Watching President Donald Trump berate the leader of Ukraine in the Oval Office last Friday, many Western officials were appalled. But they weren’t surprised. They have long understood what is now obvious to anyone who watched the ostensible photo op that careened into a diplomatic fiasco: Trump’s visceral disdain for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is inversely proportional to his abiding admiration for Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin.

Most U.S. allies I spoke with after the White House confrontation thought that Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance had planned to attack Zelensky, like bullies cornering the new kid on the school playground. One former U.S. official called it a “setup” (the White House denies this), intended to give Trump a pretext to withdraw American military support from an ungrateful ally, which, three days later, he did.

The United States also curtailed the intelligence it provides Ukraine, including technical assistance essential for firing long-range weapons at military positions miles inside Russia. Those strikes have allowed Ukraine to slow Russia’s advance, so cutting off the intelligence is in effect an act of assistance to Moscow. A Ukrainian official I was in touch with yesterday morning was despondent and confused. He wasn’t sure when the vital flow of intelligence would be turned back on. CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Fox Business that it depends on Zelensky’s willingness to work with the Trump administration on a “peace” plan. But U.S. and Western intelligence officials have said for months now that Putin is unwilling to negotiate, because he believes he is winning the war he started against Ukraine and is not prepared to make concessions. Trump has placed no new pressure on Russia even as he ties Ukraine’s hands. It’s hard to see how the United States could still be called Ukraine’s ally.

Watching Trump browbeat a country the United States had steadfastly backed until just six weeks ago, one bewildered Western diplomat who served in Russia asked me, “What the hell is happening to your country?” Now some of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters in the West wonder where their countries stand with the new leadership in Washington. The question has been on their mind for months.

[Read: Incompetence leavened with malignity]

Back in the summer of 2024, before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, I started talking with senior allied officials about how they were preparing for Trump’s possible return to power. Could they depend on him to support Ukraine in a war that poses a significant, even existential threat to Europe? Would Trump preserve decades-old alliances or attempt to extract concessions in exchange for security support, as he did to Zelensky in 2019 during their infamous “perfect” phone call, and as he is doing now with a claim on Ukraine’s natural resources? On a tactical level, could longtime U.S. allies trust the president not to leak or mishandle the intelligence secrets they routinely share?

My conversations with more than a dozen career diplomats and intelligence officers throughout the Western alliance, several of whom have served long tours in Washington, continued through the 2024 campaign, after the election, and into this week. Eventually the discussion came around to one basic question: Is Trump a reliable ally?

The answer, unsurprisingly, was no. But it came with an essential caveat.

The president was not someone they could easily trust. But the career officials who work for the U.S. government have long been reliable partners. These are the senior-level employees who actually run the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and the Pentagon day-to-day, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office or in the executive suites of headquarters buildings.

When foreign leaders extol the mutual benefit of military partnerships and intelligence sharing, they’re talking about this layer of permanent government and the people who work in it. These are the unknown officials who jointly collect and analyze electronic communications with the British; make strategic naval plans with the Australians to counter a rising China; collaborate on North American security and air defense with the Canadians; partner with the Germans to break up terrorist cells; collaborate with the Dutch on cyberoperations directed at Russia; and work hand in glove against Russia with the Ukrainians, whose contemporary intelligence service was practically built by the CIA.

[Read: The real reason Trump berated Zelensky]

These relationships are the soft tissue of global security. They are based on mutual trust that is earned, not assumed. And the officials who make up this part of the U.S. government are the ones Trump has relentlessly attacked since he took office, because they don’t swear allegiance to him. These working-level relationships took shape in the aftermath of World War II, and for eight decades they have withstood political stress and the whims of elected leaders. Now they are being tested in ways that only Trump has dared.

Trump casually abused U.S. allies’ trust practically from the moment he first took office.

In May 2017, he revealed a sensitive source of Israeli intelligence to two senior Russian officials during a meeting in the Oval Office—while the FBI was investigating Russia’s interference in the election and potential connections to Trump’s campaign.

That same month, a furious British Prime Minister Theresa May complained to the American president that his officials had disclosed the name of a suicide bomber who attacked a concert arena in Macnhester, preempting local law enforcement. Police were also outraged that U.S. officials had leaked crime-scene photos to American reporters that the British had shared in confidence.

Not one to spill only other governments’ secrets, by then Trump had already revealed the presence of two U.S. nuclear submarines off the coast of North Korea, during a phone call with the president of the Philippines. In 2019, Trump tweeted a potentially revealing U.S.-spy-satellite photo of a missile launch site in Iran. In 2022, after the FBI found that Trump had stored boxes of classified documents at his Florida mansion—an action for which he was criminally charged—former White House aides said they weren’t shocked, because the president had routinely mishandled classified information while in office, taking transcripts of calls with foreign leaders, as well as intelligence-briefing materials, up to his residence for no clear reason and without an explanation.

Trump’s loose lips and sticky fingers arguably made U.S. allies less safe. In light of that history, allied officials told me recently that they were taking steps to limit the classified information they shared with the U.S. They would not stop sharing entirely; foreign countries depend too much on information that the United States provides them to blow up the entire arrangement. But the officials laid out a number of ways they could protect what they send over the transom. All the possibilities rely on those trusted relationships with career officials in U.S. national-security agencies.

In rare cases, allies might hold back a very sensitive piece of intelligence altogether. But more often, they would ask their counterparts to keep some information to themselves and not share it higher up in their organizations, where it might find its way to the president’s political appointees and potentially to him. The allies would not be hiding things from Trump, exactly—just avoiding the risk of bringing him in on things he doesn’t need to know. Another official told me their service might ask the Americans to read intelligence only in person, perhaps at the country’s embassy or a headquarters building. The Americans would still know the information, but they would take no hard copies with them that might find their way into the hands of Trump’s political advisers.

[Read: The end of the postwar world]

Some allied officials suggested that they would not start any new joint operations with the Americans unless necessary. Even before the election, one official in an allied intelligence service told me they were waiting to see the outcome before doing any new business with the Americans. They feared starting work under a president they could trust, only to regret the arrangement when Trump took over.

The allies aren’t worried only about how the Americans handle their secrets. Trump’s purge of senior FBI officials has eliminated many of the very interlocutors foreign law-enforcement and security officials deal with on any given day. Several officials told me they were anxiously waiting to see whom they are to call now, and whether their trusted contacts will be replaced by political loyalists.

