Former CIA director John Brennan on the State of the Nation

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: You know, I don’t like to ask you this question because some people might think it’s just way off into the weird zone. But given the increasing perhaps erratic behavior from inside the White House, given what the house speaker has said about the 25th Amendment, if you were the CIA official or the top intelligence official for another government and they asked you to assess right now the president of the United States of America, what would you tell your president?

JOHN BRENNAN, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Well, Christiane, I would say that Donald Trump has a natural proclivity even before he was felled by COVID and is taking these medications, a national tendency to be rather impulsive as well as, you know, reaction — reacting very quickly to events. And these medications and the COVID, I think, may intensify these types of inclinations on his part. So, I would be telling a foreign leader to be watchful for any type of erratic moves that Trump might make both domestically as well as internationally, particularly on the eve of an election that by most polls indicate that he’s going to go down in defeat. So, again, I would be looking for things that Trump might try to do to advance his prospects but that also might provide opportunities for foreign actors to take advantage of the disruption and preoccupation that Trump has right now on his health and the campaign.

AMANPOUR: Have you, in your experience, known of an acting sitting world leader who is ill with a disease called COVID in this case and who is on medications? Now, we don’t know the full extent because we’re not getting the full report from the doctors. His own White House doctor says this and that, but we don’t know the full picture. What happens when the leader of a nation, particularly a superpower like the United States, is in this state?

BRENNAN: Well, I think it raises questions in the minds of our partners and allies as well as in the minds of our adversaries because clearly a president of the United States has enormous power over the U.S. government, the U.S. military and the rest of the institutions of governance. And so, if that person at the helm of our government or at the helm of any other government is not up to full capacity in terms of being able to react and respond in a timely and appropriate fashion, it does raise questions about the judgment that is going to be exercised by something coming out of the White House. And so, I do think that the world right now is watching, you know, what’s happening in the United States. I think everybody is hoping that Donald Trump is going to have a full and speedy recovery. But, again, his tendency to do things on his own terms by himself, this may be aggravated by the wide reports about the effects of steroids and other medications that he is taking.