The Trump administration has proven "alarmingly simple" for foreign intelligence services to penetrate during President Donald Trump's second term, according to Harvard Kennedy School espionage expert Calder Walton, who warns that the resulting vulnerability is directly empowering one of America's greatest adversaries. Walton, director of research at the Harvard Kennedy School's Applied History Project and author of the 2023 book Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, has spent decades studying how great powers use intelligence operations to gain strategic advantage.

Writing in the iPaper on Monday, Walton stated: "Trump is undoubtedly targeted by more foreign intelligence agencies than any previous US president. His unpredictable decision-making, from tariffs to his war with Iran, has left foreign spy chiefs – both friendly and hostile – scrambling to understand his thinking. One can imagine it is a busy time for psychological profilers in Paris and Tokyo, to say nothing of Moscow and Beijing."

Walton, a historian of intelligence, notes that the core purpose of espionage is to gain a decision-making advantage — and the Trump administration has made that task "alarmingly simple for enemies and allies alike." US counterintelligence agencies have publicly identified China as their top strategic priority, with FBI Director Christopher Wray stating in recent years that Beijing's intelligence operations against the United States are unmatched in scale by any other adversary.

Lax Personal Security

Among the vulnerabilities Walton identifies is Trump's personal communications. "Trump's mobile phone number, for example, is widely known among the Washington press corps," Walton writes. "Journalists have managed to get interviews with him by simply cold-calling. One can only imagine how many foreign spies are also listening in to his phone conversations." Concerns about the security of presidential mobile communications are not unprecedented: during Trump's first term, reports documented his routine use of personal cell phones despite warnings from intelligence officials, a practice that echoed similar concerns raised during the Obama administration.

He also points to the security environment at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which he describes as notoriously weak. "Any foreign intelligence service worth its name will have recruited agents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where security is known to be pathetic. At the end of his first term, Trump had classified documents lying around in one of his bathrooms." The classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago became the subject of a federal criminal investigation and indictment, underscoring the tangible stakes of the security lapses Walton describes.

Unqualified Appointments

Walton further argues that key intelligence and national security appointments under Trump have compounded the problem. The posts he highlights — Secretary of Defense, FBI Director, and Director of National Intelligence — collectively oversee the entire US intelligence apparatus and counterintelligence posture, meaning that weaknesses at the top cascade through the agencies responsible for detecting and thwarting foreign espionage.

"Trump's Secretary of Defence (now renamed Secretary of War), Pete Hegseth, is the least qualified holder of that office," Walton writes. "A former Fox News presenter who was forced to deny claims of sexual assault, intoxication at work and mismanaging two veteran organizations when they were raised by the Senate in his confirmation hearing, Hegseth is apparently so out of his depth that he has instigated prayer groups at the Pentagon."

Regarding FBI Director Kash Patel, Walton writes: "A former podcaster and conspiracy theorist, Patel has waged a vendetta against the 'deep state,' claiming it is undermining Trump. Patel's tenure at the FBI has been beset by reported problems: he had to deny allegations of excessive drinking and absences from work during a Senate hearing in May."

"The clown show continues," Walton adds. "Trump's first director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was not only incompetent but positively dangerous. