Trump’s Bad Speech: A Disinformation Operation

Donald Trump speaking in the East Room of the White House on Thursday night. Saul Loeb/Pool via AP

Did you see the special announcement about my forthcoming book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America? If not, please check it out here—and see the special offer.

In covering the unhinged speech Donald Trump delivered on Thursday night, the New York Times reported that he made “sweeping,” “aggressive,” and “outlandish” assertions. The Washington Post declared that Trump “stopped short” of providing evidence of voter fraud and revisited “long-debunked conspiracy theories about his 2020 defeat” and that his speech relied on “contradictions.” The Wall Street Journal noted that Trump “repeated some of the unsubstantiated claims he has made in the past.”

These were all accurate characterizations, but they failed to convey fully what Trump has been up to: The president of the United States is mounting an extensive disinformation campaign—and he has been weaponizing US intelligence agencies to hoodwink the American public.

In this address from the White House, Trump, who had promised he would deliver “big news,” contended that US elections are not secure, that opportunities for fraud are rampant, and that China has engaged in “sinister election meddling” in the United States, strongly suggesting that Beijing intervened in the 2020 campaign to help steal the election from him. And he announced the release of declassified intelligence records that he insisted substantiated his claims, including his assertion that the supposed Deep State—his personal boogeyman—covered up China’s interference in the 2020 election.

But, as many media outlets noted, the released documents did not back up Trump’s wild allegations. One example: The White House released a report produced in August 2020 by the National Intelligence Council, which coordinates the analysis conducted by all 18 agencies within the intelligence community. This document assessed the “foreign threats” to the 2020 election, and it noted that America’s spies concluded that China “preferred” that Trump not be reelected but that Beijing “did not intend to try to affect the election.” That is, the spooks concluded that China was not sinisterly meddling in the race.

That report, however, did state definitively that during the 2020 campaign Russian leader Vladimir Putin and senior Russian officials were overseeing an operation to smear Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, with “the aim to defeat the former Vice President and ensure” Trump’s reelection.

Oops.

Other documents also backfired for Trump. One declassified CIA report from July 2020 noted that Chinese cyber operatives had targeted Biden’s campaign “to gather intelligence.” It reported that the intelligence community “assesses that China does not currently intend to covertly interfere to try to sway the outcome of this election.”

Other documents show that China did try to use propaganda and other means to spread criticism of Trump in the United States—no surprise—and that its hackers had obtained voter registration information, as well as databases containing personal information on American consumers and US military personnel. (If the Trump administration wants to crack down on China’s well-known cyber-thefts of data on Americans, that would be a good thing.) But none of these declassified records supported Trump’s implication that the 2020 election—which he has relentlessly claimed was stolen from him—was rigged by China. They show the opposite.

This blatant abuse of top-secret information is nothing new for the Trump crew. A year ago, Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, released declassified intelligence records that she claimed showed that President Barack Obama and his top national security aides at the end of his presidency created a phony intelligence report that said Putin had intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win the White House. This intelligence community conclusion—reaffirmed by subsequent investigations—has long stuck in Trump’s craw, for it taints his first triumph in a presidential contest.

But the documents Gabbard put out revealed no conspiracy. They were intelligence reports from 2016 stating that Russia, whose hackers had penetrated election systems across the country, had not attempted to interfere in the voting and vote-counting processes. This was a completely different matter than Russia’s covert hack-and-leak and social-media operations that were conducted to influence the election in Trump’s favor.

Gabbard’s brazen misrepresentation of these once-classified records was one of the most extreme perversions of US intelligence in modern history. She cited them to accuse Obama and others of “treason”—a crime punishable by death. And this BS move triggered a criminal investigation now being overseen in the Miami US attorney’s office by Joe diGenova, a pro-Trump fanatic and former Fox News commentator who was part of the smear-Biden operation led by Rudy Giuliani that was aided by Russian intelligence in 2020.

