Media Stokes Fear That Jilted Trump Could Spill State Secrets

We are living in a hyperbolic bubble these days, aren’t we?  Everyone we dislike is akin to Hitler, and everyone we support is on the path to sainthood.

There is no middle ground in American politics anymore, and we no longer reward those who reach across the aisle with anything more than a byline on their political resumé.  We are at war with one another, and it’s getting uglier by the minute.

Kicking off our latest lurch toward total governmental anarchy is the fight for the White House, as Donald Trump continues to insist that the Associated Press made the wrong call on Saturday.  Now, thanks to the fact that the left has spent the last 4 years demonizing the President, there are unfounded fears that Trump, a man who owes his entire existence to the American Dream, is going to leave the White House guns-a-blazing, spilling all manner of national secrets on his way out the door.

“Anyone who is disgruntled, dissatisfied or aggrieved is a risk of disclosing classified information, whether as a current or former officeholder. Trump certainly fits that profile,” said David Priess, a former CIA officer and author of “The President’s Book of Secrets,” a history of the top-secret intelligence briefings that presidents and their staff receive while in office.

Others weren’t so sure about how much the President retained.

“He probably doesn’t know much about collection details. But he will have bits and pieces,” said retired Gen. Peter B. Zwack, who served as a military intelligence officer and was the senior U.S. defense attache to Russia from 2012 to 2014.

The chances are low that Trump knows the fine details of intelligence, such as the name of a spy or where an intelligence agency may have planted a surveillance device. But he almost certainly knows significant facts about the process of gathering intelligence that would be valuable to adversaries.

Of course, it is also possible that this concern is a product of the wild and unkempt state of our political egos in the late stages of 2020.