Would Trump Plot Coups in Greenland? Panama? Really?

We've reached peak insanity, intelligence journalist extraordinaire Tim Weiner says. Don't be surprised by more new shocks.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any crazier, it has. Not to beat an old and now tattered drum, but events in our corner of the national security world continue on their Alice-in-Wonderland, hallucinogenic path under the Trump administration, which has astoundingly switched sides in the 80-year struggle to contain first Soviet, now dictatorial, imperial Russia.

“The question that we ink-stained wretches who cover intelligence have been grappling with for the better part of a decade [is], what accounts for Trump's strange bromance with Vladimir Putin?” Pulitzer Prize-winning intelligence journalist extraordinaire Tim Weiner asks on the latest SpyTalk podcast.

Tim Weiner (PBS)

Theories abound, but “the question has been answered,” he says. “Trump is not an agent of Russia. He is Russia's ally. And proof of that came back in February when he voted with Russia and North Korea and other members of the axis of authoritarianism against a resolution condemning Russia for the invasion and occupation of Ukraine.”

During our fast-moving 35-minute conversation, Weiner and I touched on all the bizarre developments since Jan. 20, starting with the appointments of Russia-friendly Tulsi Gabbard as director of National Intelligence and far right enemies-lister Kash Patel as director of the FBI. And then there was Signalgate, the weird, apparently inadvertent invitation to the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine, into an online discussion of battle plans for Yemen by the Trump administration’s top defense and intelligence officials.

Meanwhile, the purge and resignations of career intelligence officials at the National Security Council, the CIA and the NSA continued, driven by no less than Laura Loomer, a conspiracy mongering social media influencer whom Trump has embraced like a “modern day Rasputin,” as our colleague Michael Isikoff aptly calls her.

And evidently there are no guardrails on what Trump might try next.

“What would stop him, for example, if he ordered the clandestine service of the CIA to subvert the government of Denmark in order to grab Greenland or to subvert the government of Panama, instigate a coup perhaps, to enable him to grab the Panama Canal, wrest it back, treaties be damned? Only CIA officers with the greatest morality would be able to do that.”

There are few better chroniclers of U.S. intelligence to discuss all this than Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, among other fine investigative works. His latest, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, will be out in July.

Listen in here, or wherever your preferred podcast platform.