helm’s charge, the agency finally drew the line during Watergate and refused to comply with directions from Nixon to orchestrate a cover-up. Helms was fired from his job, but Nixon didn’t survive either, having to resign from the US presidency on August 9, 1974, brought down by acts of one FBI agent. 

There is much for Trump to perhaps learn from the past, and not just Nixon, but the relations that former US presidents including Jimmy Carter, who was intensely criticized and undermined by spooks for downgrading intelligence gathering in the run-up to the Iranian revolution of 1979, John F Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson and Bill Clinton had with their own battles with the intelligence establishments. While most of the previous digressions between the presidents and spooks were comparatively insulated from public eye, Trump’s no-holds-bar reality-television style take on administration has placed large questions over the longevity of his tenure, and the ease at which it could be possible for the clandestine shadows that help run American political power to dislodge ‘The Apprentice’ from his latest season.