Republican national security advisers warn that Trump is ‘unfit to lead’

Donald Trump has held a number of private telephone conservations with his Russian handler Vladimir Putin for which national security experts have raised concerns that the normal national security personnel assigned to listen into such calls have been cut out and there is no “read out” of the call prepared by national security analysts.

All too often, the media has learned of these calls only because Putin’s press office or Russian state media report the call, and the White House has to admit that “yes they talked on the phone,” but there is no official “read out” of the call. From pandering to Putin to abusing allies and ignoring his own advisers, Trump’s phone calls alarm US officials.

Despite all of his phone calls with Putin, Trump admitted at the end of June that he never discussed alleged Russian bounties in calls with Putin. Asked about Russian arming of Afghan jihadists so they can attack American troops, the president of the United States replied, “Well, we supplied weapons when they were fighting Russia, too.” Trump’s Unconscionable Equivalence of American and Russian Aid to Afghan Jihadists.

This past week, Vladimir Putin, once again, attempted to assassinate one of his leading critics in Russia, Alexei Navalny. Again, the Trump administration has said nothing. Another Putin foe is felled. The West must respond.

[T]he news that Mr. Navalny was hospitalized Thursday and gravely ill after a suspected poisoning was shocking — but not a surprise.

Doctors in the Siberian city of Omsk, where Mr. Navalny reportedly was in a coma and on a ventilator after falling ill on a flight, have not confirmed the charge of poisoning disseminated by his spokeswoman, who said he took ill after drinking tea in an airport cafe. Nor is it certain that an attack on him would have been ordered by Mr. Putin; thanks to his anti-corruption exposés, the 44-year-old activist has other enemies.

Still, poisoning has become a common fate of Putin enemies. Other victims have included two former Russian spies exiled in Britain; a member of the protest group Pussy Riot; a former Ukrainian president; and Post contributor Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist and opposition activist who has survived two poisonings in Moscow. Boris Nemtsov, the most prominent opposition leader before Mr. Navalny, was gunned down on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015.

And then there are the Russians who mysteriously keep falling out of windows to their deaths. Why Do Russian Journalists Keep Falling Out of Windows?; Three Russian Frontline Health Workers Mysteriously Fell Out Of Hospital Windows.

Despite the brazenness of these attacks, Mr. Putin has suffered little blowback … One reason for the impunity is the indifference of President Trump, who when asked in 2017 about Mr. Putin’s record as a “killer,” responded, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” Mr. Trump, who benefited from Russian intervention in the 2016 election, has never publicly criticized Mr. Putin; though he has spoken to the Russian leader on multiple occasions in recent months, Mr. Trump has, by his own account, never raised U.S. intelligence reports of Russian payments to the Afghan Taliban for the killing of U.S. soldiers.

Putin’s puppet, Donald J. Trump, instead wants to invite his Russian handler to the U.S. before the November election, which would be a reward for his murderous criminal behavior and bounties on U.S. troops. Trump eyes Putin meeting before November election.

This is why the intelligence community assigned with the task of protecting the national security of the United States over several decades has come together to denounce Donald Trump, once again, and endorse Joe Biden for president. Top Republican National Security Officials Say They Will Vote for Biden:

In a letter released hours before Joe Biden delivered his nomination acceptance speech, over 70 senior officials called President Trump “unfit to lead” and outlined their support for his opponent.

Four years after 50 of the nation’s most senior Republican national security officials warned that Donald J. Trump “would be the most reckless president in American history,” they are back with a new letter, declaring his presidency worse than they had imagined and urging voters to support former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The new letter, released just hours before Mr. Biden formally accepted the nomination, lays out a 10-point indictment of Mr. Trump’s actions, accusing him of undermining the rule of law, aligning himself with dictators and engaging “in corrupt behavior that renders him unfit to serve as president.”

They also accused him of “spreading misinformation” and “undermining public health experts,” making him “unfit to lead during a national crisis.”

“When we wrote in 2016, we were warning against a vote for Donald Trump, but many of the signatories were not ready to embrace his opponent,” Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, noted John Bellinger, a former legal adviser at the State Department and National Security Council who was among the authors of the past and current letters. “This is different: Each of the signatories has said he or she will vote for Biden. Signatories are now even more concerned about Trump, and have fewer concerns about Biden.”

Eric Edelman, a former senior Defense Department official under President George W. Bush, and a signatory to both the old and new letters, noted that the 2016 warnings were “a prospective judgment about Donald Trump’s fitness for office. Today the things that were cited in those letters have been vindicated by Trump’s actual performance.”

The result, he said, was that new Republican signatories joined — there are more than 70 in the new letter — people who “undoubtedly hoped that Trump would grow in office and would take the responsibilities of office seriously. He didn’t.”

For the Democratic National Convention, Mr. Biden has invited a series of Republicans to speak, most notably Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Democrats are betting that these cross-aisle endorsements may bring over moderate Republicans who may have supported Mr. Trump four years ago, but are struggling with whether they can vote for a Democrat.

