Say what you want about AI, but powerful artificial intelligence in the hands of a 79-year-old man with zero emotional intelligence makes for ugly outcomes.
Trump disputes Gabbard’s statement on Iran’s nuclear program
President Donald Trump says Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is “wrong” about Iran’s nuclear program.
Tulsi Gabbard was on the outs – literally and figuratively – with President Donald Trump last month after contradicting him about Iran’s nuclear program, which he was about to bomb.
Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, was shut out of planning meetings about Iran and pushed to the intelligence sidelines for asserting that Iran had not been trying to build a nuclear weapon. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump replied when asked about Gabbard back then.
She needed a way back inside Trump’s bubble. The president’s new “Epstein files” scandal offered an opportunity.
Trump has stumbled badly with his loyal base and MAGA influencers by demanding that they just move on from a favorite conspiracy theory: that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in 2019 to prevent disclosure of his “client list” of famous, powerful, wealthy people he had blackmailed.
Epstein, you must know by now, was a former Trump cruising buddy and convicted pedophile who died by suicide in federal prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges filed during Trump’s first term.Â
Trump has long relied on distraction tactics when his supporters get antsy, like a weary parent shaking car keys in a baby’s face to stop the crying. But that wasn’t working this time. MAGA was in a meltdown. The base was not buying Trump’s new pitch: that the Epstein files they so desperately want to see were a Democratic “hoax.”
So Gabbard dug deep into the classics of Trump’s “hoax” claims, declaring on July 18 that President Barack Obama’s top advisors had somehow concocted the notion that Russia had attempted to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won while defeating Hillary Clinton.
Tulsi Gabbard caters to Trump by suggesting Obama is a criminal
Gabbard issued a July 18 memo claiming to have new evidence of an “Obama Administration conspiracy to subvert” Trump’s 2016 win. She pushed it in a post on X, announcing that she was sending information to the Department of Justice for “criminal referral.” And she played it up for the weekend morning anchors at Fox News, because, of course.
Trump grabbed all that like a drowning man grabs a life preserver.
He spent the weekend frenzy-posting on his website, Truth Social, promoting Gabbard’s Fox News hit, posting memes of Obama and other prominent Democrats in a jail cell and in prison uniforms. The president of the United States of America even shared a video made with artificial intelligence of Obama being handcuffed in the Oval Office.
Say what you want about AI, but powerful artificial intelligence in the hands of a 79-year-old man with zero emotional intelligence makes for ugly outcomes.
Trump and Gabbard won’t let facts get in the way of their fresh lies
The lit sparkler Gabbard passed off as a bombshell focuses on the discussion within the intelligence community at the end of Obama’s second term about whether Russia had used cyberattacks on election infrastructure. She’s claiming Obama’s team “manufactured” intelligence to hobble Trump’s impending presidency after he won.
There’s a hole in that theory. First, the Obama administration said shortly after the 2016 presidential election that hackers had not tampered with the election results. Marc Elias, who then was general counsel for the Clinton campaign, wrote at the time that they had “not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking” in the election.
Trump’s tantrums about this have never been focused just on cyberattacks or hacking. He has long insisted that any claim that “Russia, Russia, Russia” wanted him to win in 2016 was a “hoax.”
Here’s another problem with that. The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in an August 2020 report issued as Trump was running for re-election, said it “found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling” in the election, including “an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome.”
Those words came from the archived statement by Marco Rubio, who at the time was a Republican senator from Florida and acting chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and now serves as Trump’s secretary of State.
He and Gabbard are, in theory, on the same team.
You know who else is on that team? CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who earlier this month released a review of his agency’s 2016 assessment that Russia tried to interfere with the 2016 election. That review offered some criticism for how the assessment was reached, but didn’t challenge its veracity.
Gabbard is hoping that Americans will be distracted
U.S. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, put out that 966-page 2020 report about Russia with Rubio and still holds that post today. The report’s title: “Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 Election.”
Warner, in a July 18 statement, said, “It seems DNI Gabbard is unaware” that the committee found that Russia “used social media to conduct an information warfare campaign in order to benefit Donald Trump.” He also noted, “This conclusion was supported on a unanimous basis by every single Democrat and Republican on the committee.”
Gabbard is dredging back up Russian interference because American voters just don’t buy what Trump has tried to sell them about the Epstein files that his administration is still keeping secret, after he promised during last year’s campaign to make them public.
She appears to have won back his favor, for now. But this distraction is just so shaky, like those keys dangled in a baby’s face, that it won’t hold America’s gaze for long.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.
