the cac mamba
Veteran
Schumer hit a nerve 
General Trump Administration F**kery Thread (2025-2029)
- Thread starter OfTheCross
- Start date
ArchStanton
All Star
This dude was not having it with ICE and made them tuck tail and run like the bytches they are.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/23/moscow-putin-sabotage-trump-venezuela/
Trump is ignoring the real threat matrix
Summarize
A puzzling pivot to the Caribbean increasingly leaves Europe to answer Putin’s aggression on its own.
David IgnatiusOctober 23, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDTToday at 6:00 a.m. EDT
“Why America Slept.” That might be the title of a future book examining the Trump administration’s shift of national security focus away from a mounting Russian threat against Europe and toward a noxious but relatively impotent network of drug gangs in Venezuela.
This misallocation of priorities is evident across the Trump administration. The FBI’s most experienced national security agents have been purged; cyber defenses at several agencies have been slashed; scores of veteran CIA analysts and operations officers have quit or been forced out; alliances with friendly intelligence services have weakened.
Meanwhile, according to White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly: “The President will continue to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice.” President Donald Trump said last week he had “authorized” CIA covert action against Venezuela and its president, Nicolás Maduro. “We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela,” he explained.
“Great-power suicide” is how former CIA director William J. Burns described the self-inflicted damage to national security resources in a recent article for the Atlantic. “We’ve put at risk the network of alliances and partnerships that is the envy of our rivals. We’ve even gutted the research funding that powers our economy,” he wrote.
Trump’s reluctance to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin militarily, even as he chases Maduro, confounds U.S. allies in NATO. Germany’s intelligence agencies have warned in recent briefings that “Russia is now highly active in infiltrating the German armed forces and undermining the stability of NATO,” German defense analyst Nico Lange posted on X last week.
European leaders issued a joint statement Tuesday warning about Russia’s threat to the continent. “We must ramp up the pressure on Russia’s economy and its defense industry, until Putin is ready to make peace,” the statement said. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte visited the White House on Wednesday to make the same argument.
After meeting with Rutte, Trump announced new sanctions against two of Russia’s biggest energy companies. “These are tremendous sanctions. These are very big,” Trump declared in the Oval Office. But the sanctions are well short of the Tomahawk missiles and other military steps that Ukraine had sought. And there’s no sign that more sanctions, by themselves, will force Putin to the peace table.
European countries now feel they’re directly in the firing line, without an adequate American shield.
“Multiple European countries have suffered successive waves of clandestine attacks organised and directed by Moscow,” noted a recent analysis of Russian “mayhem” by the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. Though the United States hasn’t been hit by sabotage, such attacks would be easier because of “the dismantling of U.S. federal agencies previously tasked with detecting and preventing such attacks,” the report noted.
While the administration surges military and intelligence resources to the Caribbean to confront Maduro, it is slashing funding for more basic national security priorities. The staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, for example, has been cut from 3,300 when Trump became president to 2,200, according to Sen. Angus King (I-Maine).
“We are unilaterally disarming in the face of an escalating threat,” King told me this week. He said that a cyberspace commission he co-chaired reported this month that the number of its recommendations made in 2020 that are now “fully implemented” has dropped from 48 percent to 35 percent over the past year. Cyberdefense projects at the State Department and other agencies have been abolished or cut sharply, he said.
Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a speech last month that “the integrity of our intelligence is being sacrificed on the altar of partisan convenience.” As an example, he cited the firing of two officials on the National Intelligence Council “because their well-documented, evidence-based assessment of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua criminal network did not align with the administration’s preferred narrative” that it was a terrorist group directed by Maduro. The administration ordered a new analysis that justified its mission.
The Trump team’s purge of experienced national security leaders is documented in a 68-page complaint filed last month by Brian Driscoll and two other former top FBI officials against FBI Director Kash Patel and other administration officials. Driscoll alleges that even before Trump’s inauguration, he was asked by a transition official named Paul Ingrassia whether he had voted for Trump and whether he planned to punish FBI agents involved in the raid that found classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. (Ingrassia this week withdrew his nomination to head the Office of Special Counsel because of Senate opposition.)
Driscoll alleges in the complaint that he refused to answer Ingrassia’s political questions and balked at the pressure for retribution. The complaint says that Patel told him in early August, “The FBI tried to put the president in jail, and he hasn’t forgotten it.” Driscoll was fired three days later.
