Will Trump Be ‘Scared Straight’ by His Classified Briefings?
By MATT LATIMER at Politico
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/donald-trump-2016-classified-briefings-214169
SNIP............
The news that Donald Trump will begin receiving intelligence briefings on Wednesday has created concern that the oversharing GOP candidate will be unable to resist vague-tweeting or otherwise blabbing America’s secrets to the entire world. That very worry was expressed recently by President Obama, who implicitly warned Trump against reckless disclosures, saying if presidential candidates “want to be president, they have to start acting like a president.” There is obviously considerable irony here: Obama neglected to note, of course, that it wasn’t Trump but his favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, who was recently criticized by the FBI director for her “extremely careless” handling of classified material.
But there is another possibility—that a sobering look at the real state of affairs in the world will give the Republican nominee his first real sense of the sizable challenges in store for the next commander in chief. Unlike Secretary Clinton and nearly every one of the Republicans who challenged him for the nomination, Trump has not been immersed in the intelligence world. Since he’s never worked at all in the federal government, he’s never received a classified briefing, of the type congressional leaders and various Cabinet secretaries receive as a matter of course. This is a new world for him. Maybe, one hopes, these briefings will help him realize just how complicated that world actually is.
Having worked for a U.S. president and a secretary of defense, both of whom were privy to intelligence briefings on a daily basis, I know personally how these briefings can affect people. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that any person would not be altered significantly by hearing and seeing firsthand the activities of people who seek every day to do the hard work of keeping Americans from harm. Knowing things before the rest of the world knows them isn’t always cool; sometimes it’s frightening. I had some experience in this area from my time in the White House, having learned about the looming financial crisis of 2008 before the general public had any idea that our entire economy was within days of a systemic collapse.
So what will the impact of access to America’s biggest secrets have on the candidate? Will we see a “Scared Straight” Trump or a “Scary” Trump? Which version of the following sounds more realistic?
.............SNIP
= new reply since forum marked as read
Why not?
1. The dude is fucking toast. He will not be president. Period .
2. The dude is a fucking loon. Seriously. Mad as a hatter and/or thick as a brick.
3. The dude hired Manafort with his deep Russian ties and then changed the fucking GOP platform to a more favorable stance for Russia
4. The dude just hired that Breitbart jackass. This has now ceased to be a serious or credible campaign.
If you were the President, and you saw this list (minus the dudes and f bombs of course), how much "intelligence" would you allow the dude to get.
Exactly, not much.
Dude