What’s more, one official worried, if American intelligence agencies are distracted by internal battles, what vital information might their agents miss? Would the quality of information about terrorist plots or Russian espionage degrade? How helpful a partner can the United States be when it is consumed by feuds?

Allied officials can protect some information by limiting what they tell their counterparts. But to restrict the flow of technical information, particularly “signals intelligence,” the fruits of electronic eavesdropping or cyberespionage, is difficult.

The U.S. and British signals-intelligence systems are so intertwined as to be practically one and the same; their technical equipment, or “kit,” as the Brits like to say, is sometimes physically co-located. The systems are so compatible that in 2003, when the National Security Agency was tracking a plot by al-Qaeda to detonate a nuclear weapon inside the United States, officials made a contingency plan to transfer the control of U.S. signals intelligence to the British, in the event that NSA headquarters was taken out by terrorists, Michael Hayden, the agency’s director at the time, once told me.

That kind of nightmare-scenario planning speaks to the bedrock level of trust between the U.S. and Great Britain, its closest ally. The two countries are members of the so-called Five Eyes, an Anglophone security pact that includes Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The member states share an enormous amount of classified information. And although the United States is by far the biggest contributor to that bounty, it materially benefits from the other countries’ ability to fill in the gaps with their own unique sources and capabilities. The American intelligence system, massive as it is, cannot cover everything.

[Read: The death of government expertise]

Yet now, even the Five Eyes is not sacrosanct. Late last month, the Financial Times reported that Trump-administration officials were discussing kicking Canada out of the pact, as a way of extracting more favorable security and trade arrangements. Two allied officials bluntly described the proposal to me as “crazy.”

The White House official reportedly pushing the expulsion, Peter Navarro, later claimed he hadn’t done so. But other officials told me that Trump indeed has toyed with the idea, which would have been unthinkable under previous Democratic and Republican presidents. How one member jettisons another is not clear, because the other countries can work with whomever they choose. A “Four Eyes” alliance theoretically could exclude the United States, but it would be a severely diminished partnership.

Nothing Trump has said or done since taking office this year has lessened allies’ concern about his reliability. Recently, the newly elected chancellor of Germany has suggested that the time has come for the transatlantic powers to break up.

“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step-by-step, we can really achieve independence from the U.S.A.,” Friedrich Merz said last month.

Merz may have taken to heart a truculent speech Vance had given days earlier at the Munich Security Conference. The address, in which vice presidents customarily acknowledge the alliance’s shared democratic values and mutual security interests, was read as a giant middle finger. “He told us off,” one Western official in the audience put it to me more diplomatically. Vance’s speech was the dominant subject for the remainder of the conference.

Vance further infuriated European officials in an interview with Fox News this week, when he dismissed their potential contribution to a future peacekeeping force in Ukraine as “20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.” His comments were widely seen as directed at Great Britain and France, which have pledged to commit forces to such an effort. But troops from more than two dozen additional countries have died fighting with U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, foreign officials were quick to note.

[Listen: The Five Eyes have noticed]

Hanging over the rapid dissolution of these old relationships is the question of who would lead in the United States’ absence. Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, held an emergency meeting with Zelensky and other European leaders in London on Sunday, trying to assemble what he called a “coalition of the willing” against Russia. Starmer insisted that the United States remained a reliable partner, while exhorting his colleagues to seize a “once-in-a-generation moment” to protect Europe from Putin’s expansionist appetites. The Americans would clearly not lead that effort. But the British have been working to secure an American “backstop” to a peace deal in Ukraine, keeping long-range weapons and other heavy equipment on standby in a nearby country in case Russia attacked Ukraine again.

Vance isn’t alone in undermining allied confidence. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, took to X on Friday, praising Trump for his “unwavering leadership in standing up for the interests of the American people, and peace. What you said is absolutely true: Zelensky has been trying to drag the United States into a nuclear war with Russia/WW3 for years now, and no one has called him on it.”

Putting aside that Trump actually told Zelensky he risks a third world war if he doesn’t strike a peace deal, not that he was “trying to drag the United States” into one, Gabbard’s statement is completely at odds with years of intelligence reporting that the office she now leads has provided to American policy makers and allies. U.S. intelligence has long assessed that Russia invaded Ukraine in the hopes of decapitating its leadership and installing a Kremlin-friendly government. When Gabbard portrays Zelensky as the aggressor, and rhetorically backs up Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine, she politicizes the intelligence community at the very highest level, something every allied official I talked with has long feared. Gabbard’s office didn’t respond to my request that she elaborate on her comments.

Seemingly the only country praising Trump’s strong-arming of Ukraine is Russia. After Zelensky left the White House, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a Russian-state-television reporter, “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign-policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision.”

This, too, is an outcome the allies have dreaded. The officials I talked with debate why exactly Trump is so solicitous of Putin; they have for years. But there was little arguing this week that the United States seems to be switching sides.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirms US 'pause' in intelligence sharing with Kyiv amid tensions between allies.

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The single greatest success of Donald Trump’s second term so far might be his Cabinet. Today, senators confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, one day after confirming Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. The nomination of Kash Patel to lead the FBI is headed to a floor vote, and Linda McMahon—chosen to lead and apparently dismantle the Department of Education—is testifying to senators today.

Many parts of Trump’s agenda are deceptively fragile, as the journalist Ezra Klein recently argued. Courts have stepped in to block some of his executive orders and impede Elon Musk’s demolition of broad swaths of the federal government as we know it. Republicans in Congress still don’t seem to have a plan for moving the president’s legislative agenda forward. But despite clear concern from a variety of Republican senators about Trump’s Cabinet picks, it now seems possible that Trump will get every one confirmed except for Matt Gaetz—an indication of how completely Senate Republicans have surrendered their role as an independent check on the president.

The initial rollout of nominees was inauspicious. Gaetz, whom Trump reportedly chose spontaneously during a two-hour flight, lasted just eight days before withdrawing his nomination, after it became evident that Republicans would not confirm him. The rest of the slate was weak enough that at least one more casualty was likely, though I warned in November that a uniformly bad group might perversely make it harder for Republicans to take down any individual. How could they say no to one and justify saying yes to any of the others?

