Silence on cybersecurity
The day after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Congress that he had “directed that all measures be taken for our defense,” and that he had resolved to achieve total victory.
The day that terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush told the nation that he had “directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice,” and said that America would “go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.”
But in the week since it was revealed that U.S. government computers — including systems at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security — have been compromised by Russian hackers in what is being called “a grave risk to the federal government,” President Donald Trump has been silent on the matter. He remains instead fixated on imaginary voter fraud in the election he lost, and in his efforts to subvert our democracy.
It is such a dereliction of duty and so grave a violation of his oath of office that it’s almost impossible to believe.
Yet it is hardly surprising. Mr. Trump
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has never seemed to comprehend the gravity of foreign foes’ efforts to compromise what he referred to in a 2016 debate as “the cyber.” Indeed, in that debate he gave the kind of rambling answer on a cybersecurity question that one might expect from a middle schooler who hadn’t studied for the test. He careened from not being sure one could blame Russia or China or a 400-pound hacker to stolen Democratic Party emails to the invention of the internet to his son having computers to concluding that “cyber is very, very tough,” and “maybe it’s hardly doable,” but also “we have to do better.”
Mr. Trump’s administration would go on to dismantle U.S. cybersecurity efforts in the White House and the State Department and end funding for the nation’s largest digital evidence training center. When the head of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency contradicted his false claim of widespread voter fraud, Mr. Trump fired him.
We can only speculate why Mr. Trump persists in being so unserious about “the cyber” and other threats posed by Russia, a nation with which he was secretly trying to arrange a real estate development deal even while running for president. We don’t really know why he has accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials of interference in the 2016 election over the unanimous conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community.
What we do know is plain to see: Mr. Trump has been virtually absent on the two most urgent crises facing this nation — a pandemic that is killing more people daily than 9/11 and could well claim more American lives than we lost in World War II before it’s over, and a cybersecurity attack whose damage is still being understood. Shockingly, the president of the United States has reacted with ignorance and indifference in the face of a foreign attack.
Fortunately, President-elect Joe Biden is already taking this seriously, stating that his administration would impose “substantial costs” on those responsible and that the country needs to do better than play defense. “We need to disrupt and deter our adversaries from undertaking significant cyberattacks in the first place,” he said.
But as the saying goes, we have only one president at a time. To paraphrase another, you go to war with the president you have, not the one you wish you had. For the next month, this is America’s reality: A commander-inchief chasing imaginary enemies, unmindful of the ones who are not merely at our gates, but past our firewalls.