Trump’s election speech was another installment in his disinformation crusade that has been underway since 2020, when he refused to accept defeat and concocted the bogus narrative that a mélange of Deep State actors, Democrats, media jackals, and foreign governments swiped the election from him.

Since returning to the White House, he has exploited his power in Orwellian fashion to promote this Big Lie. And he has done so in a rather stupid way. These document releases are easy to debunk. One only has to read them to see they don’t say what Trump says they say. It’s a demonstration that Trump and his minions believe they can get away with the most obvious lying.

No doubt, they can with his die-hard base. But Trump isn’t wearing well with anyone else. His constant lies about the economy, the Iran war, and you-name-it are alienating independent voters. The lackluster response to his election security speech—even from Republicans—might be a sign that he’s slipping. Surprisingly, Fox & Friends, the morning after the speech, mentioned it not once. (After having to settle and pay out $787 million in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case that resulted from its amplification of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, Fox might be a tad reticent about echoing the latest iteration of his conspiracy-mongering.)

Despite Trump’s failure to whip up a frenzy, the speech and the larger disinformation operation are still dangerous. As others have noted, this address, though a dud, could be part of a plan to discredit the upcoming midterms and create a predicate for Trump to somehow mess with them.

What’s also disturbing is how Trump has debased US intelligence. He has turned government agencies vital for national security into partisan outfits that serve his own interests. There are always reasons to be wary of the intelligence community, and it has been politicized in the past. (See the Iraq War.) But with these sham declassifications, Trump has warped this crucial arm of the government into a revenge hit squad for his own benefit.

Those intelligence officials who go along with these transparent misrepresentations of intelligence—such as CIA Director John Ratcliffe or acting DNI Bill Pulte—would presumably accept other fabrications of intelligence, as well as other misuses of intelligence by Trump. Consequently, nothing they say or tell the public can be trusted. Last week, Manhattan US attorney Jay Clayton, who Trump has nominated to be DNI, refused during his confirmation hearing to state that Biden won the 2020 election—that is, he went along with Trump’s con job. So how independent could he be as DNI? The spy agencies have been hijacked by a pathological, deceitful narcissist for his war on reality.

It’s good that many in the media fact-checked his phony-baloney allegations, but it’s not sufficient to just cast Trump’s election claims as false, unproven, or debunked. The full story needs telling: The president is directing a disinformation operation against the American public and subverting the intelligence community to do so. This is not merely the latest instance of Trump lying; this is a major Trump scandal, with tremendous consequences for the safety of the nation and the future of American democracy.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

The other day, as I walked to my local Metro station, I spotted a DC public bus with this advertisement on its side:

This promotion for the Museum of the Bible is a lie.

The Old Testament was written over a long stretch likely beginning in the 10th century B.C.E. And the New Testament was obviously cobbled together in the decades after the death of JC.

Now when did legislation begin? The earliest surviving legal code is the Code of Ur-Nammu, which governed the Sumerian city of Ur and is dated to 2100–2050 B.C. There’s also the more famous Code of Hammurabi of the mid-1750s B.C. (In between the two came the Code of Lipit-Ishtar and the Laws of Eshnunna.) It’s also possible that early societies in Egypt, China, and the Indus Valley had laws and legal codes—though no clear texts from those days remain. And the Roman Republic had legislative assemblies, beginning about 500 B.C. Ditto for the Greeks in Athens. That’s before some portions of the Bible were written.

So the Bible does not predate civic law. Moreover, does the Museum of the Bible regard some of the more extreme provisions presented in the Old Testament as legitimate laws, such as death for rebellious sons and people who work on the Sabbath, the prohibition of wearing wool and linen together, or the requirement that a man who rapes a woman must marry her and pay her father 50 shekels?

I don’t fault the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority for not fact-checking the ads that adorn its buses. But these Bible champions ought to remember Leviticus 19:11: “Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another."

