Our Persistent Naivete is Endangering Our Country

We Need To Think Bigger

It’s been over 18 months since Donald Trump left office, and we continue to be naive.

It’s not helping.

We collectively need way huger imaginations, and at every level. And we need to talk about risk way more than what we’re doing. Denial and naivete together are wickedly powerful, and they’re helping this country get weaker.

The shared shock today is that at least some of the documents that Trump has had squirreled away in his wholly unsecured resort facility likely crawling with foreign agents were about the nuclear capabilities of a foreign country, and were of the highest, highest, super-rare kind of classification that almost no one has a clearance for.

First, why are we only alarmed about Trump having taking classified documents EIGHTEEN MONTHS AFTER IT HAPPENED?

Why weren’t we more worried he might have taken highly classified documents in January of 2021 when we saw pictures like this… after he attempted a coup, fomented an insurrection, and sent a mob to kill his vice president?

Jim Bourg @jimbourg

A worker adds a box of items to others waiting for a moving truck in the middle of West Executive Drive on the White House grounds on January 14, 2021, before the departure of U.S. President Donald Trump from Washington. Reuters Photo by Erin Scott ⁦⁦@erinscottphoto⁩

There’s a bunch of photo documentation of Trump’s hasty, chaotic move out of the White House. Some of it came with loose rumours that maybe classified material was mixed in. Here’s another moving photo:

Jim Bourg @jimbourg

White House workers move boxes of documents and presidential gifts into a U.S. Government moving truck on the White House grounds on January 14, 2021, before the departure of U.S. President Donald Trump from the White House. Reuters Photo by Erin Scott ⁦@erinscottphoto⁩

Those kinds of pictures should have been alarming in 2021 but maybe we were collectively too busy being shocked by the insurrection and coup attempt to consider then that there was a potential 5-alarm fire shipping out in those boxes. Moved by government employees.

Of course, we don’t expect that US presidents steal highly classified national intelligence secrets. But why wouldn’t we have expected that this former president would steal secrets? Like seriously? He motivated a mob to bring a gallows to the US Capitol, to chant “Hang Mike Pence!”, and to seek out other political leaders to murder.

He tried to steal the presidency.

He had secret meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he refused to have US government staff present. He gave away highly classified intelligence from our allies to a Russian Ambassador in 2017. He tweeted classified intelligence photos. He danced with Saudi leadership around a sacred orb. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s son-in-law has a current $2 billion contract with the Saudis. The lists go on.

With Trump, it’s always worse than we collectively imagine. Always.

The Security Risk Is So Much Bigger Than We’re Seeing

I wrote a piece the week the search warrant was executed on Mar-A-Lago that we were focused on the pilfered documents, but that the larger security threat was likely much, much larger than the stolen classified documents alone.

That’s still true, yet we continue to remain focused on the documents and on the Trump himself - and not his whole crew and the risks they collectively pose.

We continue to focus on the completely alarming specific intel that news agencies are figuring out that Trump had… but how long did the US government know this was an issue and dicker about it while thousands of documents were spread about a completely unsecured facility? While Trump was having meetings with uncleared people including foreign nationals in rooms with highly classified documents?

Who let the documents run free into Trump’s stashes to begin with, when he was in the White House? If these things are so damn sensitive, how did he manage to keep them in a horde?

How many other people wandered off with highly classified stuff if Trump managed to weaken the White House’s security protocols so much that this volume of stuff made it out untracked? Was it truly untracked?

What in the holy hell took the national security community so damn long to respond?

Did they have the whole place staked out and bugged in the meantime to monitor access and threats? If so, they’d have needed a FISA warrant and other legal provisions.

Would we rather know that the US government was doing such things to protect our unsecured intelligence assets (documents), or were we just crossing our fingers and hoping it wasn’t too bad? If that’s the case, then why have we bothered with all the guns, guards, gates, and processes up to this point?

Does the US government have enough wherewithal to truly spy on its own ex-president?

Would they have brought the US Secret Service (USSS) ex-president security detail in on it? Or were they part of the problem?

If the USSS detail personnel were doing their jobs, they should damn well have known about at least some of this material. So again - why did it take the US government so damn long to get down there?

Why was it a negotiation given the level of sensitivity of this material? Is it because there were still too many Trump appointees and loyalists burrowed in into the US government? Or is it because of some other reason that also seems highly relevant, because it’s contributed to this spectacular security vulnerability created by a man who was supposed to taken seriously an oath to protect our national security.

Our Limited Brainscape

The media keeps its attention on this phenomenal security damage Trump has brought by tracking the legal challenges like a hawk… but they’re not doing big-picture risk. Not that that’s new, or or the only problem.

After 9/11, we were astonished that we hadn’t thought that someone might try and use a small fleet of huge airplanes as bombs against urban and strategic targets.

After the 2016 election, we were astonished that a foreign country such as Russia could - or would - conduct such a successful voter suppression disinformation campaign. Most of our imaginations refused to see that Russia’s disinformation continued into the pandemic and helped to amplify Trump’s disinformation about the pandemic. And why not? They got excellent results for their investment in both cases. Russia and others have done a spectacular job in fomenting divisiveness and chaos in the US… while we collectively deny that it’s even happening.

Why are we so naive?

I don’t know. I do it too. I like to default to thinking the best about people; until I’ve given them a fair chance to demonstrate otherwise.