Pete Hegseth had no clear qualifications to run the Defense Department, serial infidelities, and allegations of a sexual assault and alcohol abuse. (He has denied both allegations, and settled with the sexual-assault accuser out of court. Prosecutors have said that they did not have sufficient evidence to pursue charges.) Gabbard not only lacked any intelligence experience but also brought a history of views antithetical to many Republican senators, an affinity for deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and evidence of dishonesty. Patel was, in the view of many of his former colleagues in the first Trump administration, simply dangerous. Kennedy was, um, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Now all seem likely to take up their posts. Sure, it’s taken a while. Democrats have done what they can to slow down many of these nominations, and they voted unanimously against Hegseth, Kennedy, and Gabbard (a former Democratic House member!). Republicans objected when the administration tried to drive nominees through without FBI background checks, and damaging information about each of these nominees has continued to emerge; earlier this week, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin accused Patel of orchestrating a political purge at the FBI, despite promises not to do so. Yet none of that has mattered to the results.

Getting this done has required the White House to do some deft maneuvering. Trump allies publicly bullied Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who is a veteran and an outspoken advocate for victims of sexual assault, into backing Hegseth. According to The Wall Street Journal, they privately bullied the Republican Thom Tillis, a North Carolinian who has sometimes bucked Trump and faces a tough reelection campaign next year, after he indicated that he’d vote against Hegseth; he ultimately voted in favor. They horse-traded with Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana medical doctor who sounded very skeptical of Kennedy during hearings, giving him undisclosed reassurances in exchange for his support. As Politico reported, Trump dispatched J. D. Vance to absorb the grievances of Todd Young, an Indiana senator, about Gabbard; the vice president called off attacks from Trump allies and won Young’s vote.

One lone Republican voted against all three: Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the man responsible for keeping GOP senators lined up behind Trump during his first four years in office. The rest have various justifications for voting more or less in lockstep. They say they were reassured by what they heard in meetings—as though they’ve never seen a nominee fib, and as though that outweighed long histories. They say that presidents deserve to have the advisers they want. Behind closed doors, they might lay out a different calculation: Voting no on Cabinet members is a good way to tick Trump off while gaining little more than symbolism; better for them to keep their powder dry for real policy issues where they disagree with him.

These rationalizations might have made sense for a distasteful nominee here and there, but what Trump has put forward is likely the least qualified Cabinet in American history. In 2019, the Senate deep-sixed John Ratcliffe’s nomination as DNI (though it did confirm him a year later); this time around, when nominated for director of the CIA, he was seen as one of the more sober and qualified picks. Putting people like Trump’s nominees in charge of important parts of the federal government poses real dangers to the nation. Tom Nichols has explained how Hegseth exemplifies this: He seems more interested in bestowing trollish names on bases and giving contradictory messages about Ukraine than the tough work of running the Pentagon. That’s bad news in the immediate term and worse news when a crisis hits.

The idea of waiting to push back on Trump later might be more convincing if no one had ever seen him in action, as I discussed yesterday. Successfully ramming through this slate of nominees will only encourage the president. If Republican members wanted to, they could exert unusual leverage over the White House because of the narrow 53–47 margin in the chamber; Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin showed during the Biden presidency how a tiny fraction of the Democratic caucus could bend leadership to its will. But if Trump managed to get senators to vote for Gabbard and Kennedy, two fringe nominees with some far-left views, why should he expect them to restrain him on anything else?

The real reason for these votes is presumably fear. Republicans have seen Trump’s taste for retribution, and they fear his supporters in primaries. The irony is that in bowing to Trump, senators may actually be defying voters’ preferences. A CBS News poll published Monday found that six in 10 GOP voters would prefer to see congressional Republicans stand up to Trump when they disagree with him. By knocking down some of the worst nominees, senators might have made the Cabinet better and served the country well. But if that wasn’t enough to persuade them, perhaps the chance for political gain could.

Related:

Kash Patel will do anything for Trump. The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus (From November)

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The “Gulf of America” is an admission of defeat, David Frum writes. RFK Jr. won. Now what? Who’s running the Defense Department? Anne Applebaum: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing.

Today’s News

Trump signed a proclamation that outlines a plan to implement reciprocal tariffs for any country that imposes tariffs on the United States. A federal judge extended the pause on the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle USAID for at least another week. Roughly 77,000 federal employees accepted the Trump administration’s buyout offer by last night’s deadline after a federal judge lifted the freeze on the program yesterday.

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The House Where 28,000 Records Burned

By Nancy Walecki

Before it burned, Charlie Springer’s house contained 18,000 vinyl LPs, 12,000 CDs, 10,000 45s, 4,000 cassettes, 600 78s, 150 8-tracks, hundreds of signed musical posters, and about 100 gold records. The albums alone occupied an entire wall of shelves in the family room, and another in the garage. On his desk were a set of drumsticks from Nirvana and an old RCA microphone that Prince had given to him at a recording session for Prince. A neon Beach Boys sign—as far as he knows, one of only eight remaining in the world—hung above the dining table.

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This week, CIA personnel came to a “fork in the road.” That’s the official euphemism for a buyout that the Trump administration has offered federal government employees, among them the more than 20,000 who work for the intelligence agency. But many longtime officers and new recruits really do feel like they are at a crossroads as they ask themselves whether they still want their jobs, or will be able to keep them.

The buyout, part of a legally dubious proposal called “deferred resignation,” is ostensibly an attempt to cut government spending by reducing the number of employees. But another objective is plainly visible: The president suspects that the CIA harbors people who oppose his policies and might try to undermine them. The buyout is one way to weed these people out. But it’s a strategy that reflects a misunderstanding of how the CIA actually works—and a drawdown that could leave the country exposed at a time of heightened global risk. The measures the administration is taking to thin the ranks further risk doing the very thing that Donald Trump claims he wants to stop: politicizing the intelligence community.

[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]

The CIA wasn’t initially among the government agencies offered the buyout, which excluded “positions related to … national security.” But John Ratcliffe, the new CIA director, asked the White House to make the offer available, “believing it would pave the way for a more aggressive spy agency,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported about it.

Ratcliffe has said many times that CIA employees aren’t “aggressive” enough. What exactly he means by this can be hard to pin down, but generally Ratcliffe—who was the director of national intelligence in the first Trump administration—seems to think that the CIA has “subordinated the truth,” as he once wrote, to the political biases and preferences of unaccountable analysts, most consequentially those studying China. He has said that he personally saw officers pulling punches or altering analysis to comport with “the company line” that the country did not pose as significant a threat to the United States as Trump claimed during his first term. He has also said that the agency is too hidebound and bureaucratic, an assessment that surely some, and perhaps many, CIA officers would agree with.

