A former CIA director says Donald Trump has hurt U.S. national security by adopting the messaging used by Islamic extremists.
“The jihadist narrative is that there is undying enmity between Islam and the modern world, so when Trump says they all hate us, he’s using their narrative … he’s feeding their recruitment video,” said Michael Hayden of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Hayden spoke in a Sunday appearance at the Hay Festival in the United Kingdom.
Hayden, who led the CIA under George W. Bush and briefly under President Obama, spoke on a wide range of security-related topics, including changes wrought by social media. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will probably have greater influence on security than government agencies because of the rules he sets up for the massively popular website, Hayden said.
“Your habits are all geared to protecting privacy against the government because that was always the traditional threat,” Hayden said. “That is no longer the pattern, it is the private sector … we are going through a cultural adjustment.”
Hayden also told attendees that the British are much more tolerant of security agencies than Americans, who are demanding increased transparency in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks which sparked a national conversation about surveillance.
“You as a population are far more tolerant of aggressive action on the part of your intelligence services than we are in the United States,” he said.
