Former director of national intelligence James Clapper cast doubt on President Donald Trump’s fitness for office shortly after the president hosted a deeply divisive campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, Tuesday evening. The president has been widely condemned for using the rally to angrily defend his Charlottesville response and continue attacks on the media that are generally based on falsehoods and distortions.
“It’s hard to know where to start, it’s just so objectionable on so many levels,” Clapper said in a CNN appearance with Don Lemon. “I’ve toiled in one capacity or another for every president since and including John F. Kennedy through President Obama, and I don’t know when I’ve listened and watched something like this from a president that I’ve found more disturbing.”
“I really question his ability to be—his fitness to be—in this office, and I also am beginning to wonder about his motivation for it,” he added.
James Clapper, former director of national intelligence, says he questions President Trump's fitness for office https://t.co/IRRXg7paZM
— CNN (@CNN) August 23, 2017
Clapper also issued a stark warning over Trump’s access to the country’s nuclear capabilities, particularly amid escalating tensions with North Korea.
These were not new concerns voiced by the former director of national intelligence, who has been one of the president’s fiercest critics for some time. In May, he warned that the country’s democratic institutions were “under assault” with Trump in the White House. Clapper has also described the ongoing Russia investigations as far more serious than the Watergate scandal of the 1970’s.
“I think you compare the two, that Watergate pales, really, in my view, compared to what we’re confronting now.”
Trump has previously distorted Clapper’s remarks and suggested that they proved his innocence in the Russia probes.