In his first written message to the entire workforce as CIA director, Ratcliffe said the agency needed to rededicate itself to its core mission of international espionage, people who read his note told me. He largely repeated remarks from his Senate confirmation hearing last month, when he promised that the CIA “will collect intelligence—especially human intelligence—in every corner of the globe, no matter how dark or difficult.”

This was an odd thing to emphasize, given that the CIA literally does this every day, and has since its inception more than 75 years ago. But Ratcliffe argues that the agency has lost its focus and is drifting away from its apolitical ethos. He promised “a strict adherence to the CIA’s mission … never allowing political or personal biases to cloud our judgement [sic] or infect our products.” Addressing personnel, Ratcliffe said, “If all of this sounds like what you signed up for, then buckle up and get ready to make a difference. If it doesn’t, then it’s time to find a new line of work. ”

Here was another curious exhortation, because risky and dangerous spying in the service of presidents, regardless of party, is exactly what people who work for the CIA signed up for. Presumably many of them also thought they were making a difference. When Ratcliffe talks about stamping out bias, many will presume he’s talking to people who wish Trump weren’t the president. And surely there are many. But CIA officers are trained to subordinate their own political views and do their job regardless of who sits in the White House. Ratcliffe appears to think that for a lot of intelligence officers, that’s just lip service, and his broader critique of political bias aligns neatly with Trump’s own long-held suspicions.  

So now those who don’t want to buckle up are being invited to get out. Ratcliffe addressed the buyout yesterday when he held his first “all-hands,” a town-hall meeting in an auditorium at headquarters known as the “Bubble.” The gathering was uncontentious, people who heard his remarks told me. Ratcliffe said he wanted CIA officers to have the same opportunity as other federal employees to leave if they decided that they could not work for the Trump administration. Those who were on board with the administration’s vision—which he described as countering China and protecting the United States from terrorists—were welcome to stay.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil service reform]

In a written statement, a CIA spokesperson described the buyout offer as “part of a holistic strategy to infuse the Agency with renewed energy, provide opportunities for rising leaders to emerge, and better position the CIA to deliver on its mission.” But the agency exists to support the president’s policies—any president’s policies—and moves with the political tides. Presidents come and go. CIA officers salute (metaphorically) and carry out their orders. At the town-hall meeting, Ratcliffe “highlighted his determination to rebuild the Agency’s trust with the President,” a CIA official said. Trump’s feelings are no secret, but to hear the new director articulate them to the nation’s most important intelligence agency was still remarkable: The president doesn’t really trust you.

Trump’s attacks on the CIA are not new, and most officers sweated them out through the president’s first four years in office. But some are wondering if they can do it again—not because of their political beliefs, but because of what they see transpiring at other agencies in the first few weeks of the new administration. Some have told me that they’re watching events at the FBI—where Trump is rooting out agents who worked on criminal investigations of his conduct—and the wholesale demonization of USAID, and they wonder if this is a preview of things to come at Langley.

Holly Berkley Fletcher, who worked as a senior Africa analyst, resigned in December, having decided before the election to bring her 19-year career to a close. “Watching all of this feels like a massive betrayal,” she told me. CIA officers “give up elements of their privacy and personal freedom, curtail their political activities, and constrain their speech in the workplace in order to function as a team, with mission always at the center of what they do. Diversity of all kinds, including political diversity, has always been CIA’s strength in accomplishing that.”

Trump is not likely to simply shut down the CIA. But he could gut it. And buyouts aren’t the only means to that end. Two officers told me they are considering early retirement, an option that could be attractive for people who are financially prepared to leave the government after decades of service and would collect a pension. And the Trump administration has taken other steps that might push out people who joined very recently.

The White House demanded the names of all officers under probationary status, meaning that they have worked for the CIA for two years or less, people familiar with this process told me. Those new employees don’t yet have full civil-service protections, which could make them easier to fire than those who do. The agency plans to review their qualifications to ensure that they are aligned with the mission. Presumably they will be; the CIA hired them for a reason. But the obvious and troubling implication is that people who joined while Joe Biden was president are at greater risk of losing their job.

Demanding a list of names in this way (as first reported by The New York Times) is unconventional and risky. Foreign governments labor diligently to learn the identities of anyone working at the CIA. To protect the information while complying with the White House’s directive, the probationary officers were identified by only their first name and the first initial of their last name. Those names were delivered to the Office of Personnel Management, which has been effectively taken over by Elon Musk and his staff.

[Listen: Purge now, pay later]

Reducing the number of CIA employees at a moment when the United States faces such formidable challengers as Russia, Iran, China, and international drug cartels “is potentially a big mistake,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former operations officer who worked in the Middle East and on Russia, told me. “This may have a significant impact on CIA’s core mission of recruiting and handling agents. Replacing case officers with years of street experience, tradecraft training, and hard-target language skills is exceedingly difficult if many indeed walk out the door.”

To train officers to work in the field takes years. Polymeropoulos worries that getting rid of the newest officers, who are the next generation in the pipeline, could set back the work of espionage. “This is not reform, which is for sure needed,” he said. “This is more of a sledgehammer.”

And surely U.S. adversaries are taking notes, Fletcher, the Africa analyst, told me—just as the CIA would be if an adversary’s intelligence service were in such disarray.

“Our adversaries could not have scripted things better, and they are no doubt celebrating the chaos, fear, and division permeating the agency right now,” Fletcher told me. “As a former CIA officer, I am heartbroken. As an American citizen, I am terrified.”

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The aged president of the United States and the young midwestern senator he’d chosen as his second-term running mate were having a private, late-night discussion. The commander in chief wanted to share his plan to make America greater than it’s ever been. He flung an arm toward one end of the room as he explained the most audacious idea in the history of the republic.

“Canada! Canada!”

The senator, a veteran of America’s most recent war, was dumbfounded. “A union with Canada?” he asked.

“Right. A union with Canada. … Canada is the wealthiest nation on earth … Canada will be the seat of power in the next century and, properly exploited and conserved, her riches can go on for a thousand years.”

Not only did the president want to annex Canada, but he then declared the need to bring Scandinavia—with populations ostensibly blessed by genetics—into a new Atlantic union. “Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, to be specific. They will bring us the character and the discipline we so sadly lack. I know these people … I’m of German extraction, but many generations ago my people were Swedes who emigrated to Germany.”

