Yesterday America's top intelligence officers presented their "Worldwide Threat Assessment" to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in what amounted to a stunning repudiation of the country's commander in chief.
Contrary to Trump's rather peculiar, obstinate views, they said North Korea will likely maintain its nuclear arsenal. They said Iran has foregone, at least so far, needed preparations to build a bomb. They contradicted Trump on ISIS, saying it's not defeated; that it still harbors an army of capable fighters in Iraq, Syria, and throughout the world.
The FBI, CIA and national intelligence directors also portrayed the cyberthreat from Russia and China as significant, poignantly adding that the two adversaries are "more aligned than at any point since the mid-1950s." And they underscored that Trump's trade policy and go-it-alone America Firstism have alienated our allies and caused them to look elsewhere for collaboration.
"Taken together," observes the Times, their Senate testimony "paint[ed] a picture of threats vastly different from those asserted by Mr. Trump." Most dissimilar was that nowhere in the Worldwide Threat Assessment were the beseeching hordes of Latin America — virtually the only "threat" the president has cited in weeks — or the stated need for a border wall.
Intriguingly — and I mean that literally — the Times reports as well on the Republican foreign policy establishment's now-overt disagreements with Mr. Trump. To wit, a growing number of Senate and House Republicans are objecting openly that a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan portends a disaster; that North Korea is thunderingly untrustworthy; that ISIS remains a distressing danger; and that, as the Times words it, "Russia is bad and NATO is good."
In part, Republicans formally said so in a kind of "sense of the Senate" evaluation yesterday, while many House Republicans have recently voted in similar ways. Which is to say, they're defying the president and, to a less visible but more perilous degree, the president's base.
Congressional Republican opinion hasn't changed, yet their behavior has. Why? For sure, they detect a weakened president — the result of his foolish, failed closure of government. But mostly they're annoyed, at long last, by Trump's recklessness. Especially in purple states, the latter could haunt them in 2020, so they're wisely distancing themselves from their party's cavalier leader. As the NYT presents it: "The [internal] rupture of recent days comes amid disgruntlement over the 35-day partial government shutdown."
Hence, what we have here, as Strother Martin might have put it in Cool Hand Luke, is less a failure to communicate than a heretofore circumscribed rebellion by an amplifying number of congressional Republicans, and an outright slap in the presidential face by the nation's top intelligence officers.
Predicting how all the discord will play out is a fruitless game, since Trump's unpredictability is just about the only constant. Everything else is a couple hundred or so variables — except for one other immensely reliable factor: However Trump chooses to react, his counteraction will be incredibly stupid.