Donald Trump
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Donald Trump's 2016 election victory was partly due to public fatigue with perpetual wars, as the majority of Americans opposed the war.  In the same conversation, Kiriakou describes Trump's ceasefire efforts with Iran, reaching out behind the scenes twice in ten days only to be rebuffed. John Kiriakou says he believes Trump genuinely thought he was doing the right thing and saving lives when he ordered the Iran strikes, including the 30,000-lb MOAB strike on the Fordow bunker, believing he was saving Iran from a nuclear attack by the Israelis, and now realizes he has been "duped", falling for the same nuclear-weapons bluff from Benjamin Netanyahu that Barack Obama had called years earlier. He notes the irony that Trump had campaigned against war with Iran and had repeatedly called invading it stupid, and asks why, of all the presidents who made that same campaign promise, Trump became the first to actually strike. Kiriakou also suggests Trump's eagerness may be partly personal: he believes Trump "absolutely hates" that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize and desperately wants one himself, and with North Korea talks stalled, Iran became "the next best thing", leading Trump to write a letter to Ayatollah Khamenei proposing talks that opened in Muscat.

The Iran war and the case for it

The no-foreign-wars promise

A month into the 2026 campaign against Iran, Kiriakou called it "a disastrous miscalculation" and located the political damage inside Trump's own coalition: "there were a lot of Republican voters who voted for Donald Trump because they believed that he really was the no-foreign-wars president." He dates that expectation to a specific debate, "February 14th, Valentine's Day 2016 ... in which Donald Trump called George W. Bush a war criminal for getting the United States involved in the war in Iraq", and contrasts it with an administration in which "it's as though it's John McCain's neoconservative Republican Party again." See the Republican split over the Iran war.

Naming Witkoff and Kushner

During the 2026 Iran war, John Kiriakou described a press appearance in which Trump answered questions about the Tomahawk strikes evasively, "I don't know, maybe I saw them Tomahawks. I don't know", and then named Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner as the men who had given him the information on which he decided to go to war. "He named them and he threw them under the bus." Kiriakou's objection was to the substance rather than the disloyalty: Kushner holds no official position in the government, and the admission amounts to telling the public that the country entered a war on his say-so.

On the decision itself, Kiriakou's view is that Trump was sold a false premise: "it was the Israelis who convinced Trump that Iran was a house of cards." His account of the strategic error behind the war is at the house of cards theory. Trump also publicly stated that Benjamin Netanyahu had called him in advance to tell him Israel was preparing to strike Iran, an admission Kiriakou says undercut Washington's official position that it had no involvement, since if the U.S. knew in advance and did nothing to stop it, that itself is a form of involvement.

Going quiet

Speaking about the June 2025 Iran war, Kiriakou said Trump went into a security-driven "hiding," which he compared to George W. Bush's concealment on September 11, a move he called strategically justifiable but one he "strongly politically" disagreed with, since Trump never publicly addressed the American people about the strikes, made no case for the war on television, and did not so much as send a tweet. Kiriakou called this a sign of "peak ego" and extreme arrogance.

Put to him in 2026 that Trump had lost his superpower, that he had spent much of his first term still holding rallies, keeping his ear to the ground with at least the conservative half of the country, and had stopped, John Kiriakou agreed without reservation: "I think that's right." He likewise rejected the premise that Trump rarely makes an unwitting political mistake, naming two: the Save America Act, and the opposition to mail-in ballots during the pandemic, which he called "a huge contributing factor" to Trump's earlier defeat.

Israel and the Palestinians

"The most blindly pro-Israel president"

John Kiriakou calls Donald Trump the most "blindly, knee-jerk" pro-Israel president ever, the one who moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, closed the Palestinian office in Washington and expelled its diplomats, and claimed he could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict "in a day" by giving Israel everything it wanted. Asked directly whether Trump is the most pro-Israel president the U.S. has ever had, Kiriakou says yes, pointing again to the embassy move as proof enough on its own, a law Congress had passed in the 1990s but that every president before Trump chose to keep on hold pending a Palestinian peace deal. He blames Trump, not just Bill Clinton, for the embassy's eventual move, noting Sheldon Adelson personally paid for it out of pocket. Kiriakou has separately raised the possibility that Israel or another party holds compromising material on Trump, suggesting this could help explain his willingness to strike Iran without hesitation.

