Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was partly due to public fatigue with perpetual wars, as the majority of Americans opposed the war. [1] 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.[2][3][4] 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.[5] 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.[6]
‘The most blindly pro-Israel president’ (SaltCube)
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.[7][8] 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.[9] 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.[10] He also blames Trump, not just Bill Clinton, for the embassy’s eventual move, noting Sheldon Adelson personally paid for it out of pocket.[11] Separately, Kiriakou has 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.[12]
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.[13] 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.[14] Kiriakou 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.”[15]
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.[16] 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.[17]
War powers, war crimes, and naming things
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.[18][19] 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.[20][21] 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.[22]
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.[23][18]
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.”[24] 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.[25][26] Kiriakou calls Trump’s first term a “four-year slow-motion disaster for our democracy,” staffed with people he considered unqualified, but says this second term is different, at least on intelligence appointments and the proposed defense cuts.[27]
Kiriakou also 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.”[28][29] He notes that foreign officials who have dealt with Trump feared and disliked him for his unpredictability, recalling 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.[30] 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.[31] Kiriakou has separately 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 — and says 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.[32][33]
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.[34][35] He also said Trump 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.[36]
Pardons and clemency
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.[37] 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.[38] 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.[39][40] 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.[41]
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.[42]
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.[43] On his 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.[44]
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.[45]