“While some of us hold policy positions that differ from those of Joe Biden and his party, the time to debate those policy differences will come later,” the new letter says. “For now, it is imperative that we stop Trump’s assault on our nation’s values and institutions and reinstate the moral foundations of our democracy.”

The letter was released by DefendingDemocracyTogether.org, an advocacy group created in 2018 by anti-Trump Republicans and conservatives. They are spending about $20 million to oppose him, the group says, including placing the full letter in an ad in The Wall Street Journal on Friday.

Among the signatories are former officials from the Reagan administration; others who served both George Bush and George W. Bush; and a few, like John Negroponte, the former director of national intelligence, and Gen. Michael Hayden, who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency and whose service extended over both Democratic and Republican administrations.

The letter also includes a handful of midlevel officials who served under Mr. Trump. But the list of signatories misses most of the biggest names in national security who entered the administration, only to be fired or resign. Among those missing are Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, and three former generals who served in high posts: John Kelly, the former chief of staff; H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser; and Jim Mattis, the former defense secretary.

These individuals are previously on the record in this Politico article:

• Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in July 2017 called Trump a “moron,”NBC News reported. The comments came after Tillerson had a meeting at the Pentagon with members of the White House national security team and Cabinet officials.
• White House chief of staff John Kelly called Trump “an idiot” and said he thought the president was “unhinged,” The Post also reported. NBC News first reported in May that Kelly had referred to the president as an idiot multiple times, in addition to making several remarks “insulting the president’s intelligence and casting himself as the savior of the country.”
• At a dinner in July 2017, McMaster mocked Trump, also calling him an “idiot,”BuzzFeed News reported. At the dinner, which was with Oracle CEO Safra Catz, McMaster also said Trump was a “dope” with the intelligence of a “kindergartner,” according to that report.
• Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Trump had the understanding of “a fifth- or sixth-grader,” according to accounts of Woodward’s book that were published by The Washington Post.

More recently, James Mattis, Trump’s Own Former Defense Secretary Just Compared Him to the Nazis:

James “Mad Dog” Mattis, dropped a thousand-pound hammer on Trump in a short essay in The Atlantic on [June 3], breaking his long silence by slamming Trump as a threat to the United States Constitution. Mattis pointedly noted, in two adjacent paragraphs, that Nazis tried to divide Americans during World War 2 — and that Trump is trying to divide Americans now.

The Post continues:

John R. Bolton, who was fired as national security adviser last year, has said publicly that he would not vote for Mr. Trump, but has refused to embrace Mr. Biden, saying he would write in a conservative Republican instead.

John Bolton has always been a dick who believes that he is the smartest guy in the room, and everyone else is an idiot. He should never be allowed near national security ever again.

When the first letter was released in 2016, it had some shock value: No one could recall when established national security leaders had abandoned the party’s nominee. Today, the critiques sound more familiar, though the new letter picks through more than three years of international chaos to argue that Mr. Trump has “gravely damaged America’s role as a world leader” by mocking allies, and soliciting foreign influence in American elections.

As the most recent letter laid out, Mr. Trump “proclaimed his ‘love’ and ‘great respect’ for the North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un, endorsed ‘brilliant leader’ Xi Jinping’s move to serve as China’s president for life,” and “repeatedly sided with Vladimir Putin against our own intelligence community.”

Yet within the Republican national security establishment, there are arguments about whether such letters actually harm Mr. Trump or help him.

Peter Feaver, a veteran of the Clinton and Bush administrations, who helped draft several versions of the 2016 letter, decided not to sign the one released on Thursday.

“I don’t regret signing the 2016 letters, and I think the new letter is accurate in its critique of Trump’s performance,” Mr. Feaver, a professor at Duke University, said in an interview.

But he said he worried that “letters like this have some unintended consequences.”

“Trump was able to fund-raise off the 2016 letter and buy himself some anti-establishment street cred,” said Professor Feaver. “His team even thought the letters were a net plus for him.”

* * *

The 2016 letter had another effect: It disqualified a raft of Republicans from serving in the Trump White House, including many who would have provided a much deeper bench of experienced officials. Republicans split in 2017 between those who refused to serve under Mr. Trump and others, like Mr. Tillerson and Fiona Hill, the Russia expert who joined the National Security Council and later testified at impeachment hearings about Mr. Trump’s actions in Ukraine, who believed they had an obligation to try to guide his foreign policy.

But in private, they were often accused of quietly undermining his policies or acting as secret sympathizers with the “Never Trump” movement. Mr. Tillerson was finished, officials said, as soon as he was widely reported to have described Mr. Trump as “a moron” after a briefing — an account Mr. Tillerson never denied.

Professor Feaver said that should Mr. Trump win in November, “the pool of potential officeholders will be even thinner in 2021.”

There is no bench of credible national security and intelligence officers for Trumpistan. A Trump reelection spells disaster and ruin for the United States.

Trump’s MAGA morons, who are true believers of the QAnon cult, will dismiss these experts as the “deep state” conspiracy out to remove their “Dear Leader” from office. There’s a grain of truth in that, these experts are warning you that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to the national security of the United States, and you cult followers are blind to the truth. Which makes YOU the greatest threat to the national security of the United States.