The feud will now be played out in the open

No surprise after Trump's latest lies.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s renewed attacks on the U.S. intelligence community this week, senior intelligence briefers are breaking two years of silence to warn that the President is endangering American security with what they say is a stubborn disregard for their assessments.

Citing multiple in-person episodes, these intelligence officials say Trump displays what one called “willful ignorance” when presented with analyses generated by America’s $81 billion-a-year intelligence services.

  Time

What a waste, when we have a president whose gut is smarter than anyone else's brain. Not to mention he has the best intel in the world: Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity.

The officials, who include analysts who prepare Trump’s briefs and the briefers themselves, describe futile attempts to keep his attention by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences, and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible.

We've heard that story before.

What is most troubling, say these officials and others in government and on Capitol Hill who have been briefed on the episodes, are Trump’s angry reactions when he is given information that contradicts positions he has taken or beliefs he holds. Two intelligence officers even reported that they have been warned to avoid giving the President intelligence assessments that contradict stances he has taken in public.

[...]

At a Congressional hearing on national security threats [last week], the leaders of all the major intelligence agencies, including the Directors of National Intelligence, the CIA and the FBI contradicted Trump on issues relating to North Korea, Russia, the Islamic State, and Iran. In response, Trump said the intelligence chiefs were “passive and naïve” and suggested they “should go back to school.”

[...]

The problem has existed since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, the intelligence officials say, and for a time they tried to respond to the President’s behavior in briefings with dark humor. After a briefing in preparation for a meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May, for example, the subject turned to the British Indian Ocean Territory of Diego Garcia [...] home to an important airbase and a U.S. Naval Support Facility.

[...]

The President, officials familiar with the briefing said, asked two questions: Are the people nice, and are the beaches good? “Some of us wondered if he was thinking about our alliance with the Brits and the security issues in an important area where the Chinese have been increasingly active, or whether he was thinking like a real estate developer,” one of the officials said wryly.

In another briefing on South Asia, Trump’s advisors brought a map of the region from Afghanistan to Bangladesh [...] Trump, they said, pointed at the map and said he knew that Nepal was part of India, only to be told that it is an independent nation. When said he was familiar with Bhutan and knew it, too, was part of India, his briefers told him that Bhutan was an independent kingdom.

A Politico article last August describing that meeting said he called Nepal "nipple" and Bhutan "button". Who knows whether that's how he thought they were pronounced, or he was being snarky. Either one is totally believable.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGIA), which oversees the spy satellites that map and photograph key areas, [once] tried to impress upon Trump the size and complexity of the North Korean [major nuclear site which they falsely claimed - although Trump believed them - to have destroyed]. In preparing one briefing for the President on the issue early in his administration, the NGIA built a model of the facility with a removable roof, according to two officials. To help Trump grasp the size of the facility, the NGIA briefers built a miniature version New York’s Statue of Liberty to scale and put it inside the model.

[...]

[Trump] has ignored the agencies’ warnings and has exaggerated the steps North Korea has taken to shutter the facility, those officials and two others say. That is a particular concern now, ahead of a possible second summit with the Kim Jong-Un later this month.

Unfit. Incapable. Impeach.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.