Trump's cabinet picks are an assault on the truth
He's not even president yet, but he's clearly made polluting the information space a priority.
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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT
All good authoritarians know, the first step to becoming a true dictator is to solidify control over the means of communication. Study any pre-internet coup and you’ll see that capturing state radio and television was a top priority. In the modern age of social media, controlling the message has gotten easier. Trump, of course, has been building this control for years. Some of his nominations announced this week look like the next steps in consolidating that control and dominating the information space for the foreseeable future.
I’ll just touch briefly on a few of the chaotic announcements this week before diving into my main Rant!
Trump announced plans to purge generals.
He named a far-right Fox News host who sports a neo-Nazi tattoo and who has been accused of sexual assault for Secretary of Defense.
He announced his intention to create a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE—a play on the Doge cryptocurrency meme) to be headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Despite its name, this won’t actually be a department (creating a new department requires an act of Congress) but rather an advisory board that aims to bring “entrepreneurial” approaches to government. This has never gone well, since the federal government is not a business where profit is the bottom line. I’ve written extensively about how management consultants ruined CIA. This looks like more of the same, but worse.
Trump nominated Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Gaetz has been under investigation for trafficking young women to sex parties. His friend pleaded guilty to sex trafficking a minor, among other charges, in the same investigation.
And he announced his intention to appoint his nominees during Senate recess, if the Senate refuses to rubber stamp them.
But I want to focus on three other batshit crazy announcements, ones that clearly denote Trump’s intention to dominate the information space for his political advantage.
Trump suggested he will dismantle the “Deep State” in part by prohibiting federal funds from going to any program that studies disinformation. Labeling anything mid- or disinformation will not be allowed, so that information manipulation will run rampant. As my friend Darth Putin likes to say, the point of propaganda isn’t to make you believe something, but to make you believe nothing, then you do nothing. When truth becomes unknowable, people stop participating in public debate. Democracy requires active citizen participation. If people stop participating, that's not democracy. And those controlling the information have all the power. It is also a threat to rule of law. If there is no truth, there is no law. And again, those in power will decide what fits their definition of legal and illegal. We are in a full fledged information war and Trump just hurled a grenade. (For more on why a polluted information space is good for autocrats, see my Foreign Influence Operations course, where I go into to detail about these themes.)
Trump announced John Ratcliffe as his nominee for CIA. Ratcliffe served briefly as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence last time around. The intelligence community was still standing, so how bad can he be, right? Uh, very bad. During his short tenure, he proved his willingness to politicize intelligence. Specifically, he released Russian disinformation claiming Hillary Clinton, in 2016, planned to smear Trump by inventing a scandal involving Russian interference to help Trump get elected. Put more succinctly, he released what he and other Trump minions said was proof Clinton created the “Russia Hoax.” This is a lie, of course. Russia most certainly did interfere in the election to help Trump. We know this, many times over. Ratcliffe also attacked the 51 former intelligence officers (my former colleagues!) who rightly called out the Hunter Biden laptop story as a possible Russian influence operation. “But those were Hunter’s photos and emails!” I hear you say. True information can be manipulated to tell a completely different story, as anyone who has taken my Foreign Influence Operations course can tell you.
has written the authoritative take on the laptop, so I’ll just link to it here. Additionally, it’s good to remember the laptop narrative was simply a plot tool in the “Biden did corruption in Ukraine” lie, which was pushed by Russian intelligence, meaning those 51 former intelligence officers were right! For more, see here and here. In any case, Trump has vowed revenge on these 51 former intelligence officers; several “retribution” lists are being circulated. And just to drive home the point, in announcing Ratcliffe as nominee for Director CIA, Trump mentioned those 51. That is, in announcing the guy who has already proved his willingness to twist intelligence to please the king, the king mentioned some of the very people he’d like Ratcliffe to target.Trump also announced Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence. Some key things to know about Gabbard: 1) She has zero intelligence experience. 2) She doesn’t believe US intelligence. For example, she has repeatedly denied Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons, despite a consensus from the US intelligence community that concluded he indeed had. 3) She peddles conspiracy theories, very often those pushed by Russia. 4) Gabbard is an agent of influence for both Syria and Russia. The only real question is, is she tasked to do that and does she get anything in return from those states? Or is she a useful idiot? Either way, she’s not qualified to be DNI. I mean, any one of the points I just laid out is enough to disqualify her. Oh, and also, she’s in a cult.
Tie all these together and you see we are in for a rough ride.
The issue here isn’t necessarily where any of these folks stand on policy. The bigger theme we see is individuals who do not embrace facts, right at the moment Trump has announced his intention to let disinformation spread with impunity. Not believing facts is particularly egregious in an intelligence leader. Ratcliffe has already proven his willingness to use selective, out-of-context intelligence to score political points. Gabbard peddles in conspiracy theories. At best, that means she doesn’t believe empirical evidence backed by good intelligence. At worst, it means she doesn’t care and is ready to traffic whatever narrative suits her and the boss. Both are unforgivable in the top intelligence official of the country.
Good information will be increasingly hard to find as we move forward. Truth will be more difficult to discern. There will be so much bad information out there, much of it coming from government sources and our own intelligence leaders. The idea here is to numb you, to make you not participate at all. Don’t let them have that power over you.
As a reminder, I wrote Class 17 about how to find good information. It might be a good time to review that.
Even if not everyone gets confirmed (and somehow Trump doesn’t just appoint them as “acting” or appoint them during recess) the picks still give us a pretty good idea of where Trump is headed: not toward truth, but toward retribution and destruction.
THE WEEK’S LINKS
A roundup of things you should be reading
TRUMP AND RETRIBUTION
Some Trump critics are preparing for his vow of retribution once in office (Washington Post)
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?
In addition to polluting and controlling the information space, it seems like Trump’s goal is to undermine as many of the checks and balances of our institutions as possible. I’m curious how much awareness, and subsequent pushback and workarounds, there will be within the intelligence community and throughout the military.
Hopefully the more outlandish picks won’t be confirmed, but worst case scenario, will there still be avenues within the intelligence community to keep the proper personnel informed and our country safe? I understand the importance of respecting rank, but I assume many of those men and women, who value country over party, will see the existential risk these decisions pose.