The two stories in the lead slot of Saturday’s New York Times under the umbrella headline “Trump Selects Loyalists On Right Flank to Fill National Security Posts” both hammered Trump’s “hard-line” national security choices.
But it was Michael Rosenberg’s profile of Trump’s pick for national security, retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn, that truly lifted the hood on the paper’s seething contempt for Trump’s assertive foreign policy philosophy.
The news analysis by Matt Apuzzo and Mark Landler, “Strident Team Of Like Minds,” led off:
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s trio of hard-line selections on Friday served notice that he intends not only to reverse eight years of liberal domestic policies but also to overturn decades of bipartisan consensus on the United States’ proper role in world affairs.
The headline and lead paragraph to Julie Hirschfeld Davis’s co-lead story emphasized the fringe, “hard-line” theme: “Three Hard-Liners Are Seen as G.O.P. Outliers.”
President-elect Donald J. Trump moved quickly on Friday to begin filling national security posts at the top echelons of his administration, selecting a group of hawks and campaign loyalists who reflect the hard-line views that defined his run for president.
Matthew Rosenberg’s Saturday story on Army general and Islamist critic Michael Flynn, president-elect Trump’s pick for national security adviser, went over the top, resorting to liberal name-calling by accusing Flynn of “outright Islamophobia” in “Anti-Militant Former General Is Pick for National Security Adviser.”
Anyone who has spent time with Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for national security adviser, knows he is nothing if not blunt, especially when it comes to his near-obsessive focus on “radical Islamic terrorism.”
He has said on Twitter that “fear of Muslims is RATIONAL,” written that Islamic law is spreading in the United States and said that Islam itself is more like a political ideology than a religion. The United States, he wrote in “Field of Fight,” a book about radical Islam published in August, is “in a world war, but very few Americans recognize it.”
Rosenberg teed up a Democrat to smear Flynn.
General Flynn, 57, a retired military intelligence officer and registered Democrat, will be the person Mr. Trump turns to when confronted with a crisis abroad. Whether it is a renewed bloodletting in Ukraine, a Russian cyberattack on the United States or a hurricane hitting Haiti, the national security adviser is supposed to be a steady hand and honest broker who can provide measured and unbiased guidance to the president about how the United States should respond.
“These are not qualities readily apparent in observing General Flynn over the last few years,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
General Flynn was once counted among the most respected military officers of his generation. He spent 33 years in the Army, becoming known as an outspoken and unconventional thinker as he climbed the ranks of military intelligence.
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But General Flynn’s career unraveled after he was named by President Obama to run the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012. James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, fired him after his attempts to change the sprawling agency left subordinates squabbling and his superiors alarmed.
General Flynn, though, has said he was forced out for refusing to toe the administration’s line that Islamist militants were in retreat, a position that was in fact correct.
In his speeches and writing since his retirement, General Flynn has veered far from the mainstream in his views of Islam, and has insisted that Islamist militants pose a threat to the very existence of the United States.
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Mr. Flynn railed at a Washington elite that he saw as too cowardly to call the enemy by the name “radical Islamic terrorism.” He continued to make comments that crossed the line into outright Islamophobia. And he led the raucous “lock her up” taunts of Hillary Clinton, drawing the ire of former colleagues in the military, most of whom see it as their duty to stay out of politics even in retirement.
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Among the hard-line Republicans who now dominate the party, Mr. Flynn has become something of a cult figure for what is seen as his brave stand against the Obama administration’s perfidy.
The favorable view of Mr. Flynn is not shared by many in the Republican national security establishment, most of whom opposed Mr. Trump, or many current and former military officers. They say he lacks the temperament and broader worldview needed at the White House, where he will have to contend with more than just Islamist militants.
They also fear General Flynn’s apparent willingness to work with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who he has said should be courted as an ally in the fight against Islamist militants. Last year, he even sat next to Mr. Putin at a lavish anniversary dinner hosted by Russia Today, a television network funded by the Kremlin, which also paid General Flynn to speak.
(Also at that table with Putin? Green Party candidate Jill Stein.)
Then there is General Flynn’s habit of saying things that are simply not accurate with complete conviction (Exhibit A: Islamic law spreading in the United States). At the Defense Intelligence Agency, his subordinates called them “Flynn facts.”
Rosenberg also seethed at Flynn back in October during the campaign: “Ex-General Offers an Angry Voice of Authority.”
....He has gone from being one of the most respected military officers of his generation to one of its most openly partisan, loudly inveighing against what he sees as a corrupt Washington elite that has left the United States weak and vulnerable. No one else on Mr. Trump’s national security team comes with the pedigree of General Flynn, who was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency until 2014, and no one has brought the same level of vitriol.
