As shocking as Donald Trump’s victory was – and as uncertain as the future is – his victory marked a massive “intelligence failure” of the Establishment, a blow to its arrogance and self-dealing, says ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.
By Graham E. Fuller
President Trump. The very words hit the ear as a shock; the mind is not ready for it.
And that is exactly the problem. We could not see it coming. Among other things this tawdry and interminable election represents a massive American intelligence failure. Not failure of IQ, but failure to grasp reality — now a deeply engrained American characteristic. We not only fail to perceive and grasp reality abroad, but now even at home.
President Barack Obama meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Nov. 10, 2016. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
The Establishment was cocksure down to the last hours that such a thing could not, would not happen. It had drunk its own Kool-Aid.
A huge portion of this intelligence failure rests with the Democratic Party. Its complacent certitude of its right to win, expressed right down to the end of Election Day, was vivid.
Such smugness also fed the anger of Trump supporters, many of whom were apparently shamed into hiding it, but who voted Donald Trump in the anonymity of the polling place.
It did not fully grasp the racism that still runs so deeply in American society, the poisonous and corrosive legacy of slavery that has not truly been internalized by most white people. The prejudice against Latino, and especially Mexican people, betrays ignorance of the historical reality that vast areas of rising Latino power in the U.S. today are precisely those regions that once constituted an integral part of a large state of Mexico, its society, culture and politics — Texas, Arizona, California.
The U.S. power Establishment — the two national parties, the bureaucracy, the “deep state,” the military, the security establishment, Wall Street and the corporations — all have believed in their own exceptionalism and right to dominate and determine the course of American society — and indeed even much of the rest of the world.
We had no…