The doomsday hysteria over Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence is out of control

Roger Stone’s sentencing came and went this week, and Donald Trump predictably didn’t pardon him, because pardoning a co-conspirator would represent a major risk. But the doomsday pundits had spent all this time promising that Trump would magically pardon Stone the minute his sentence came down, and now that it didn’t happen, they have to find some other scare tactic for keeping us tuned in. That brings us to Trump’s DNI scandal.

Here’s what actually happened. Donald Trump’s handpicked Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire dared to brief Congress about the latest attempts by the Kremlin to interfere in the 2020 election. Trump doesn’t want anyone talking about this, so he got mad and fired Maguire. This is highly corrupt and highly awful. But it also represents a mistake on Trump’s part, because he just gave a lot more attention to the Trump-Russia 2020 scandal, and because he doesn’t have anyone left to fill the job opening he just created.

Trump has installed Richard Grenell as Acting Director of National Intelligence. Yes, Grenell is a slime ball. But he’s also an idiot. He’s not going to come into the role with a magic wand and somehow magically rig the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. That kind of thing is difficult to pull off even when you are competent, and Grenell is anything but competent. He’s also not planning to keep the Acting DNI gig for long, as evidenced by the fact that he’s keeping his appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Germany, which requires him to be in Germany. As for permanently filling the DNI role, Trump is having such a hard time of it, he couldn’t even get his longtime loyalist Doug Collins to take the job.

So it’s a big scandal that Trump and Russia are once again trying to rig the election, but we already knew that was going to be a thing, and we’re fortunate that the details are already becoming public. That’s the beauty of knowing this time around that we have to watch for Trump-Russia antics. The pundits are doing us no favors by trying to convince us that an idiot like Richard Grenell is somehow going to successfully rig everything, and that Trump has already magically ensured he’ll win in 2020 no matter what, and that we should all just give up on the election. In fact the pundits are thoroughly betraying us by pushing this inaccurate fatalist hysteria.