Other NATO members would be frozen out, especially Great Britain, France, and Germany, nations the president believed had faded as world powers. He assured his running mate that eventually they would become part of the new union one way or another—even if that meant using force against former American allies to compel their submission to his plans for greatness. “Force?” the incredulous young senator asked. “You mean military force, Mr. President?”

“Yes, force,” the president said. “Only if necessary, and I doubt it ever would be. There are other kinds of pressure,” the president continued, “trade duties and barriers, financial measures, economic sanctions if you will.” In the short term, however, the president’s first move would be to meet with the Russians—and to propose a nuclear alliance against China.

These exchanges are—believe it or not—the plot of a 1965 political thriller, a book titled Night of Camp David.

The author Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote the more widely known Seven Days in May) came up with these plans as evidence that a fictional president named Mark Hollenbach has gone insane. In the story, a crisis unfolds as the young senator, Jim MacVeagh, realizes that Hollenbach has told no one else of his scheme. He races to alert other members of the government to the president’s madness before the potentially disastrous summit with the Kremlin.

Such ideas—including a messianic president talking about attacking other NATO members—were in 1965 perhaps too unnerving for Hollywood. Unlike Seven Days in May, a book about a military coup in the United States that was made into a well-regarded film starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Night of Camp David was never made into a movie despite decent reviews and more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list. In fairness, the market was glutted with such thrillers in the mid-’60s, but perhaps the idea was too disturbing even for Cold War America.

And now, 60 years later, Donald Trump—an elderly president with a young midwesterner as his vice president—is saying things that make him sound much like Mark Hollenbach. He, too, has proposed annexing Canada; he, too, has suggested that he would use coercion against U.S. friends and allies, including Panama and Denmark. He, too, seems to believe that some groups bring better genes to America than others. Like Hollenbach, he dreams of a giant Atlantic empire and seeks the kind of accommodation with Russia that would facilitate an exit from our traditional alliances, especially NATO.

One of the most important differences between the novel and real life is that until the titular night at Camp David, Hollenbach is a highly intelligent and decent man, a president respected by both parties after a successful first term. His new plans (which, in another moment of life imitating art, also include unleashing the FBI on America’s domestic “enemies”) are wildly out of character for him, and in the end, MacVeagh finally manages to convince the Cabinet that the president is suffering from a sudden illness, perhaps dementia, a nervous breakdown, or the onset of paranoia.

Trump, however, has always talked like this. He is regularly caught up in narcissistic and childlike flights of grandeur; he routinely lapses into fits of self-pitying grievance; he thinks himself besieged by enemies; and he talks about international affairs as if he is playing a giant game of Risk. (In the novel, MacVeagh at one point muses that the president’s “once brilliant mind now was obsessed with fancied tormentors and played like a child’s with the toy blocks of destiny.”) Whatever one thinks of the 47th president, he is today who he has always been.

I am not a doctor, and I am not diagnosing Trump. I’m also not the first one to notice the similarities between the fictional Hollenbach and Trump: The book was name-checked by Bob Woodward, Michael Beschloss, and Rachel Maddow during Trump’s first term, and then reissued in 2018 because of a resurgence of interest in its plot. Rumors that the United 93 director, Paul Greengrass, wanted to make a movie version circulated briefly in 2021, but the project is now likely languishing in development hell.

In any event, rereading Night of Camp David today raises fewer disturbing questions about Trump than it does about America. How did the United States, as a nation, travel the distance from 1965—when the things Trump says would have been considered signs of a mental or emotional disorder—to 2025, where Americans and their elected officials merely shrug at a babbling chief executive who talks repeatedly and openly about annexing Canada? Where is the Jim MacVeagh who would risk everything in his life to oppose such things? (I’ve read the book, and let me tell you, Vice President J. D. Vance is no Jim MacVeagh.)

The saddest part of revisiting the book now is how quaint it feels to read about the rest of the American government trying hard to do the right thing. When others in Congress and the Cabinet finally realize that Hollenbach is ill, they put their careers on the line to avert disaster. At the book’s conclusion, Hollenbach, aware that something’s wrong with him, agrees to give up the presidency. He resigns after agreeing to a cover story about having a serious heart condition, and the whole matter is hushed up.

Perhaps such happy endings are why some thrillers are comforting to read: Fear ends up giving way to reassurance. Unfortunately, in the real world, the GOP is not responding to Trump’s bizarre foreign-policy rants by rallying to the defense of America’s alliances and its national values as the leader of the free world. Instead, Republican members of the United States Senate are seeing how fast they can ram through the nomination of an unqualified talk-show host as secretary of defense.

In 2018, Knebel’s son was asked what his father would have thought about the renewed interest in the book. The younger Knebel answered: “He’d say, yeah, this is just what I was afraid of.” But at least Mark Hollenbach only dared whisper such ideas in the dark. Donald Trump says them, over and over, in broad daylight.

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A federal judge temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Trump told the countries attending the World Economic Forum that if they don’t make their products in America, they will face a tariff. The Senate voted to confirm John Ratcliffe as the new director of the CIA.

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Time-Travel Thursdays: Stephanie Bai spoke with Russell Berman about the last president to lose, then win, a reelection bid.

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America Is Divided. It Makes for Tremendous Content.

By Spencer Kornhaber

Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.

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Figures like Pam Bondi and John Ratcliffe faced questions over concerns about Trump prosecuting political rivals.

In September 2016, the CIA sent a classified memo to the FBI, which was investigating Russian interference in the presidential election. According to Russian intelligence sources, Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to publicly tie Donald Trump to the country’s hack of the Democratic National Committee. The Russians reportedly said that Clinton wanted to distract the public from the scandal over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

As secret tips from spies go, this one was not earth-shattering. FBI agents didn’t need the CIA to tell them that Clinton was painting Trump as an ally of the Kremlin—her campaign chair was on CNN saying just that. Trump was also making Clinton’s case for her: In late July, he had publicly encouraged the Russians to hack her email, which they then tried to do.

The CIA memo may have been obvious and not particularly useful. But it did contain “sensitive information that could be source revealing,” its authors cautioned, so the information was limited to those with a “need-to-know” status and “should not be released in any form.” Exposing human sources—spies—compromises intelligence gathering and can sometimes get them killed. For four years, the document’s stewards complied and kept it secret. Then it caught the attention of John Ratcliffe, President Trump’s director of national intelligence.