Gaza

Kiriakou says Trump himself once described the Israeli goal in Gaza as pushing out all Palestinians to develop the property, that it would be "better than Monte Carlo", which Kiriakou calls the very definition of ethnic cleansing. Speaking as "an Arabist" who has spent most of his adult life and career in the region, he said he genuinely feared for the Palestinian people under a Trump presidency, and called the proposal to take over the Gaza Strip "one of the most disgusting things that somebody could say, first of all, it's a war crime."

Why he presses Netanyahu

Kiriakou's reading of Trump's Gaza diplomacy does not rest on any change of sympathy. As pro-Israel and pro-Zionist as Trump is, he says, the operative fact is that Trump expects people to do as they are told, and Netanyahu will not do as he is told, so he has to be forced.

He reads the July 2026 meeting between the two as one operator recognising another's method and refusing it, Netanyahu going public "to influence American public opinion to pressure the president to do what you want him to do", and a president who is "tired of Netanyahu constantly trying to manipulate him." Why the pressure campaign misfires is a matter of Trump's own command of the medium, treated below.

Russia, autocracy, and the intelligence community

The Putin exception

John Kiriakou notes that Trump has criticized nearly every world leader and ally, including the Canadian and British prime ministers, but has never once criticized Vladimir Putin, a pattern Kiriakou calls "strange" and reads as evidence Trump "admires autocracy" and "loves Xi Jinping" too. Kiriakou also says Trump uses his personal cell phone and answers calls from unrecognized international numbers on the chance one might be a foreign leader, and agrees, drawing on his own CIA experience with such interception, that a dozen or more countries are likely listening in. He traces this same instinct back to a pattern he says he has seen repeatedly in politicians who convince themselves they are the smartest person in the room and stop listening to anyone around them, George W. Bush and John Kerry included, telling an interviewer in 2017, early in Trump's first term, that Trump's version of that trait led him to say publicly, for the first time in his life, that he "actually feared for the country."

The deep state, and the men he put in charge of it

Kiriakou traces Trump's fraught relationship with the intelligence community back to a 2017 exchange after Trump called the CIA part of the "deep state" and threatened to dismantle it: Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer warned publicly that the CIA had "nine ways from Sunday" to ruin a person's life, and CNN asked Kiriakou on air what Schumer meant. Kiriakou said Schumer wasn't predicting a repeat of the Kennedy assassination, but pointing to a real deep state, career CIA leaders who serve 25, 30, even 35 years and can simply ignore a president's orders, confident that in four or eight years he'll be gone and they'll still be there. Kiriakou says he personally hoped, when Trump was first elected in 2016, that he would really shake up the CIA, but Trump instead named what Kiriakou calls two "swamp creatures," Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel, to lead it, dispelling any notion of reform. He adds that despite Trump and John Bolton openly disliking each other, the CIA worked closely with Bolton and with H.R. McMaster during Trump's first term regardless.

FISA Section 702

Kiriakou noted that Trump had drawn a personal distinction between the "foreign" Section 702 collection he supports, arguing it should be renewed, and the domestic "Title I" FISA surveillance he says was abused by "the dirty cop James Comey" to run the Russia collusion investigation against him. Kiriakou agreed with the distinction in principle but argued for tighter controls on Section 702 to protect the civil liberties of American citizens.

