Trump 'alarmingly simple' to spy on — and there’s one major beneficiary: espionage expert​

Over the course of President Donald Trump’s second term, not only has his administration proven itself to be “alarmingly simple” to spy on, but the ease of gathering intelligence on American leadership is directly empowering one of the country’s greatest adversaries.

This is according to Harvard Kennedy School espionage expert Calder Walton, who wrote in the iPaper on Monday, “Trump is undoubtedly targeted by more foreign intelligence agencies than any previous US president. His unpredictable decision-making, from tariffs to his war with Iran, has left foreign spy chiefs – both friendly and hostile – scrambling to understand his thinking. One can imagine it is a busy time for psychological profilers in Paris and Tokyo, to say nothing of Moscow and Beijing.”

As Walton explains, on its most basic level, intelligence aims to gather information that provides a decision-making advantage. The Trump administration has made this “alarmingly simple for enemies and allies alike.”

“Trump’s mobile phone number, for example, is widely known among the Washington press corps,” writes Walton. “Journalists have managed to get interviews with him by simply cold-calling. One can only imagine how many foreign spies are also listening in to his phone conversations. Any foreign intelligence service worth its name will have recruited agents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where security is known to be pathetic. At the end of his first term, Trump had classified documents lying around in one of his bathrooms.”

Then, asserts Walton, there are the wildly unqualified people Trump has appointed to key intelligence roles.

“Trump’s Secretary of Defence (now renamed Secretary of War), Pete Hegseth, is the least qualified holder of that office,” writes Walton. “A former Fox News presenter who was forced to deny claims of sexual assault, intoxication at work and mismanaging two veteran organizations when they were raised by the Senate in his confirmation hearing, Hegseth is apparently so out of his depth that he has instigated prayer groups at the Pentagon.”

Walton writes that “Trump’s appointment of Kash Patel as FBI Director is not much better. A former podcaster and conspiracy theorist, Patel has waged a vendetta against the ‘deep state,’ claiming it is undermining Trump. Patel’s tenure at the FBI has been beset by reported problems: he had to deny allegations of excessive drinking and absences from work during a Senate hearing in May.”

“The clown show continues,” says Walton. “Trump’s first director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was not only incompetent but positively dangerous. Gabbard has regurgitated Kremlin talking points and whispered favourable things about former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. After Gabbard’s resignation in June, Trump’s nominee for DNI, Jay Clayton, gave a pantomime performance in the Senate where he refused to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election.”

Walton argues that there is only one qualification necessary to be one of Trump’s intelligence directors: “absolute loyalty to his belief that he did not lose the 2020 election.” Last month, he renewed these allegations, taking to primetime TV to share intelligence documents he said proved China’s electoral meddling. “In fact,” writes Walton, “the intelligence assessments he declassified show nothing of the kind. The centrepiece of Trump’s evidence was that China had obtained voter records of 220 million US voters. In reality, US voter records are widely available, and Trump produced no evidence that China interfered with votes.”

This is all part of a plan, asserts Walton, to claim that the election was rigged should the Republicans lose in November. “Ironically,” he notes, “one of the declassified US intelligence assessments says that Russia – not China – was seeking to undermine public confidence in the 2020 election. Trump is acutely sensitive about Russian election meddling after the 2016 US presidential election, when he sought and welcomed Kremlin support. Admitting Russian interference in that election would, in Trump’s mind, undermine the legitimacy of his presidency.”

Based on all this, Walton draws a grim conclusion, writing, “Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election and his war with Iran are destroying American soft power. The greatest beneficiary of Trump’s chaotic second term is China. By contrast to the White House, China is able to present itself as a stable and sober player on the world stage. Trump’s policies are doing more damage to American interests than any hostile foreign intelligence operations could do. The President is Moscow and Beijing’s greatest asset.”