[Read: Clinton: Just trust me on this one]

Ratcliffe had been a divisive pick for the nation’s top intelligence adviser, made late in Trump’s term. His critics said he lacked sufficient national-security experience and was a partisan warrior. As a freshman Republican congressman from Texas, he had risen to national prominence by suggesting a theory, during committee hearings and television appearances, that Clinton had engineered the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russian interference. (Ratcliffe surely knew that she had not, because this had been exhaustively established by multiple investigations, including one led by Senate Republicans.)

In late September 2020, weeks before voters would choose between Trump and Joe Biden, Ratcliffe declassified and released the CIA memo, along with some notes from an intelligence briefing given to President Barack Obama. He claimed that he was responding to requests from Congress to shed light on the FBI’s Russia investigation, but the documents didn’t provide much new information.

Intelligence officials were appalled. History had repeatedly, painfully, shown that politics and intelligence were a dangerous mix, and as the DNI, Ratcliffe was expected to avoid partisan behavior and safeguard sources and methods. Also, officials warned, the Russians might have wanted that memo to be released; even four years on, anything mentioning Clinton, Russia, and Trump was politically combustible and potentially disruptive to the election. Gina Haspel, then the director of the CIA (a Trump appointment), opposed the document’s release. So did officials at the National Security Agency.

But to Trump and some of his advisers, the memo had a certain expedience. The president seized on it as new evidence of Clinton’s hidden hand in the “Russia hoax,” a subject that reliably caused him to rage against his supposed enemies inside the intelligence agencies.

[Read: Trump vs. the spies]

“It is imperative that the American people now learn what then–Vice President Joe Biden knew about this conspiracy and when he knew it,” the Trump campaign’s communications director said in a statement at the time. “Biden must give a full accounting of his knowledge and his conversations about Clinton’s scheme, which was known to the highest reaches of his administration.”

Trump himself made passing reference to the intelligence in his first debate with Biden, accusing Clinton of “a whole big con job” and the intelligence community of “spying on my campaign.”

Ratcliffe had cherry-picked just the thing to feed Trump’s fixation on “deep state” chicanery and malfeasance. The act was nakedly political. And it surprised no one.

Ratcliffe’s appeal to Trump has always been clear: He’s a political operator willing to push the boundaries of a historically apolitical position in a manner that serves the president’s interests. In November, Trump nominated Ratcliffe for an even more important job than the previous one: CIA director. The question likely to hang over his tenure is how much further he will go to enable Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community.

When Trump nominated Ratcliffe as the DNI in 2019, he gave him marching orders to “rein in” the forces that the president believed were undermining him. “As I think you’ve all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok,” Trump told reporters. Ratcliffe would get them back in line. But lawmakers were wary of appointing such a staunch partisan, and amid concerns about his experience, Democrats and key Republicans questioned whether he had exaggerated his credentials, something Ratcliffe denied. After only five days, Ratcliffe (who declined to be interviewed for this article) withdrew his candidacy. Trump nominated him again in 2020, and he was narrowly confirmed along party lines, 49–44. He received more votes in opposition than any DNI in the office’s 15-year history.

[Read: Ratcliffe’s withdrawal reveals Trump still doesn’t understand appointments]

When Trump named Ratcliffe as his pick for CIA director, he again made his expectations clear: He praised Ratcliffe for exposing alleged abuses by the FBI and former intelligence officials, and for showing “fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation.” But this time, the response in Washington has been muted.

Having served as the DNI for eight months, Ratcliffe is now better qualified to run an intelligence agency. He also benefits from comparison with Trump’s other choices for top national-security positions: at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual assault and alcohol abuse (he has denied the allegations); at the FBI, Kash Patel, a fervent Trump supporter who has threatened to investigate the president’s critics, including journalists; and for the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman who has expressed sympathy for some of the world’s most notorious anti-American dictators, including Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.

Compared with these selections, Ratcliffe looks like an elder statesman, and he has essentially been anointed: The Senate will almost certainly confirm him, which will make Ratcliffe the only person ever to have served as both the DNI and the director of the CIA. Several U.S. and allied intelligence officials told me that they would welcome this development, given the alternatives. Patel had been on Trump’s shortlist to run the CIA, some reminded me.

[Read: Trump’s ‘deep state’ revenge]

But the question of where Ratcliffe’s limits lie is even more salient in Trump’s second term. Though the DNI technically ranks higher than the director of the CIA, the latter is the more powerful post. The DNI is largely a managerial job; the CIA director is operational. From Langley, Ratcliffe would control covert intelligence activity. He could learn the locations and identities of spies. The CIA is also the primary interlocutor for foreign intelligence services, which share information that could implicate their sources if exposed. Several foreign intelligence officials have recently told me that they are taking steps to limit how much sensitive intelligence they share with the Trump administration, for fear that it might be leaked or used for political ends.

Some U.S. officials fear that Trump could direct the CIA to undertake illegal activities, such as aiding paramilitary forces inside the United States to secure the border, or clandestinely spying on Americans, knowing that the president would enjoy criminal immunity for official acts thanks to a recent Supreme Court opinion. These are extreme examples, and Trump would surely face internal resistance. But Ratcliffe has demonstrated that he’s willing to break norms and traditions. How would he respond if the president asked—or ordered—him to do something more drastic than declassify documents?

Though Trump has turned to Ratcliffe twice to “rein in” the deep state, his political origin story is actually rooted in the security state’s expansion. After graduating from Notre Dame in 1986, when he was only 20, Ratcliffe went to law school and then into private practice in Texas. “But something was missing,” he told senators at his DNI confirmation hearing. On September 11, 2001, Ratcliffe said, he was at work in a high-rise office building in Dallas that “looked a whole lot like the ones in New York that were under attack”—and he wondered, in the months that followed, how he might devote his time to more meaningful work.

Ratcliffe had gotten to know Matt Orwig, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas and a George W. Bush appointee. Orwig needed someone to run a joint terrorism task force, one of the dozens set up after the attacks to coordinate federal and regional security efforts. The goal was not only to prosecute terrorism crimes but to prevent them from happening. Ratcliffe took the job in 2004.

“The whole law-enforcement structure was being remade,” Orwig told me. “There was a lot of information flooding in from different authorities. It was a really big job.” In 2007, Orwig stepped down, and Ratcliffe became U.S. attorney for 11 months. Afterward, he returned to private practice, running the Dallas office of a firm he co-founded with John Ashcroft, Bush’s first attorney general.