War powers and the limits of the office

The Strait of Hormuz, and NATO

Kiriakou says Trump posted on Truth Social telling U.S. allies unable to get Gulf oil to buy from the United States instead, to "learn to fight for themselves," and to take the Strait of Hormuz by force now that Iran has been "decimated." He calls this several distinct war crimes, since seizing another nation's natural resources is explicitly barred under the law of war. He notes the contradiction of Trump, in the same period, calling NATO weak and useless while also expecting NATO allies to fight for the Strait, and calls false Trump's claim that NATO has never helped the U.S., pointing out that the alliance's only invocation of Article 5 came after September 12, 2001, when NATO agreed to help fight al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Kiriakou has separately questioned the alliance's own consistency, noting NATO troops have been deployed to non-member, non-European countries, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and the Sahel, contrary to its founding charter.

Renaming a department, renaming a gulf

Kiriakou also points to Trump's announcement renaming the Department of Defense to the "Department of War" as an example of Trump exceeding his actual authority, only Congress can rename a federal department, he notes, contrasting it with Trump's rebranding of the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" on Google Maps, which is within a president's real power.

Greenland, and the defense budget

Kiriakou says Trump has repeatedly floated acquiring Greenland, jokes eight years ago that he now keeps bringing up, driven by Greenland's rare-earth-metal reserves, since China holds a near-monopoly on the expensive refining process and the U.S. cannot yet compete. A junior Georgia congressman, Kiriakou notes, went so far as to sponsor House Resolution 1116, calling for the president to take Greenland "by any means necessary" and rename it "Red, White, and Blue Land." On the flip side of Trump's approach to the military, Kiriakou says Trump requested an unprecedented 8% year-over-year cut to the defense budget for five years running, a 45% overall cut no Democratic president has ever proposed, though he doubts Congress will let it stand, since the Defense Department has spent decades deliberately spreading manufacturing subcontractors across all 435 congressional districts, making any serious cut politically painful everywhere at once.

Trade, the economy, and the rest of the world

The tariffs

Opening a 2026 interview with the economist Richard D. Wolff, Kiriakou gave his own summary of Trump's economic record: Trump "has shaken up the economy more and in a shorter period of time than really any previous president over the past couple of generations." The tariffs on every trading partner, in his account, caused chaos in global stock markets, laid the groundwork for inflation and economic contraction, and led to political upheaval inside the United States. Kiriakou set the policy against the tariffs of William McKinley, who "crashed the economy", while noting that leaders today are not ignorant of that history, which is why he finds the silence around the policy harder to explain than the policy itself.

China and North Korea

Kiriakou credits Trump as one of the only presidents to get something right on North Korea, though he says Trump's own North Korea envoy backed off further engagement in the back half of his first term and Democrats were "just waiting to kill it anyway." He is more critical of Trump's China policy, saying the tariffs and sanctions Trump imposed began a slow deterioration of the U.S.-China economic relationship, one the Biden campaign later exploited by painting Trump as "pro-Russian" and tarring his opponents as "pro-Chinese."

Diplomacy by FedEx

Kiriakou says he laughed out loud reading, in the unsealed Mar-a-Lago search affidavit, that Trump had a former lawyer FedEx correspondence to Kim Jong Un, specifically so Trump could track the package's progress on his phone, rather than using the normal diplomatic-pouch process delivered by an ambassador.

Ukraine, Zelensky, and the consistency test

Days after the February 2025 Oval Office confrontation between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, Kiriakou gave an assessment that separated the man from the policy. On Zelensky he was blunt: "I think Zelensky is done. I would not be surprised if Zelensky in the next three months was a resident of London rather than Kyiv. I think he's done. I think this war is done."

On Trump he made a point he said peace activists were reluctant to make. "Trump does exactly what he says he's going to do. It can be something terrible, like a Muslim ban, but I don't know why everybody's like 'oh my God, I'm so shocked.' Trump did exactly what he said he was going to do during the campaign." He then drew the line explicitly: "Trump is wrong about Gaza, Trump is wrong about Syria, Trump is wrong about Iran, Trump is wrong about China ... but on this one issue of the Ukraine war, Trump is right. He's right. And if we're going to be peace activists, if we're going to be people who go out into the streets and demand peace, then we've got to be consistent about it."

