"The gut-wrenching, nauseating feeling that the [US] has joined the axis of authoritarianism"

"All Things Considered" host Mary Louise Kelly interviewed journalist and national security historian Tim Weiner on Tuesday about his latest book, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century. His assessment of the agency's first-quarter end was far from "things could be

better." For spies and intelligence analysts, indeed for the United States, the situation is out-and-out wretched, said Weiner.

About that, he was explicit — an arrestingly honest departure from journalism's oppressive orthodoxy of "sanewashing" Trump's many policy desecrations. Kelly, herself a former national security correspondent, soon got to Weiner's supreme judgment of America's self-crucifixion, with no redemption in sight.

KELLY: ... We are in 2025, and the CIA again serves a commander-in-chief, a president, who has openly questioned the agency's leaders and their work. When you ask current CIA officers about that, what do you hear?

WEINER: The gut-wrenching, nauseating feeling that the president of the United States has gone over to the other side and joined the axis of authoritarianism. It's hard for an outsider to understand the feeling that went through the high levels of the CIA when Trump ordered the United States to vote with Russia, North Korea and Iran at the United Nations against a resolution condemning the Russian occupation of Ukraine.

KELLY: Did CIA staffers raise that specifically with you, that incident?

WEINER: Oh, yeah.

KELLY: What were they saying?

WEINER: You know, there's an ideological purge that Trump has ordered at CIA. And the current director, John Ratcliffe, who is a MAGA acolyte, has told top officers and analysts with 20 or 30 years' experience to head for the exits, find a new line of work. He dismissed two years' worth of new hires, everybody the CIA had hired in 2023 and '24. And ideology is the enemy of intelligence.

KELLY: ... What [are you] hearing from people who are working at the agency now?

WEINER: I have to say that people are trying to keep their heads down lest they get chopped off, which is not a good posture for the world's most famous intelligence service.

KELLY: ... Are there stories you wish you could tell in this book and you couldn't get your source to go on the record?

WEINER: ... I wish I knew more about what is going on right now. It is a very dangerous thing to have an intelligence service in the hands of an autocrat. And I wish I knew if there is, in fact, resistance at the CIA to Trump's foreign policies. The CIA is an instrument of American foreign policy. With the rarest exceptions, it does what the president tells it to do.... The CIA does not have a history of saying no to presidents. I'd like to know if there's a resistance inside Langley.

KELLY: ... Do you think there'll be a CIA around in anything resembling recognizable form 25 years from now?

WEINER: That depends on how we get through the next 3 1/2 years. The president of the United States is implacably hostile to the idea of intelligence. He thinks the CIA is the capital of the deep state, which it is decidedly not.... I cannot imagine America as a superpower without an intelligence service to warn of dangers over the horizon.

***

If Weiner were in Congress, his talk destined for The Congressional Record, he'd think twice, then alter and thus vastly improve that final sentence before printing, as all congressfolk do. "Imagination" would be superfluous. Our greatest danger lies not on, and certainly not over, the horizon. In hellish betrayal it reigns in the White House, at America's unwashed feet.

"Current CIA officers" and Weiner too are of course spot on about the "gut-wrenching, nauseating" More Than a Feeling of Trump having joined the modern Triple Axis of authoritarianism (notwithstanding his recent "unhappiness" with Vladimir; that too shall pass, as most fellow dictatorial unpleasantness does). But I suspect the big boys of Global Tyranny Inc. see Trump as merely a junior partner — joined but nonvoting in board decision-making, no windowed corner office, a folding card table for prepubescent Donald at their extravagant state banquets.

He's "implacably hostile" to even the idea of professional intelligence — a vital element of world-class thuggishness — and so even the caliber of U.S. authoritarianism is wretched.

*** This piece is cross-posted at my Substack page. Subscribe for free to be notified of new posts.