Ashcroft became Ratcliffe’s political mentor, an association that seems ironic in retrospect. Ashcroft was in many ways an architect of the powerful national-security bureaucracy that Trump and Ratcliffe now rail against. After 9/11, the attorney general oversaw and approved controversial applications of the PATRIOT Act and other new authorities, including secret wiretapping of phone calls involving Americans. Such counterterrorism measures enhanced the powers of the Justice Department and the intelligence community, and occasionally encroached on civil liberties that Americans had long taken for granted.

Ratcliffe and Ashcroft shared a deeply conservative political outlook, and Ashcroft admired the younger attorney’s commitment to community service. Ratcliffe was also serving as the mayor of Heath, Texas, a bedroom community where he lived with his wife and two children. Ashcroft thought Ratcliffe was suited for national leadership. “We decided he should run for Congress,” Ashcroft told me, and in 2014, Ratcliffe did.

Ratcliffe at his congressional-campaign headquarters in Heath, Texas, March 19, 2014 (Kim Leeson / The Washington Post / Getty)

[Read: The case of John Ashcroft]

Getting to Washington would test Ratcliffe’s budding political skills. Ralph Hall, a conservative Democrat who switched to the GOP in 2004, had reliably represented the fourth congressional district, where Ratcliffe lived, since 1981. At 91, Hall was the oldest-ever member of the House of Representatives, and his voters seemed in no mood to replace him with a young upstart. But the Tea Party was elevating a new generation of conservatives who were suspicious of entrenched power, and in a bid for change that avoided taking aim at Hall’s age, Ratcliffe promised to bring “energetic leadership” to the district. “It’ll be up to the voters to decide whether or not a candidate is too old,” Ratcliffe, who was 42 years younger than Hall, told reporters at the time.

Ratcliffe picked up endorsements from conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, and eventually defeated Hall in a runoff. He was the first primary challenger to beat a Republican incumbent in Texas in 20 years. His political acumen was now beyond dispute, according to Todd Gillman, a reporter for The Dallas Morning News. “Affable. Discreet. Knife fighter,” Gillman wrote in a recent column for The Washington Post. “All of it was there to see when Ratcliffe took down the oldest member of Congress ever without coming off like a jerk.”

In Washington, Ratcliffe discovered the full extent of his talents, which included a lawyerly facility for constructing political narratives that appealed to Republicans. He fell in with fellow conservatives who were also new to Congress. Trey Gowdy, another former federal prosecutor, introduced him to his fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott. The three spent many evenings together, eating dinner and talking about their lives and political ideas.

Gowdy helped Ratcliffe raise his national profile and get Trump’s attention. At a hearing in September 2016, the congressman grilled James Comey, the FBI director, about the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, questioning whether officials had already decided that there was no prosecutable crime when they sat down to interview the presidential candidate. Ratcliffe was aggressive but not hectoring. His questions were clearly prepared, but his delivery seemed unrehearsed. He corrected Comey’s account of a chain of events in the FBI’s investigation, prompting the director to admit that he might have been misremembering. It wasn’t exactly a gotcha moment, but Ratcliffe showed that he could confuse an adversary with a blizzard of facts.

After Ratcliffe finished with Comey, Gowdy passed him a handwritten note: “100 percent A+.”

“That was really a moment for me where I thought, You know, I’m really where I’m supposed to be,” Ratcliffe recalled in 2021 on a podcast that Gowdy hosts.

Ratcliffe credited Gowdy with steering his career. “You said to me, ‘Johnny, focus on what you do well, get better at it, and shut up about the rest.’ And I literally followed that advice. In other words, only go on TV to talk about things that you know about. Don’t try and be a master of all trades. Do the things that you do really well and people will notice, and it will serve you well. And it did.”

Gowdy helped make Ratcliffe a go-to interrogator when congressional committees wanted to quiz the FBI or poke holes in the Russia investigation. Ratcliffe stuck to a theme of pernicious bias against Trump. He suggested that political animus, not genuine concern about foreign-intelligence threats, was the impetus behind the Russia probe. He also suggested that the CIA—the agency he is about to lead—may have kicked off the investigation. (It did not, and this is among the fringiest views that Ratcliffe has flirted with.)

[Read: Don’t let the Russia probe become the new Benghazi]

Ratcliffe’s performances impressed Trump. But although he, Gowdy, and Scott are deeply conservative, they are not MAGA Republicans. They seem to share Trump’s antipathy toward the federal bureaucracy. But their political ideas were shaped by forces that gave rise to Trump, not by the man himself. Gowdy, who left Congress in 2019, got on Trump’s bad side for not embracing his conspiracy theories about Democrats spying on his campaign, and Scott competed against Trump in the GOP’s 2024 presidential primary.

As for Ratcliffe, he has more fiercely defended Trump as a victim of an unfair system than championed him as a hero sent to fix it. In one of the most-watched hearings of the Trump era, Ratcliffe lit into Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the language of his final report, which stated that although the investigation “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” That was an unfair standard no American should face, Ratcliffe insisted. “Donald Trump is not above the law,” he thundered. “But he damn sure shouldn’t be below the law.”

It was a principled position, and perhaps a reflection of sincere disquiet about the politicization of law enforcement and the intelligence community. Ashcroft told me that he shares such concerns and speaks with Ratcliffe four or five times a year about reforming the system. But when Ratcliffe takes these stances, he also gives credence to Trump’s refrains about “Crooked Hillary” and the deep state. And he makes little effort to distinguish Trump’s critique from his own.

Jim Jordan speaks to Ratcliffe during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, December 9, 2019. (Zach Gibson / Getty)

[Read: Republicans take their shot at Mueller—and narrowly miss]

Ratcliffe probably wouldn’t have become the director of national intelligence if not for another pro-Trump partisan, Richard Grenell. The then-ambassador to Germany was also serving as the acting intelligence director when Trump nominated Ratcliffe for the second time, in 2020. The president essentially forced the Senate to choose between the two. Grenell had long been loathed and even feared in some quarters of Congress for his heated rhetoric and vicious social-media attacks. Suddenly, Ratcliffe seemed like the less political option.

Ratcliffe took office less than six months before the 2020 election. The intelligence agencies he now led were on guard against foreign governments trying to skew political contests with misleading social-media posts and divisive propaganda. Russia, once again, was a top concern.