The exception did not extend to the administration's transparency claims: Kiriakou rejected the idea that its free-speech executive orders would deliver any, "they're not. It's all about lawfare, it's all about going after your enemies."

The torture case his CIA declined to kill

One early Kiriakou observation about the Trump administration is a point in its favour, and he gave it as a puzzle rather than as praise. At the very end of the Obama administration the CIA announced that it would not seek to have the Salim suit against Mitchell and Jessen thrown out; Kiriakou's reaction at the time was "well, we'll see if it lasts with the next president." It did. "Here we are with Donald Trump. Donald Trump's CIA did not seek to have the case thrown out." He called that "odd" and "almost inexplicable", and read it as an institutional decision rather than a political one, "something that the CIA decided to do at the topmost levels, just to put it behind them."

Pardons, clemency, and the law

The pardon habit

Kiriakou says most presidents issue pardons and commutations in the narrow window between an election and the inauguration, when there is little political fallout, but Trump, by contrast, pardons people constantly, regardless of timing. He says Trump has pardoned an outsized number of African-Americans serving what Kiriakou calls "draconian" drug sentences from the 1980s through the early 2000s, genuinely believing those laws were racist, a position Kiriakou says Kim Kardashian helped bring him around to. To act on such cases, Trump named Alice Johnson, herself pardoned after receiving 30 years for a minor role in a drug conspiracy because she chose to go to trial, which Kiriakou calls "a terrible miscarriage of justice", as his informal "pardon czar." The position has no government office or telephone, but Johnson has direct access to the White House to recommend pardons and commutations. Kiriakou's own case brushed up against Trump's clemency power at the very end of Trump's first term: on the night Trump pardoned 15 people, including cronies from the Russia investigation, Kiriakou was passed over.

Clearances, documents, and enforcement

Trump has also used his authority the other way. Kiriakou discusses Trump's 2025 revocation of the security clearances of 51 former intelligence officials who had signed the public letter dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story as bearing the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, a letter later shown, in testimony from one of its authors, Michael Morell, to have been organized at the request of the Biden campaign.

On his own classified-documents case, Kiriakou notes that when Trump was found with classified material at Mar-a-Lago, he wrote his own op-ed on the subject, and Joe Lauria at Consortium News published one titled "Don't Charge Donald Trump with Espionage or Anybody Else," arguing the Espionage Act itself, not just its application to Trump, is broken. Interviewed the week Trump was indicted in the Manhattan hush-money case, Kiriakou noted Trump had been leading Ron DeSantis in national primary polling by five to 13 points the week before the indictment, and by 30 to 35 points by the time of the interview, a gap he said no other Republican candidate was anywhere close to matching. On domestic immigration enforcement, Kiriakou says Trump is simply doing exactly what he told voters he would do during the campaign, so the raids and National Guard deployments that followed should not have shocked anyone.

Kiriakou's assessment of the man

Kiriakou has described Trump as "mobbed up to his chin" during his years as Manhattan's biggest construction magnate, when his lawyer was Roy Cohn, the mob's own attorney.

The negotiator

On the PBD Podcast in April 2026, John Kiriakou said the shift in the American electorate's implicit job description of the presidency between 2000 and 2026 explained Donald Trump's rise: whereas in 2000 the top qualities voters would name for a president were diplomacy and oratory, by 2026 they were "negotiation skills," and Trump, unlike Obama or Biden, "a phenomenal negotiator", had matched the moment. Asked whether he still supported the president if the cameras were off, Kiriakou answered "yeah, I would say that," even as he acknowledged the administration had "had problems too." The trait read differently abroad: foreign officials who have dealt with Trump feared and disliked him for his unpredictability, and Kiriakou recalls a senior Luxembourg foreign ministry official who told him the first thing he did every morning was check Twitter to see what "craziness" Trump was saying.