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. “The theme of the innocent man being accused, I feel, provides the audience with a greater sense of danger,” Alfred Hitchcock once told fellow director François Truffaut. “It’s easier for them to identify with him than with a guilty man on the run.” And a plot device to which Hitchcock often returned was the innocent bystander who stumbles into a nefarious conspiracy. That happened in North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and others of his works. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, a new Apple TV drama, deftly melds these Hitchcockian go-tos.

The “innocent man” in this case is Paula, a single-parent soccer mom—literally, she coaches her young daughter’s team—who’s a fact-checker at a New York-based magazine. Things aren’t going too well for her. Her boss is jerking her around about a promotion, and, as she’s having a tough time juggling work and family, her remarried former husband has started a custody battle so he and his new wife can move to Boise with the daughter. Plus, she’s lonely and has been paying for online sessions with a cute camboy named Trevor who helps her get off.

But she’s holding it all together—until Trevor is brutally assaulted one night while Zooming with Paula. He later informs her that the assailants will kill him unless he pays them $15,000 and asks Paula for the money. It’s obviously a con, and when she calls Trevor on this, he threatens to use the personal information she has shared during their sessions to blackmail her. A pissed-off Paula studies a video of the purported attack on Trevor and uses her fact-checking skills (yay, fact-checkers!) to figure out where he lives and heads there to confront him. Guess what she finds. A dead Trevor.

From this point on, our everywoman is drawn deeper into and threatened by a criminal conspiracy—while contending with the increasingly bitter custody battle. But it’s her fact-checking skills that allow Paula to chase after the very violent bad guy, though at great peril to herself.

The show has more than the requisite number of clever plot twists. Tatiana Maslany is superb as Paula, who transitions from stressed-out mom to dogged pursuer of dangerous scammers, while being accused by the cops of killing Trevor and a pal of his. The creator of the show, David Rosen, does far more than check off the boxes on a DIY-Hitchcock list. He puts Sir Alfred’s basics to excellent use. If you’re going to steal, it’s been said, steal from the best. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed does and pulls off the heist brilliantly.

Goin’ Local, Lenny Kaye. A few weeks ago, I was invited to meet Lenny Kaye at a DC-area club where he’d be performing. I was bummed, for I had another commitment that night. I’ve always wanted to meet Kaye. He’s rock ‘n’ roll royalty on two counts. Kaye was a music writer in the 1960s and 1970s and worked at the now-legendary Village Oldies record store in Greenwich Village. In 1972, he compiled a collection of songs from mostly forgotten garage and psychedelic bands that were recorded in the mid-60s. The album, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968, became an essential record for in-the-know musicians and a key influence for punk bands. In fact, Kaye’s reference to “punk rock” in the liner notes is one of the earliest uses of the term. This project earned him the title “godfather of garage rock.”

Kaye, though, was much more than an early rock musicologist. While he was working at Village Oldies, he met a young aspiring poet named Patti Smith, who had been advised to put her poetry to music, and he became a guitarist in her band. He produced her debut single (“Hey Joe,” with “Piss Factory” on the B side) and played on Horses, her first album, which has been hailed as a seminal record within the punk movement. (He co-wrote two of the tracks.) For decades afterward, Kaye remained an artistic partner for Smith as a co-writer and a member of the Patti Smith Group, while also touring with his own band and working on projects with others, including the Fleshtones and R.E.M.

Yet Kaye, now 79, never released a solo album. Until this month, with Goin’ Local. It’s a collection of ethereal tunes; many are ditties Kaye sings in a whispery voice. On “The Things You’ve Left Behind,” this soon-to-be-octogenarian reflects on the physical and emotional stuff one accumulates before the final departure. (“We all cart around a whole lot of baggage / That would better be left by the side of the road / Books and records, old clothes and photos / Carry a heavy load.”) The standout track is the lovely “Solstice,” co-written with Smith, a poetic contemplation of the longest day of the year. I didn’t get to see Kaye, but listening to this song made me feel as if I were on a pleasant stroll with him and Smith through the twilight-illuminated streets of the Village.