Trump transitions into a tense relationship with intelligence agencies

(Image credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

last updated 12 December 2016

President-elect Donald Trump's rejection of the CIA's conclusion that Russia attempted to manipulate U.S. elections on his behalf has led to an unusually rocky relationship between the incoming administration and the intelligence establishment, which Trump's team has dismissed as "the same people that said Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction."

"Given [Trump's] proclivity for revenge combined with his notorious thin skin," said Paul Pillar, former deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, "this threatens to result in a lasting relationship of distrust and ill will between the president and the intelligence community."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.