"I just go with my gut"

On National Security Files in July 2026, John Kiriakou contrasted Donald Trump's stated method with that of every prior modern American president. Asked on 60 Minutes "who are your closest advisers?", Trump had answered, as Kiriakou paraphrases the exchange, "I don't have any. I just go with my gut." Kiriakou treats this as a discontinuity from a longstanding norm under which "any other president will ask the Secretary of State, 'what do you think?' Secretary of Defense, 'what do you think?' National Security Adviser, 'what do you think?' CIA director, 'what do you think?'" on major policy decisions.

Master of the media

Kiriakou grants Trump the same skill he attributes to Netanyahu and rates it higher: "Donald Trump knows what he's doing because Trump is a master of the media. Donald Trump is terrific at manipulating the media. He always has been."

His evidence is personal and offered against himself. Watching The Apprentice years earlier, "I used to lay in bed with my then wife and watch this show", he turned to her and admitted the programme was working on him, "I've got to admit, Trump has won me over. I feel like I'm halfway through an MBA just watching this show." His point is not about the show but about the technique: "He's great at using the media."

"Not the Donald Trump of the first term"

Kiriakou calls Trump's first term a "four-year slow-motion disaster for our democracy," staffed with people he considered unqualified, but says the second term is different, at least on intelligence appointments and the proposed defense cuts. He dates his own move toward Trump late and qualifies it carefully. Having campaigned for Gary Johnson in 2016, "it took me a while before I moved over to Donald Trump", and the endorsement he gives is of a different man rather than of the record.

> "This is not the Donald Trump of the first term. This is a completely and totally different Donald Trump. This is a Donald Trump who's far more worldly, and who has a deeper understanding of international events, and much, much more willingness to stand up to the Israelis. I have to say I am very pleasantly surprised by the way things have been going since January the 20th."

The specific policy he cites in support of it in the same conversation is the lifting of sanctions on Syria, which he reads as economic development rather than as diplomacy.

Sixty seconds with him

Kiriakou's only face-to-face encounter with Trump was the Mar-a-Lago lunch at which he asked for a pardon. Trump's recall of him was immediate and secondhand, "Tucker told me about you", followed by "And Dershowitz?", before he referred the matter to Pam Bondi.

The impression stuck. "I will say that Donald Trump in person, in that short exchange, was nothing like Donald Trump on television. He was warm and engaging and friendly, and I wonder how much of the tough guy Donald Trump is is an act for political purposes. I don't know. I don't know him well enough. I only met him for 60 seconds."

"Too stupid to have broken the law"

The New York Times reported in May 2017 that three administration officials had privately conceded they could not publicly articulate their most compelling defence of the president's disclosure to the Russian foreign minister, that Trump, "a hasty and indifferent reader of his briefing materials," simply did not possess the interest or the knowledge to leak specific sources and methods. Asked to respond, John Kiriakou took the defence at face value and marvelled at it: "I've never heard a White House staff say that the president was too stupid or too ill-informed to have broken the law, and that's really what it comes down to."

His own position separates the authority from the conduct. Trump could have declassified the material; there is a procedure for doing so and he did not use it. "The truth is he leaked highly classified information that he shouldn't have leaked. It's one thing to say, hey, I'm the president, nobody can punish me for that. It's another thing entirely to just deny that he did it. We know that he did it, and he really ought to own up to it."

The sharper disappointment is aimed past the president. "Where I'm disappointed is in the reaction of Republicans on Capitol Hill. I understand party loyalty, this is Washington, after all, but my God, you have to think about what's good for the country, and this is certainly bad for the country."

On the separate report that Trump had urged James Comey to consider jailing reporters who publish classified information, Kiriakou's explanation was not malice but ignorance: "I say this in all candour, I think the president very simply has never read a copy of the Constitution. He's just never bothered to read the Constitution, and he has no understanding, no appreciation of the First Amendment's protections for freedom of speech." He then declined to leave it there, and named an Obama-era precedent he considers more dangerous, see James Risen.

See also

- Benjamin Netanyahu
- Dick Cheney
- John Kiriakou