With so many experienced leaders of the FBI’s national security, counterterrorism, foreign intelligence and cyber divisions gone, “people are concerned that there will be an attack, a mass casualty event, that the bureau misses,” one intelligence expert told me.
This politicization of U.S. intelligence has begun to erode the confidence of partners. The two leaders of the Dutch intelligence agencies told a Dutch newspaper last week that they were reducing the amount of intelligence they shared with the CIA and National Security Agency. “We sometimes don’t tell things anymore, that is true,” said Peter Reesink, head of the military intelligence agency. “We are very alert to the politicization of intelligence and to human rights violations,” explained Erik Akerboom, head of the civilian spy agency.
Intelligence cooperation is close to hardwired among the U.S., Britain and the other three English-speaking “Five Eyes” partners. But even some of the Five Eyes services are moderating what they tell Washington, U.S. intelligence officials believe.
What worries intelligence veterans is that Trump is balking at countering a real Russian drive to subjugate Ukraine and sabotage NATO — and focusing instead on military strikes against drug cartels and Maduro.
Quite apart from the mismatch of priorities, CIA covert actions in Latin America rarely end happily. That’s especially likely in Venezuela, where a corrupt military supports Maduro, the U.S. lacks a well-trained local insurgency to partner with, and the government receives potent intelligence and military support from Cuba and Iran.
Jack Devine, a former senior CIA officer who oversaw several covert projects in Latin America, cautions against any assumption that you can “just light a spark” and trigger a successful coup. His advice: “Don’t do covert action without congressional support and a strong indigenous force. If you go in, do it hard. Don’t dabble,” he told me. “Otherwise, you’re opening Pandora’s box.”
Trump certainly wouldn’t be the first president to mask a retreat on a big problem by assaulting a smaller one. President Ronald Reagan attacked the tiny island of Grenada after U.S. Marines were killed in Beirut in 1983. But when you look at the threat matrix around the world, it seems to me Trump has his priorities upside down.
Trump is ignoring the real threat matrix
Summarize
A puzzling pivot to the Caribbean increasingly leaves Europe to answer Putin’s aggression on its own.
David IgnatiusOctober 23, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDTToday at 6:00 a.m. EDT
“Why America Slept.” That might be the title of a future book examining the Trump administration’s shift of national security focus away from a mounting Russian threat against Europe and toward a noxious but relatively impotent network of drug gangs in Venezuela.
This misallocation of priorities is evident across the Trump administration. The FBI’s most experienced national security agents have been purged; cyber defenses at several agencies have been slashed; scores of veteran CIA analysts and operations officers have quit or been forced out; alliances with friendly intelligence services have weakened.
Meanwhile, according to White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly: “The President will continue to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice.” President Donald Trump said last week he had “authorized” CIA covert action against Venezuela and its president, Nicolás Maduro. “We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela,” he explained.
“Great-power suicide” is how former CIA director William J. Burns described the self-inflicted damage to national security resources in a recent article for the Atlantic. “We’ve put at risk the network of alliances and partnerships that is the envy of our rivals. We’ve even gutted the research funding that powers our economy,” he wrote.
Trump’s reluctance to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin militarily, even as he chases Maduro, confounds U.S. allies in NATO. Germany’s intelligence agencies have warned in recent briefings that “Russia is now highly active in infiltrating the German armed forces and undermining the stability of NATO,” German defense analyst Nico Lange posted on X last week.
European leaders issued a joint statement Tuesday warning about Russia’s threat to the continent. “We must ramp up the pressure on Russia’s economy and its defense industry, until Putin is ready to make peace,” the statement said. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte visited the White House on Wednesday to make the same argument.
After meeting with Rutte, Trump announced new sanctions against two of Russia’s biggest energy companies. “These are tremendous sanctions. These are very big,” Trump declared in the Oval Office. But the sanctions are well short of the Tomahawk missiles and other military steps that Ukraine had sought. And there’s no sign that more sanctions, by themselves, will force Putin to the peace table.
European countries now feel they’re directly in the firing line, without an adequate American shield.
“Multiple European countries have suffered successive waves of clandestine attacks organised and directed by Moscow,” noted a recent analysis of Russian “mayhem” by the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. Though the United States hasn’t been hit by sabotage, such attacks would be easier because of “the dismantling of U.S. federal agencies previously tasked with detecting and preventing such attacks,” the report noted.
While the administration surges military and intelligence resources to the Caribbean to confront Maduro, it is slashing funding for more basic national security priorities. The staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, for example, has been cut from 3,300 when Trump became president to 2,200, according to Sen. Angus King (I-Maine).
