Daily insanities from Donald Trump’s presidency have overwhelmed our capacity for outrage. Journalistic investigations of disturbing findings rarely penetrate our collective conscience, as they are overwhelmed by fleeting headlines generated by the president’s latest pronouncements, from annexing Greenland to arresting Democrats.
For example, two months ago, The New York Times revealed that during Trump’s first term, an elite Navy SEAL Team 6 unit—the one that took out Osama bin Laden—botched a 2019 mission to North Korea aimed at planting a listening device intended to capture Kim Jong-un’s private communications. Scuba-diving SEALs, having reached shore in the middle of the night, panicked upon seeing a North Korean boat and fired on the crew, killing them all. After examining the bodies, the SEALs concluded the dead were civilians diving for shellfish. They punctured the lungs of the corpses, watched the bodies sink, and aborted the mission. The Pentagon reviewed what went wrong, but “the Trump administration never told leaders of key committees in Congress that oversee military and intelligence activities about the operation or the findings,” potentially violating federal law.
The Times found that the debacle was not unusual because, in fact, “the SEALs have a reputation for devising overly bold and complex missions that go badly.” When Barack Obama was president, he tried to address the problem by “curtailed Special Operations missions late in his second term and increased oversight.” But Trump, upon entering office in 2017, “reversed many of those restrictions and cut the amount of high-level deliberation for sensitive missions.” One of his first acts was authorizing a SEAL Team 6 operation in a Yemeni village where an Al Qaeda leader lived, for which he “skipped over much of the established deliberative process.” The result: “30 villagers and a SEAL dead,” and the loss of a $75 million tiltrotor aircraft.
As the Times scoop generated nary a ripple in the public discourse, little if any connections have been drawn between Trump’s checkered first-term history of reduced deliberations for sensitive missions and recent operations targeting Central and South American boats, which have killed at least 83 people. The president claims their crews are “narco-terrorists,” but has provided no evidence. According to CNN, “the United Kingdom is no longer sharing intelligence with the U.S. about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in U.S. military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal.” That’s a significant setback to the anti-drug efforts Trump supposedly cares so much about.
Last Sunday, another Times deep dive tracked how Trump’s Homeland Security Department has funded its mass deportation program by steering resources away from other priorities. For example, “homeland security agents investigating sexual crimes against children, for instance, have been redeployed to the immigrant crackdown for weeks at a time,” and those agents “worked approximately 33 percent fewer hours on child exploitation cases from February through April compared to their average in prior years.” Considering Trump’s blasé attitude towards Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors, no one should be surprised that Trump prioritized deporting immigrants over the safety of children.
More surprising is Trump’s equally blasé attitude towards counterterrorism operations. The Times also reports that a “national security probe into the black market for Iranian oil sold to finance terrorism has been slowed down for months because of the shift to immigration work, allowing tanker ships and money to disappear.” Additionally, “highly trained specialists have been pulled into immigration work, such as analysts who assist in money laundering and counterterrorism cases and agents who investigate the multibillion-dollar black market for looted antiquities, a source of income for organized crime and terrorist groups.”
But this may be the most disturbing revelation:
One of D.H.S.’s major functions is distributing intelligence reports about terrorism, active shooter incidents and other threats across government, an attempt to fill the gap in information sharing exposed by the 2001 terrorist attacks.
But employees at D.H.S.’s intelligence office have been increasingly directed to focus more on supporting immigration enforcement than on other security issues, according to people familiar with its operations. That shift in emphasis has affected the daily intelligence briefings that go to top officials, according to these people.
And local law enforcement authorities are now receiving far fewer intelligence reports than they normally would, according to people familiar with the reports. One official said the decline in information sharing has amounted to “chipping away at everything that’s been built since Sept. 11.”
A reminder: The Department of Homeland Security was created because of 9/11 in hopes of preventing another calamitous attack. The idea behind this behemoth was to break down bureaucratic barriers, more easily share counterterrorism intelligence across government agencies, and make that intelligence more readily actionable. Yet because of Trump’s bigoted and myopic obsession with ridding America of immigrants, often based on scurrilous claims that many immigrants are terrorists, Trump is undermining counterterrorism operations. And it just takes one inopportune bureaucratic hiccup to allow a grievous terrorist attack to slip through our defenses.
I read another deep-dive investigation this week, but this one mercifully reduced my anxiety. Politico’s David Ferris examined the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program that was part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law signed by Joe Biden. The program became a punching bag. Trump mocked it. Abundance authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson highlighted it as an example of a kludgy liberalism, because the program was designed to yield 500,000 chargers (by 2030), but by March 2024, only seven had been built.
However, Ferris notes that the program needed to establish smart rules before starting construction in earnest. Existing charging stations, aside from Tesla stations, often didn’t reliably charge cars, and “Biden’s people had an overriding goal: to take the glitchy, frustrating experience of EV charging and transform it into a smooth operation that could supersize across the nation’s highways. To do that, they sought to establish a common set of rules and requirements that would spur the many actors of the charging world to coordinate so that all drivers—not just Tesla owners—could count on a charging experience that, well, works.” And “By that goal, NEVI is working.”
It’s working because Biden’s Congressional allies wrote thoughtful, durable legislation. Ferris explains, “Congress had written out the program in such specific detail—and had thrust it so deeply into Washington’s core spending programs—that Trump had little room to flout the legislative branch. NEVI not only survived a court challenge but was reluctantly adopted by the administration. While Trump has relaxed some of its most burdensome requirements, the core mission of constructing a federal charging network has endured, shielded by pages upon pages of Democratic legalisms and technicalities.” Thousands of new chargers by the end of Biden’s first term were never realistic, but now many are expected to be built by the end of Trump’s second term.
Most Americans are coming to see that Trump is both depraved and incompetent; there’s a reason why his job approval is sinking. But because we rate our politicians on superficial measures, our collective understanding of how Trump is failing at policymaking and bureaucratic administration is limited, just like our appreciation for the meaningful and difficult work of his predecessors.