Nothing angered Trump like talk of Russia trying to help him win an election. His aides had learned to avoid the subject. The president had identified China as the biggest strategic threat to the United States, an assessment that many Democrats and Republicans shared, Ratcliffe among them. But career intelligence analysts doubted that China intended to disrupt the election. What Beijing really wanted was stability in its relationship with Washington, they argued. Trying to help one candidate win, as Russia had in 2016, could backfire.

[Read: Trump’s intelligence war is also an election story]

In August 2020, the intelligence community produced a classified assessment of election threats. Then Ratcliffe intervened, analysts have said, and inserted a warning about China that was an “outrageous misrepresentation of their analysis,” according to a later report by an intelligence ombudsman.

The DNI typically does not help write intelligence assessments, because he is a political appointee, and so his involvement could present a conflict of interest. But Ratcliffe argued that although his intervention was unusual, it was not unprecedented, nor was it inappropriate. He maintained that the analysts were thinking too narrowly: China’s well-documented efforts to lobby state and local officials, and to steal corporate intellectual property and classified government information, were aimed at achieving political outcomes. That made them, in effect, a kind of election interference. The ombudsman also found that the analysts working on China and the ones working on Russia used different definitions for influence and interference. Ratcliffe argued that such discrepancies could create the false impression that Russia was trying to affect the U.S. election but China was not.

“I know my conclusions are right, based on the intelligence that I see,” he said, according to the ombudsman. “Many analysts think I am going off the script. They don’t realize that I did it based on the intelligence.”

Ratcliffe’s defenders say that his role as the DNI obligated him to speak up, even if that meant straying into red-hot political topics. “What I saw was him reflecting a value of transparency and informing the public,” said one U.S. intelligence official who worked for Ratcliffe when he was the DNI and asked not to be identified by name. “Sometimes he would challenge assessments and assumptions, I think in the interest of seeing if they would hold. He is an attorney by trade. You kind of have to keep that in mind when you brief him.”

Ratcliffe wasn’t the only one to gauge the threat from China more broadly: Two senior intelligence officers also expressed views on China’s interference activities that were in line with Ratcliffe’s assessment. But Ratcliffe didn’t raise the same level of concern about Russia, which many analysts thought posed the more direct threat to the election. He framed the issue, not for the first time, in a way that lent support to Trump’s political argument. And because the DNI was making that case, the ostensibly objective work of intelligence now had a partisan gloss.

Ratcliffe leaving a meeting with Senate Minority Whip John Thune after being nominated to be the CIA director, December 4, 2024 (Andrew Harnik / Getty)

[Read: Trump calls out election meddling—by China]

When announcing Ratcliffe’s nomination for CIA director, Trump indicated what he valued most in his pick: From “exposing” the Russia investigation as the alleged handiwork of the Clinton campaign to catching the FBI’s abuse of Civil Liberties at the FISA Court, John Ratcliffe has always been a warrior for Truth and Honesty with the American public,” Trump wrote in a social-media post. The reference to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was shorthand for one of Trump’s elastic theories about how Democrats had spied on his 2016 campaign.

He also lauded Ratcliffe for publicly refuting 51 former intelligence officers who had claimed in a letter that the 2020 discovery of emails on a laptop purporting to belong to Joe Biden’s son Hunter had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Ratcliffe was right about that one: No evidence linked Hunter Biden’s laptop to a Russian plot to harm his father. But the letter by the former officials was an act of free speech and an expression of opinion by former officials and experts—not something that the DNI traditionally makes his business.

In the four years he has been out of government, Ratcliffe has remained an enthusiastic critic of the intelligence community. He co-authored a September 2023 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with a former aide, reflecting on “a dangerous trend inside the CIA to politicize intelligence on China, and to suppress dissenting views that stray from the company line.” He was particularly worried about resistance to investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The once-fringe view that the virus likely originated in a laboratory in China, which Ratcliffe believes, has gained more respectability thanks in part to U.S. intelligence.

[Read: The coronavirus conspiracy boom]

Tim Scott told me that Ratcliffe’s controversial positions have aged well. “Some of the time he stood alone or in the minority and took a scathing rebuke from the intellectuals in our country,” the senator said. “I think the truth of the matter is, he was right—about the origins of COVID, the Biden laptop, and Russiagate.”

In other scenarios, however—the memo about the Clinton campaign and Russian hacking comes to mind—Ratcliffe conducted himself less like an intelligence adviser, who is supposed to help the president make a decision, and more like a litigator doing his best to help his client win an argument, or a political pugilist eager to score points.

Still, unlike some others in Trump’s orbit—most notably Kash Patel—Ratcliffe has shown that he does have limits. Shortly after the 2020 election, Trump offered Ratcliffe the job that he had long wanted, and that his friend Trey Gowdy had said he was perfect for: attorney general. The president was prepared to fire Bill Barr, who’d rejected Trump’s baseless notions of widespread voter fraud. According to an account in Michael Bender’s book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, Ratcliffe had privately told Trump that no intelligence suggested that foreign governments had hacked voting machines or changed the outcome of the election. If he became attorney general, he’d be expected to advocate for an idea he knew wasn’t true. Ratcliffe declined Trump’s offer.

In this respect, Ratcliffe might seem like one of the so-called adults in the room during the first Trump administration—the officials who slow-rolled orders or even tried to block them as a check against what they considered to be the president’s worst impulses. But people who know Ratcliffe told me that this was not his profile. He is on board with Trump’s policies and doesn’t believe that regulating the president is his job. He won’t cross his boss, either. To this day, nearly eight years after the CIA, FBI, and NSA reached a unanimous, unclassified assessment on Russian election interference in 2016, Ratcliffe has never said publicly whether he agrees with one of its key findings: that the Russians were trying to help Trump win.

[Read: The U.S. needs to face up to its long history of election meddling]

If he disagrees with that position, he surely would have said so, just as he has disputed other intelligence judgments he finds lacking or wrong. But his silence is telling. If he does agree, and says so publicly, he will not be the next director of the CIA.

At his confirmation hearing, senators are likely to ask Ratcliffe whether he plans to further Trump’s interests. Not the president’s policies—all CIA directors do that—but his political preferences, prejudices, and vendettas. Only Ratcliffe knows the answer to this question. But alone among Trump’s picks to head the national-security agencies, he comes with a clear track record in the role.