Trump’s a Russian stooge, says former CIA director
Criticism mounts after a week of blunders that has seen GOP candidate’s poll ratings plummet.
Stuart Stevens, former Republican campaign manager
A former CIA chief capped one of the most bizarre weeks in United States presidential election history yesterday, saying that Donald Trump would be a dangerous commander in chief and was being exploited as an unwitting Russian agent.
The warning from Michael Morrell, acting CIA director between 2011 and 2013, comes as fears grow among Republican leaders that their presidential nominee is marching them towards a defeat of historic proportions.
US President Barack Obama celebrated his 55th birthday yesterday with a party at the White House where the guests included Beyonce and Stevie Wonder. Arguably, though, Trump had already given Obama the best present he could have wished for: a catalogue of spectacular errors.
The billionaire picked fights with the grieving parents of a fallen Muslim soldier, with the most powerful Republican on Capitol Hill and with a crying baby at a rally in Florida.
Polls show him haemorrhaging support – nationally, in battleground states and in Republican strongholds – as his behaviour leaves pundits wondering whether, with 93 days until the election, the 70-year-old tycoon can change his belligerent personality and with it the trajectory of the election.
‘‘It’s crazy time . . . He’s a neutron bomb, destroying every person around him,’’ Stuart Stevens, who ran Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012, said. ‘‘The Republican Party needs to walk away.’’
Trump also suggested that women who experience sexual harassment should change careers; seemed unaware that Russia had annexed Crimea; and claimed that the election could be rigged. So erratic has he been that top Republican officials have privately expressed doubt over whether he wants to be president.
‘‘He is morally unfit for office. He’s a spoiled rich kid, a bully,’’ said Joe McQuaid, the conservative publisher of the Union Leader, the largest newspaper in the state of New Hampshire.
Morrell, a CIA veteran who was alongside former president George W Bush on 9/11 and with Obama when Osama bin Laden was killed, attacked Trump for taking ‘‘policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests – endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic states’’.
Trump had succumbed to flattery from Russian President Vladimir Putin, Morrell said.
‘‘In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr Putin had recruited Mr Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.’’
He also argued that Trump had played into the hands of jihadists by calling for Muslims to be barred from the US.
‘‘Many Muslim Americans play critical roles in protecting our country, including the man, who I cannot identify, who ran the CIA’s counterterrorism centre for nearly a decade and who I believe is most responsible for keeping America safe since the September 11 attacks,’’ Morrell wrote in The New York Times.
He is the third former spy chief to censure Trump. Michael Hayden, who led the CIA from 2006 to 2009, said of the tycoon this week: ‘‘He’s inconsistent. And when you’re the head of a global superpower, inconsistency, unpredictability
He’s a neutron bomb, destroying every person around him. The Republican Party needs to walk away.
– those are dangerous things.’’
Leon Panetta, CIA director from 2009 to 2011, attacked Trump as dangerously ill-informed. ‘‘He gets his foreign policy experience from watching TV and running the Miss Universe pageant,’’ he said. ‘‘If only it were funny.’’
A fourth former CIA director, former president George H W Bush, has pointedly declined to endorse the billionaire.
Trump took the rare step of admitting an error yesterday, saying that he was wrong when he claimed to have seen videotape of a plane delivering US$400 million in cash from the US to Iran.
Trump also took steps to steer his White House campaign back into favour with his party establishment yesterday by endorsing House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, after expressing coolness towards him earlier this week.
Trump endorsed Ryan, the top elected Republican, in his reelection bid at a rally in Green Bay, northern Wisconsin, which is Ryan’s home state. Ryan had no plans to attend the event, in a sign of lingering frictions between them.
Trump earlier this week refused to endorse Ryan when he told The Washington Post he was ‘‘not quite there yet’’ – using the same phrase Ryan used about Trump before finally endorsing him.
Trump also announced that he was setting up an advisory team to help guide him on economic policy. The group relies heavily on hedge fund managers and investment bankers, a group Trump has railed against in the past, and includes no women.
In addition, Trump plans to release his framework for boosting the US economy in a speech in Detroit on Tuesday, an event that will offer him a chance to avoid theatrics and detail how he would handle economic issues if elected.
Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore said the plan would focus on four areas: tax, deregulation, energy policy and trade.
At a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Trump showed newfound discipline, mostly sticking to his central charge that Democratic rival Clinton is the ‘‘queen of corruption’’.
He defended himself against her charge that he is temperamentally unfit for the White House. ‘‘All my life I’ve been told, ‘You have the greatest temperament’,’’ he said.
Trump also defended himself against what he called the news media’s claim that he kicked a crying baby out of an event earlier this week in Virginia. ‘‘I love babies,’’ he said.
Trump’s campaign said his economic advisory panel included former steel executive Dan DiMicco; tobacco company Vector Group’s president and CEO, Howard Lorber; and Trump campaign finance chairman and investment manager Steven Mnuchin.
Hedge fund managers John Paulson and Steve Feinberg; antitax advocacy group Club for Growth’s Stephen Moore; and David Malpass, who has served under previous Republican administrations in the Treasury and State Departments, were also named. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn turned down an invitation to join the group.