“We are unilaterally disarming in the face of an escalating threat,” King told me this week. He said that a cyberspace commission he co-chaired reported this month that the number of its recommendations made in 2020 that are now “fully implemented” has dropped from 48 percent to 35 percent over the past year. Cyberdefense projects at the State Department and other agencies have been abolished or cut sharply, he said.
Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a speech last month that “the integrity of our intelligence is being sacrificed on the altar of partisan convenience.” As an example, he cited the firing of two officials on the National Intelligence Council “because their well-documented, evidence-based assessment of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua criminal network did not align with the administration’s preferred narrative” that it was a terrorist group directed by Maduro. The administration ordered a new analysis that justified its mission.
The Trump team’s purge of experienced national security leaders is documented in a 68-page complaint filed last month by Brian Driscoll and two other former top FBI officials against FBI Director Kash Patel and other administration officials. Driscoll alleges that even before Trump’s inauguration, he was asked by a transition official named Paul Ingrassia whether he had voted for Trump and whether he planned to punish FBI agents involved in the raid that found classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. (Ingrassia this week withdrew his nomination to head the Office of Special Counsel because of Senate opposition.)
Driscoll alleges in the complaint that he refused to answer Ingrassia’s political questions and balked at the pressure for retribution. The complaint says that Patel told him in early August, “The FBI tried to put the president in jail, and he hasn’t forgotten it.” Driscoll was fired three days later.
With so many experienced leaders of the FBI’s national security, counterterrorism, foreign intelligence and cyber divisions gone, “people are concerned that there will be an attack, a mass casualty event, that the bureau misses,” one intelligence expert told me.
This politicization of U.S. intelligence has begun to erode the confidence of partners. The two leaders of the Dutch intelligence agencies told a Dutch newspaper last week that they were reducing the amount of intelligence they shared with the CIA and National Security Agency. “We sometimes don’t tell things anymore, that is true,” said Peter Reesink, head of the military intelligence agency. “We are very alert to the politicization of intelligence and to human rights violations,” explained Erik Akerboom, head of the civilian spy agency.
Intelligence cooperation is close to hardwired among the U.S., Britain and the other three English-speaking “Five Eyes” partners. But even some of the Five Eyes services are moderating what they tell Washington, U.S. intelligence officials believe.
What worries intelligence veterans is that Trump is balking at countering a real Russian drive to subjugate Ukraine and sabotage NATO — and focusing instead on military strikes against drug cartels and Maduro.
Quite apart from the mismatch of priorities, CIA covert actions in Latin America rarely end happily. That’s especially likely in Venezuela, where a corrupt military supports Maduro, the U.S. lacks a well-trained local insurgency to partner with, and the government receives potent intelligence and military support from Cuba and Iran.
Jack Devine, a former senior CIA officer who oversaw several covert projects in Latin America, cautions against any assumption that you can “just light a spark” and trigger a successful coup. His advice: “Don’t do covert action without congressional support and a strong indigenous force. If you go in, do it hard. Don’t dabble,” he told me. “Otherwise, you’re opening Pandora’s box.”
Trump certainly wouldn’t be the first president to mask a retreat on a big problem by assaulting a smaller one. President Ronald Reagan attacked the tiny island of Grenada after U.S. Marines were killed in Beirut in 1983. But when you look at the threat matrix around the world, it seems to me Trump has his priorities upside down.
the cac mamba
Veteran
the cac mamba
Veteran
that heart attack is right around the corner
the cac mamba
Veteran
Hood Critic
The Power Circle
@Hood Critic what is that spin your posted? most sources i've seen says Johnson tried to pay the workers, and Dems blocked it
Are you capable of doing any basic reading you muppet?
the cac mamba
Veteran
Socialism. Sad!!
the cac mamba
Veteran
gimme a break. Dems voted against Republicans' pay bill too
this game is as old as time
the cac mamba
Veteran
we NEED to take the House back in 2026, and just hammer the Trump Crime Family for 2 years. that alone would win Dems the 2028 election
Hood Critic
The Power Circle
gimme a break. Dems voted against Republicans' pay bill too
And we talking bout Autopen?!
the cac mamba
Veteran
Last edited:
Schumer hit a nerve
Schumer needs to reply with "Oh, NOW context of a quote matters? Maybe if I paired it with a Sora video, it'd be better?"
That said, the acting press secretary not being media savvy enough to know that this always going to happen to that quote is completely indicative of how shytty the administration is from top to bottom.