The Second Coming of Richard Nixon?

Donald Trump appears to have modelled himself on an unlikely hero, the former Republican president Richard Nixon. Nixon, in his 1968 bid for the White House, appealed to the fears of a “silent majority” of Americans perturbed by crime and riots across the country. And Trump, with his pledge to “make America safe again,” has deliberately evoked Nixon’s “law and order” rhetoric, vowing to beef up the military, support the police, and crack down on terrorism and public disorder.

But the parallels with Nixon go deeper. Trump, like his predecessor, appears to dislike and distrust the US intelligence community. The CIA recently concluded that Russia had interfered in the election, helping Trump to win by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails and then feeding them to Wikileaks. This prompted a fierce statement from Trump’s team attacking the CIA’s credibility: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” Trump also said he didn’t bother reading his daily intelligence briefings, as they were repetitive.

It is highly unusual for a President-Elect to castigate America’s spies in this manner. Indeed, we really need to go back to the Nixon era to find anything remotely similar. Nixon was convinced the CIA had contributed to his defeat in the 1960 election, by funneling information to his opponent John F Kennedy. He saw the CIA as “Ivy League liberals” pushing a leftish political agenda and, when he assumed the presidency in 1969, sought to exclude them from the policy-making process.

Like Trump, Nixon probably rarely read the president’s Daily Brief and distrusted the CIA’s reporting, convinced it had underestimated Soviet military capabilities, for instance. He believed the agency was too big, and wanted to cut it down. Nixon even suggested in an interview that the CIA had conspired to remove him from office: “It was no secret that I was dissatisfied with the CIA, with its reports and particularly with their appraisals of Soviet strength and our other problems around the world.”

Tensions between Trump and the CIA have been growing for months. In April, agency director John Brennan hit back at Trump’s support for “enhanced interrogation,” saying he would not obey orders to use waterboarding. Brennan repeated his opposition to waterboarding in a recent BBC interview, adding that Trump should not follow through on his promise to revoke the Iran nuclear deal, either.

Responding to Trump’s hostile comments about immigration, the CIA allowed some of its Muslim employees to speak to the Washington Post, “in an effort to increase awareness about Muslims who take part in sensitive national security work.” In September, Trump said the intelligence officers who briefed him clearly disapproved of Barack Obama’s policies, prompting another rebuke from Brennan. Then came the dispute over Russian hacking.

Trump appears to favour the military over the CIA. Most of the major national security jobs in his administration have gone to former soldiers: Secretary of Defense to retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, Homeland Security Secretary to retired Gen. John Kelly, CIA Director to former cavalry officer Mike Pompeo, and National Security Adviser to Lt Gen Michael Flynn (his deputy, KT McFarland, is a former Department of Defense official who also served in Nixon’s White House).

Since 9/11 the military and CIA have competed over which should head the fight against terrorism. Initially CIA seemed to take the lead, being the first agency to enter Afghanistan in 2001. But the military has gradually edged ahead, with special operations forces becoming “Obama’s preferred instrument for killing terrorists,” writes David Ignatius in the Washington Post. One example of this shift is drone warfare: at first the CIA carried out most strikes, but special operations forces now do more and more.

Michael Flynn, a former chief of intelligence for US special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been key to these developments. And, as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014, he boosted the military’s spying capabilities, encroaching on an area traditionally dominated by the CIA. Flynn takes a dim view of the CIA, which he accuses of missing the rise of IS and acting as a tool of the Obama administration. Echoing Nixon’s belief in that the CIA is too liberal, he told the New York Times it had become “a very political organisation.”

With Trump and his national security advisor so openly hostile to the intelligence community, and an administration packed with former military personnel, it seems possible the CIA will take a hit in the coming years. This could generate problems for Trump, if disgruntled spooks start leaking embarrassing secrets to the media in retaliation. And he might, like the Nixon of Watergate fame, set up his own clandestine operations outside of normal bureaucratic channels.

As Nixon biographer Evan Thomas writes recently in the New York Times, “Presidents face a great temptation to go “in-house” for intelligence that fits with their plans; some have even set up formal or informal operations to circumvent the CIA and other agencies. In almost every case, the result has been a disaster—for the president and for the country. The most obvious example is Richard M Nixon.”

The CIA is certainly a flawed organisation. Let us not forget the agency’s bungled covert operations in Cuba and elsewhere, its intelligence failures before 9/11 and the Iraq War, its kidnapping and torture of terrorism suspects, among other scandals. A strong case can—and has—been made that the CIA should abandon its covert activities (engineering coups, for example) and concentrate solely on intelligence collection and analysis.

Whether this will happen is another matter. Nixon might have hated the CIA, but he liked covert operations, and was more than happy to see the agency topple Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973, for example. Trump, a national security hawk, may well continue these sorts of shenanigans, whatever his personal grievances. Old habits die hard.