CIA insider tears apart Trump's 'assault' on secret intelligence

President Donald Trump’s mass firings in the military have already alarmed Pentagon officials and foreign policy experts, but now a conservative commentator is going one step further: He is accusing Trump of outright destroying the military.

“The degree to which one knows that Hegseth is a very bad Secretary of Defense, I'm now worried that he's doing much more damage to our military than I previously had thought, which, you know, that's one of the institutions you think holds up best under adverse circumstances,

and it has many, many times,” William Kristol, a longtime conservative commentator, said during a podcast for The Bulwark on Monday. “And I had talked to a couple of people who've served in the military just sort of randomly, and I saw them or talked to them over the weekend, and they did not disabuse me of my fears.”

John Hailemann, NBC News national affairs analyst, argued that Trump’s frustration at his inability to bring about a permanent resolution in the Iran war could cause him to engage in drastic actions.

“He's backed into a corner,” Hailemann told Kristol. Nothing he's doing is working now. And might he, under those circumstances, just decide to finally go forward and do the thing he's been threatening to do basically for the last five months, essentially, which is like rain hellfire down on Iran and escalate the war in a really dramatic way. And the news of the weekend was he was presented with those plans. There was a thoroughgoing debate. And he decided, no, he was not going to do that. Although the reasons for it, to the extent that the reporting suggests that the reasons are basically, we don't have enough bombs anymore.”

Kristol said that this reported bombs shortage raises questions about the state in which Trump has left the US military.

“It really was striking,” Kristol said. “And I was, I guess, a little rattled by that. I mean, one knew obviously that Donald Trump is not a great strategist or a strategist at all, that he's doing this based on a kind of hubris and a whim, and that it's very foolish, and we were going to pay a price for it. But the degree to which it's not just him being a bad commander-in-chief, but the drawing down our stockpiles, I think especially of the things we use to shoot down incoming stuff, and that's presumably why people were killed a week ago.”

He added, “Not presumably, that is how people were killed. You know, those are the casualties that Trump doesn't want to acknowledge. The Trump Defense Department doesn't believe we're part of the war on Iran, even really unbelievable, right?” All of Trump’s dodginess about the fact that America is at war with Iran and the number of casualties we have incurred there deeply alarms Kristol.

“I was so furious when I read that Thursday night, right, that they'd removed those four army soldiers, killed in action, from the website,” Kristol said. “But that turns out to be, I mean, that's terrible, but then it turns out to be, I won't say the tip of the iceberg, but a kind of indication of something much bigger, which is, the military is kind of complicit, I would say, in the cover-up of how bad things have gotten in terms of our, as you say, our munitions, especially anti-drone, anti-missile, anti-aircraft, maybe anti-aircraft as well, munitions in the region.”

Kirstol also warned about the damage Trump has caused to the military by politicizing it, particularly in terms of firing people who might stand up to or challenge the administration.

“It's that they really are doing some real damage now to this one institution that has held up so well over recent decades through thick and thin,” Kristol said. “And I had thought and do think still is probably holding up better than most of our institutions in the federal government against the Trump and Trumpist onslaught. But it turns out you can do a lot of damage when you've got a Secretary of Defense and people willing to go along with him and he removes the people who might have stood up to him and he's got the backing of the White House and he... I guess, wanted to show Trump that everything was going great.”

Earlier on Monday, a former CIA analyst who worked for both Trump and President Joe Biden similarly warned that Trump’s politicization of intelligence services has weakened American from a national security standpoint.

“In 2025, I watched from inside the White House and at the CIA as the intelligence community came under assault: senior officers fired in public, clearances revoked for dissent, decade-old assessments denounced by the CIA director in the press,” Julia Curlee wrote for Lawfare. “Earlier this month, the campaign reached the raw intelligence itself, as the White House declassified selected reporting to sustain election interference claims that the intelligence community’s own finished analysis would not support.”

As one example of Trump’s politicizing intelligence, Curlee described how members of the CIA with expertise in Venezuela were fired when they did not back the administration’s position on taking over that country.

“Twenty years later, days after taking office, the second Trump administration tasked the National Intelligence Council (NIC) to assess whether the Venezuelan regime had directed Tren de Aragua—a criminal gang—to invade the United States,” Curlee wrote. “The question, from Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, matched nearly word for word the predicate for the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, last invoked in World War II to intern Japanese, German, and Italian nationals.”