One of President Donald Trump's most common responses to intelligence briefings is to doubt what he's being told, former Deputy Director of Intelligence Susan Gordon said Tuesday.
Gordon, an intelligence veteran of more than 30 years, said Monday that Trump had two typical responses to briefings.
"One, 'I don't think that's true,'" Gordon told the Women's Foreign Policy Group.
"The one is 'I'm not sure I believe that,'" Gordon continued, "and the other is the second order and third order effects. 'Why is that true? Why are we there? Why is this what you believe? Why do we do that?' Those sorts of things."
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Gordon seemed to suggest that it was more difficult trying to figure out where the President had gotten the information that was shaping his beliefs and opinions than dealing with his tendency to doubt what he was being told.
Speaking of Trump's disbelief, Gordon said, "Remember, intelligence is fundamentally a craft of uncertainty and of possibility, so that doesn't put you off. It's trying to catch up to how you adjudicate the sources that led him to believe that and how you respond to it."
...Gordon said Tuesday that serving in the intelligence community had been the honor of a lifetime, calling it "the greatest job ever."
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"Intelligence is a lovely discipline," she said, "that all you have to do is pursue the truth as hard as you can and then represent it in a manner that policy can be formed."
Her career included briefing President Ronald Reagan as a 28-year-old, and that longevity in the field gave her some perspective on Trump compared to other presidents. She painted a picture of a commander in chief tightly focused on the economic aspects of national security issues. Trump's questioning, she said, had a "disproportionately" economic bent to it.
She also noted that Trump arrived in the White House without the framework or foundation that presidents usually have to understand and analyze intelligence reports.
He was the first president "in my experience that had no foundation or framework to understand what the limits of intelligence are, what the purpose of it was and the way that we discuss it," Gordon said, comparing it to "like playing pickup basketball with one runner. Right, everyone else knows how the game moves and plays and you have one person that comes in and plays and is just so different. That that in of itself is just so different."
Trump "asked different questions, he pursued the different -- he had different trusts," she said. ...
I'm sure having Trump as the Commander in Chief while your child is active duty is more than unsettling. 