Yet it seems like we should have passed that threshold when it comes to Trump, his cabal, and in fact the entire MAGA crowd. And his appointed judges, too. This current national security vulnerability has the potential to get a whole lot worse if the judicial system caves to what he wants and not what’s best for the national security of these United States.

At what point have we moved from naivete to active, intentional denial?

I don’t the answer to that, either.

And I wish I had a secret button I could push that could help the media and political leadership to step back from their hyper-focus on the minutiae of colourful bacteria in the weeds while fire is blowing through tree crowns of entire damn forests across the country’s landscape.

I don’t have a secret button.

National Security Is Deadly Serious For Serious Reasons

I do know that the super highly classified documents that Trump stole should have been kept under way more than “lock and key,” as the media keeps saying.

These document should have only been accessed by people with very, very deep background checks on protected compounds with layer after layer of security. Guns, guards, gates, badge-keys, complicated locks, layers of staff, and windowless vaults designed specifically to keep out prying eyes and electronic surveillance. Hell, you can’t even bring a phone, a computer, or a thumb drive into a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF)… lest you try to put that highly classified sh*t onto the internet.

News analysts are going around saying how maybe foreign agents were on site on Mar-A-Lago pilfering some of this highly classified stuff. Yeah, that’s certainly possible; and it’s good they’re talking about it.

BUT TRUMP OR HIS PEOPLE COULD HAVE SENT THIS STUFF ANYWHERE ON THE INTERNET IN THE LAST 18 MONTHS. IF NOT BEFORE.

Yes, I’m yelling.

This is pretty spectacular, and we’re seriously under-talking about it.

I didn’t get a TS/SCI (Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information) clearance easily when I had one. I didn’t learn to be casual about national security. All this highly classified intel isn’t like “overdue library books,” as some dangerous actual US elected official has tried to claim.

How is it that this intelligence-stealing hasn’t been a priority 5-alarm fire since we saw those moving photos in January of 2021, with rumours that classified stuff was likely mixed in even back then?

The damage Trump and the Trump Cabal have likely done since could be so spectacular that it weakens our national security for decades. Decades. Or maybe it turns some tide that we don’t know can be turned yet. Maybe some tide is already turning; and we just haven’t figured it out.

How much weaker will this spectacular, flagrant intelligence heist make us?

And that’s what it is: it’s a heist, of intelligence.

How much stronger will it make our enemies? How much will it weaken our international US alliances? How much will it strengthen Trump’s, and the big MAGA alliances? The MAGA alliance has very big players; they’re playing a very long game.

Of course, a lot of that we can’t and won’t know - perhaps ever. But we should at least talk about it a whole hell of a lot more than we are.

We need to collectively get bigger imaginations.

We also need to learn to talk more about national security, what it is, and what we want it to be.

We need to vote for it. We need to vote to uphold our national security.

I know this, too. We’re very, very comfortable as the world’s biggest superpower. We’re very close to becoming its first truly multi-racial, multi-ethic democracy of a superpower. That’s part of why there’s so much pushback from the status quo crowd. Our place in the world helps protect the world order; including other democracies… even as ours struggles. Yet we remain a very, very powerful country. We’re doing good in the world. No, it’s not perfect. But we help hold back danger for very many countries.

When our national security is weakened, our ability to maintain all of that weakens as well. Brutal dictators like Putin and his ilk would love to see us fall. Putin thinks nothing of literally bombing and burning down a city with half a million souls in it. He burned down Mariupol without flinching. Why would we think that he or others like him wouldn’t do anything to get their hands on our super highly classified intel? We check their power. They would love to check ours.

And why would Americans and any American media back Trump’s decision to steal all of this highly classified intelligence and other material and keep it in such a flagrantly dangerous location?

There Are Things We Can Do

Part of what we can do is talk about this stuff - with the people we know.

We can pressure the media to do a way better job of covering risk, of not doing two-equivalent-sides to everything when democracy is threatened, and of actually talking about how democracy is threatened. We can pressure the media to cover things that matter to the majority of voters, and to the majority of their media market.

We can pressure businesses who are supporting anti-democracy and anti-national-security candidates. We can call them out for what they are. Many stopped temporarily after the insurrection… but started back up again because the pressure disappeared. We can bring it back.

We can talk to people about why this stuff matters, and why it’s not even a little tiny bit like something we should dismiss like so many overdue library books.

We can share reliable information within our networks of real humans. We have more power individually to reach more humans than we’ve evern had before in the history of humanity. We can do way more with it than what we’ve been doing. Like we could use the internet for more than cat videos and hilarious TikTok videos. We’re doing some - we could seriously up our game. Imagine greater.

Shift the Country is ramping up online workshops to do some of this as fast as we can before the election this fall. We intend to help energize the majority of voters to do some of this shift, and also to actually vote this fall so we have a shot at holding onto this democracy, to keep the rights we have, and to get our other rights back. We’ll announce those webinar events here via this Substack when they’re set up.

We can do so much.

It starts with imagining greater. We don’t just have to imagine risk differently - we can also imagine greater when it comes to the country we want to create. We’re more powerful than we think. That’s part of what we can re-imagine. It’s time for some serious paradigm shifts up in this country. Let’s bring them.

Be safe. Be well. Pass this on.

And keep the faith - in good people, and in democracy. We’re going to keep it… and we’re going to evolve it.

Walk with us.