He gets his intelligence from strange places

Steve Denning
Senior Contributor

Following the annual assessment of global threats by America’s intelligence agencies presented at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday by Dan Coats, the director of National Intelligence, Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, and other officials appointed by the president, President Trump blasted them, accusing them of being “passive and naïve” about the dangers posed by Iran, and failing to defend his handling of Afghanistan, North Korea and ISIS. “They are wrong!” he tweeted about his own Intelligence agencies. “They need to go back to school” ...

The annual “Worldwide Threat Assessments” have traditionally been dispassionate apolitical surveys of the threats facing the United States. The agencies’ assessment is based on a vast array of human and information resources around the world, carefully evaluated and cross-checked. In their report and their appearance before Congress, the agency heads continued in that tradition, knowing full well that the President would be furious with their conclusions. They were living examples of “telling the truth to power” ...

Over the last several years, President Trump has noted that on a vast array of topics he is the world’s “foremost authority". The subjects of his mastery include border security, campaign contributions, courts, debt, drones, Facebook, infrastructure, the Left, money, nuclear war, Osama Bin Laden, politicians, steelworkers, taxes, technology, television, trade, visas and Wall Street bankers. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the topic of foreign threats is also one on which Trump sees himself as better informed than his own Intelligence agencies.

If the Intelligence agencies are to catch up with the President’s expertise, follow his directive and “go back to school,” it is pertinent to ask: what school should they go back to? Conventional schooling such as universities and think tanks are beside the point, since the Intelligence agencies are already deeply linked to and allied with those resources. Instead, the President seems to be suggesting that the Intelligence agencies need to cast their information-gathering net more widely and draw on the diverse and unusual resources on which he himself relies ...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2019/01/31/the-strange-places-trump-gets-his-intelligence-from/#6805ffcb312a

The author identifies these unusual resources as: Fox & Friends­, fictional movies, and conversations with Putin