2016’s Missing Ingredient: Paranoia

When Obama, members of his administration, as well as Comey, describe their approach to events approaching 2016’s Presidential election, one thing is usually mentioned. They believed Trump would lose. For Comey it’s critical, since his midnight hour reopening of Clinton’s email saga was actually the straw that broke her campaign. To admit he knew this might happen would be inexcusable.

For the Obama administration, and Obama himself, the expected Trump defeat played differently. The CIA (and FBI) knew Putin’s lackeys were infiltrating and interfering the campaigns. Everyone in the world, except American Republicans, believed Russia hacked the DNC and released material that hurt Clinton, through Wikileaks. Obama was more informed than almost anyone. In fact he confronted Putin, without much success.

Obama, and most everyone else, believed Trump would lose. Obama figured that making a public statement, a serious political effort, to address Russia’s information warfare, would backfire. In defeat Trump would claim Obama turned the election by making it up. His supporters would believe him.

With 20/20 hindsight, it’s easy to say this was a mistake. With recognition of the difficulty, however, I think it revealed a weakness of Obama. He wasn’t paranoid.

Nixon was so paranoid he blew his Presidency. How else can you explain someone who so feared George McGovern? The weakest candidate in the 20th century, Nixon still tried to hack the DNC. Imagine if Nixon was President in 2016, getting news of Russia’s infiltration and information invasion. He would have organized the entire administration into a response team, targeting every Putin business interest and political resource with legal and illegal attacks. In fact, Nixon was so paranoid, and acted so strongly on his paranoia, that Trump could have legitimately claimed he turned the election against him.

But paranoia is necessary, to some degree, because it makes you prepare for the worst. Andy Grove was Intel’s founder and CEO. He was born in Hungary. By age 20 he’d seen Nazis invade, suffered the gestapo, as a jew faced deportation, starved during the Red Army’s siege, faced communist repression, saw a popular uprising shot down, and escaped. He expected bad stuff, as a matter of course. In the 1980s Andy Grove didn’t just worry about the Japanese, he expected the worst. When they flooded the market with cheap DRAMs, Intel stopped making DRAMs and switched to microprocessors, overnight. That left Japanese companies holding the bag of old tricks. Paranoia paid off.

Obama and Comey weren’t paranoid enough. If they were, they would have known Trump could win, known that Trump’s base would believe the system was rigged even if he won. They would have expected Republicans to rally around Trump. Believing in people’s better angels, they supposed Americans would not elect an obvious rascal, racist, repugnant old man. A good dose of paranoia would have prevented that.

Expecting the worst, they would have planned and executed accordingly. Russian operatives in their big safe houses should have been expelled immediately, not after the election. Wikileaks should have been taken off line, by targeting all its resources. The administration had to do nasty things — put the screws on Ecuador, caused its London embassy’s evacuation, gotten Assange. They had to treat Russia’s information warfare as an act of war, and revealed Putin’s secrets. It wasn’t time to warn Putin to “back down, or else.” It was time for “or else.”

But in Obama’s estimation, all that would have sullied his Presidency, taken it down a notch. There was plenty of blow-back potential, as legions of Assange’s fans objected, and Russia expelled Americans. All that, and Trump was going to lose, anyway. So why bother?

Because, if you’re paranoid, you expect the worst. Trump is evil, and evil can win. Russia did bad things, and bad things can work. You can’t defeat them taking the high road. You have to push back hard enough that evil loses and bad things fail.

Although there’s plenty of paranoia in America, its most prevalent the lower you go. Paranoia and poverty go hand and hand. Paranoia and fear are mated. Those who succeed may be sociopath fighters, stabbing each other, but that’s business. Success demonstrates one can reach one’s goals, achieve ambitions, which defeats paranoia. It takes an upbringing like Grove’s to inculcate a paranoid world-view.

We need paranoia now, more than ever. Not to Nixonian levels, which, unfortunately, may be an occupational hazard. But to levels that reality deserves. The paranoia that reminds us Trump very well could go to war if he’s impeached. Trump really could nuke someone. Trump really could be blackmailed by Russia. Given that, we prepare for it. Because paranoia makes us expect it.