In Intelligence Briefing About Island Site Of Major US Airbase, Donald Trump Asks ‘Are The Beaches Good?’
Earlier this week, as Inquisitr reported, Donald Trump lashed out at top U.S. intelligence officials — officials who Trump himself had appointed — calling them “passive and naive” and saying that they should “go back to school.” Trump’s attack on the U.S. intelligence services, the latest in a lengthy series of such attacks by Trump, per the Guardian, was so alarming to the officials charged with giving Trump his daily intelligence briefings that several have now gone on the record with previously secret details of Trump’s bizarre behavior during those briefings.
The intelligence briefers spoke to Time Magazine, warning that Trump “is endangering American security with what they say is a stubborn disregard for their assessments.”
Trump appears disturbingly inattentive during the briefings, the officials told Time, despite efforts by the briefers to hold Trump’s fleeting interest “by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences, and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible.”
And in many cases, Trump simply refuses to accept intelligence findings if they contradict what he wants to hear, the briefers say, expressing exasperation at Trump’s “willful ignorance” toward information compiled and presented to him by “America’s $81 billion-a-year intelligence services.”
In one instance, according to the Time report, briefers were informing Trump of developments regarding the British-owned Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, home to a major U.S. Air Force base, a base that is essential to U.S. military efforts in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
But Trump’s only questions in the Diego Garcia briefing were, “Are the people nice?” and “Are the beaches good?” according to the briefing officials.
“Some of us wondered if he was thinking about our alliance with the Brits and the security issues in an important area where the Chinese have been increasingly active, or whether he was thinking like a real estate developer,” one told Time.
The officials said that they were concerned about Trump’s high level of anger whenever intelligence information contradicted positions he had taken in public. That anger was on display own Wednesday, as Talking Points Memo reported, when Trump simply cancelled his daily intelligence briefing due to his anger at top intelligence officials for contradicting his claims that ISIS was defeated, and similar positions, in their Senate testimony the previous day.
