Friday, September 2, 2016

Trump and Daily Security Briefings

In 1945, the 4th term American President Roosevelt, popularly known as FDR, died in office. Harry Truman who was barely 6 months in office as his VP,  stepped into the President's shoes.

At that point Truman had no idea that Nuclear weapons existed and was literally startled when he came to know about the Manhatten Project. He was soon briefed about it and not long after that gave his consent to drop couple of those bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, putting a full stop to World War II.

His experience due to the lack of prior knowledge as VP about the Manhatten project. prompted him to launch a fresh tradition. From 1952, he started sharing the National Security briefings amongst the nominated Presidential candidates. He allowed his opponent and the eventual winner of that election, IKE (Dwight Isenhower) to be defriefed on state classified matters.

This has been offered to every Presidential candidate since then, an offer he or she need not take. In fact, in 1984, the then Democrat nominee Walter Mondale refused to take this offer. But most get a knowledge of the security elated briefings during their tenure of Presidential campaign.

Now with Trump being the official Republican nominee, there some concerns about sharing state secrets like ungoing Covert operations and other classified activities with him.

Knowing his penchant for being crazy and unpredictable, not to mention his dislikes for the Bushes, Obama and of course the Clintons, he can very well spill the beans during the campaign to pin his opponent. At this crucial stage of the campaign, when he has halved Clinton's lead of 9 points to 4 points, he won't mind to go for the kill with, pulling out a few skeletons from Hillary's cupboard to wipe out her lead.

So damned if he is made privy to the Classified Briefings, damn if he doesn't. We have interesting couple of months approaching in this Election game, where unlike the Olympics there is no Silver or Bronze medal.

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