The Impossible Job of Speaking Truth to Trump
Dan Coats was nervous. Ahead of his very first threat briefing to Congress nearly two years ago, he was having trouble keeping straight what he could say in the unclassified part and what he had to save for the classified portion. He had retired from the Senate just months before—now he’d been thrust into an entirely different kind of job as the director of national intelligence. In the words of one former colleague, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, he was a “fish out of water,” horrified that he might get something wrong.
What he wasn’t worried about, this person said, was the kind of conflict with the president that erupted after his most recent threat briefing this past January, when he and other intelligence officials gave testimony on issues like North Korea, Iran, and Russia that contradicted statements Trump has made. Trump’s lingering anger about that testimony, ahead of his upcoming North Korea summit, has now revived speculation that Trump might fire Coats. But what Coats wanted to do two years ago, and by many accounts has faithfully tried to do since, was represent the views of the intelligence community to a president not always inclined to hear them. That is at once the key requirement of his job and potentially the one that puts him in the most peril.
Coats thus has one of the most precarious positions in an administration where few jobs are safe. He oversees an intelligence workforce that prides itself on the spin-free presentation of facts, for a president prone to punishing purveyors of unpleasant truth. He is a lifelong politician in what’s supposed to be an apolitical profession, trying to protect his workforce from the political attacks of his own boss. Yet Coats is, for now, one of the last national-security officials remaining from the original Cabinet Trump appointed, despite differences with the president that sometimes spill into public view. That’s partly because he really tries to stay out of public view.
He admitted as much with Andrea Mitchell at the Aspen Security Forum last summer. This was not long after the American president, standing next to the Russian one in Helsinki, undermined, reiterating Putin’s denial of the intelligence assessment that the Russians had meddled in U.S. elections. Trump then drew what many saw as an insulting, even dangerous, equivalence between the two accounts. (“I have confidence in both parties,” Trump then.) Coats told Mitchell that he’d spent a lifetime as a politician trying to get his name in the paper, and now he just wanted to keep his name out of it. He then promptly made headlines with his astonished reaction when Mitchell informed him that Trump had invited Putin to Washington.
