Another Reality-Denying, Inexperienced Trump Loyalist Has Been Confirmed As Director Of National Intelligence

Welp, the U.S. Senate has, once again, confirmed a Trump loyalist to do a job that seems important but only requires one main qualification: loyalty to President Donald Trump.

This time, it’s the role of director of national intelligence that has been handed to a man with no experience in national intelligence, but plenty of experience wearing the president’s orange-tinted hind parts as a neck and shoulder massager.

According to the New York Times, in a 51-to-47 vote that fell along party lines, the Senate confirmed Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, who Senate Democrats may have been able to get on board with if he hadn’t gone viral earlier this month after earning his MAGA daddy’s approval by refusing to say definitely that Trump lost his bid for reelection in 2020 to former President Joe Biden.

So, on Tuesday, congressional Republicans handed the keys to the nation’s intelligence agencies to a man who apparently lacks the intelligence to answer a simple yes-or-no question about who gained the most electoral votes in 2020.

But here’s the thing: Clayton ain’t so stupid that he doesn’t know who won in 2020; he, like the rest of the Republican sycophants who buckle under the watchful eye of Trump and his MAGA cultists, is too much of a coward to deal with reality out loud, knowing it could cost him his confirmation.

And see, that’s where we are under Trump. We’re in a place where, for elected and appointed officials, telling even the most obvious, easily verifiable truth can come at a cost if said truth undermines the president’s propaganda, which is pretty much always the case.

“Who won the 2020 election?” is only a “gotcha” question because Democrats use it to test Republicans to see if they’re so utterly lacking in integrity and credibility that their brains turn to MAGA mush whenever they’re asked it. Sure, Clayton claimed on the stand that he’s “not an election denier,” but he only gets to say that because he didn’t explicitly answer “no,” and instead, declared that “I’m not going to get into that with you” about a dozen times, to which any reasonably intelligent person would inquire, “Get into what? Answering in the affirmative that the sky is, in fact, blue???”

But Clayton can’t tell the simple truth because Trump is still, after six years, peddling petty little lies about how the 2020 election was rigged against him. And to say anything that would shatter any of Trump’s many delusions is to fall out of the miseducated messiah’s favor, which would put Clayton on the same train home that was ridden by the Trump stooge he’s replacing, Tulsi Gabbard, who tried her best to be everything the president looks for in a shameless, bootlicking subordinate, but fell short, resulting in her being forced to resign from her post, just like Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino, and everyone else who publicly embarrassed the Trump administration by doing everything Trump demanded of them, but failed at it anyway because it was all so damn stupid.

Clayton, who served as the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) during Trump’s first term, also earned Trump’s approval by hopping on the bandwagon of right-wingers who don’t know how anything works, who claim the California elections were rigged because Republicans lost to Democrats in some of the most liberal cities in the U.S., and it took a really long time to count the votes in L.A., the second most populated city in the nation.

Clayton also gleefully joined the administration’s war against the free press.

From the Guardian:

During an interview on CNBC in June, Clayton also suggested there was something amiss about the long period California takes to count ballots. “We had a problem, a deep problem with voting in America,” he said on the network. “On the integrity side, we’re doing an absolutely terrible job, and the American people are right to question it.” Clayton also would not say during his confirmation hearing whether voter fraud was a problem in American elections, even though several studies have shown it is exceedingly rare.

His office also issued widely criticized subpoenas to New York Times journalists over their reporting on security concerns around Trump’s Air Force One airplane that was a gift from Qatar. The government abruptly withdrew those subpoenas during a court hearing in which a federal judge pressed an attorney from Clayton’s office about errors and irregularities in the subpoenas.

Welp, that’s our new director of national anti-intelligence, good people. MAGA, amirite?

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