Trump’s Trouble With Tulsi

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Back in March, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard delivered a view of Iran to the House Intelligence Committee that was in line with Trump-administration policy: hostile toward Tehran, but also skeptical of the need for American intervention. Unfortunately for her, though, things have changed in the past three months.

“Iran continues to seek to expand its influence in the Middle East,” Gabbard said. Nevertheless, she said, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear-weapons program that he suspended in 2003.” (Presumably she was referring to Ali Khamenei and not his long-dead predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini.)

That may have been President Donald Trump’s view in March too, but this week, Trump told reporters that Iran is on the verge of getting a nuclear bomb. When asked about Gabbard’s testimony, Trump dismissed it. “I don’t care what she said,” he said. “I think they were very close to having one.”

This kind of harsh dismissal of American intelligence was a hallmark of Trump’s first term in office. Shortly before his inauguration, he compared intelligence agencies to Nazis, and somehow things got worse from there. He infamously sided with Russia’s Vladimir Putin rather than the intelligence community on the question of Russian interference in the 2016 election, accused former officials of treason, and reportedly clashed with DNI Dan Coats over his unwillingness to take his side in political conflicts.

That problem was supposed to be solved in his second term. Rather than choose someone like Coats, a former senator who had experience with intelligence, or his successor, John Ratcliffe, who claimed he did, Trump nominated Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress who had endorsed him for president. (Ratcliffe, having proved his loyalty to Trump in the first term, was named CIA director.)

Gabbard shared a few things with Trump: an odd affinity for Putin’s government, and a public stance of opposing American intervention. But above all, her qualification for the job was that she, like Trump, bore a huge grudge against the intelligence agencies, making her an ideal pick in his Cabinet of retribution.

Now the limits of this approach to appointments are coming into view. Gabbard’s beef with the IC was her sense that it was too belligerent and interventionist, especially with regard to her pals in places such as Syria and Russia; she was also angry because she had reportedly been briefly placed on a government watch list for flying. Gabbard opposes foreign wars, and it appears that she doesn’t want intelligence to implicate her friends overseas. But when the intelligence points against American intervention, as it does with Iran, she is happy to stand behind it despite her skepticism of the analysts.

Trump, by contrast, doesn’t want the intelligence to complicate his choices at all. The president was fine with the IC assessment from earlier this year, when his line was that he opposed wars and would keep the United States out. But now that he has made a quick shift from trying to restrain Israel from striking Iran to demanding Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”—a baffling demand of a country with which the U.S. is not at war—and contemplating American attacks, the conclusion that Iran isn’t that close to a bomb is a real hindrance.

Politico reports that Trump was annoyed by a video Gabbard posted earlier this month in which she warned about “political elite and warmongers” risking nuclear war, and she was reportedly excluded from a Camp David meeting. (The White House has insisted that all principals are on the same page, though Trump’s dismissive comments about Gabbard earlier this week are telling.) Cutting out the DNI at a crucial moment like this is an unusual choice, though the role has never been well defined: Although it was created to sit atop the U.S. intelligence agencies and coordinate among them, officials such as the director of the CIA have often wielded more power.

Trump’s saber-rattling has created rifts within the MAGA coalition, as my colleagues Jonathan Lemire and Isaac Stanley-Becker reported yesterday. In reality, Trump was never the dove that he made himself out to be. He has consistently backed American involvement overseas. During the 2016 election, he claimed that he had been against the Iraq War from the start, placing the idea at the center of his campaign even though there is no evidence for it. As president, he escalated U.S. involvement in Syria, backed the Saudi war in Yemen and vetoed Congress’s attempt to curtail it, and—in one of his major foreign-policy successes—assassinated Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. Throughout his first term, he treated the troops as a political prop.

These tendencies have become more pronounced in his second term, though Trump’s favorite places to send troops remain within national borders: in the streets of Los Angeles or parading through Washington, D.C. He launched a series of major strikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels, despite the misgivings of his dovish vice president, and then abruptly stopped them when it became clear that no easy victory was forthcoming. This is the crux of the matter with Iran too. Although he may be hesitant about American involvement overseas, Trump loves displays of strength. He sees one in Israel’s attacks on Iran, and he wants in on the action.

Whether the MAGA doves believed Trump really was one of them or simply hoped they could persuade him in the moment is something only they can answer. But his actions this week show that his real resentment was not toward intervention or even intelligence itself. It was toward anything and anyone who might restrain his caprices.

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Today’s News

The Federal Reserve will hold interest rates steady. Earlier today, President Donald Trump called Fed Chair Jerome Powell “stupid” and contemplated installing himself at the Reserve.
Trump said that he “may” or “may not” strike Iran, adding that “nobody knows” what he’s going to do.
The Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

Evening Read

Graphic illustration of a child walking on top of a rotary phone. — Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Olegk1986 / Getty; Sally Anscombe / Getty.

The Dumbest Phone Is Parenting Genius

By Rheana Murray

When Caron Morse’s 9-year-old daughter asked for a smartphone last year, her reaction, she told me, was unambiguous: “A hard hell no.” Morse is a mental-health provider in the Portland, Maine, public-school system, and she was firmly against smartphones, having seen how social media and abundant screen time could shorten students’ attention spans and give them new anxieties. But she wanted her children to have some independence—to be able to call friends, arrange playdates, and reach out to their grandparents on their own. She also needed a break. “I was so sick,” she said, “of being the middle person in any correspondence.”

So when her daughter turned 10, Morse did get her a phone: a landline.

Read the full article.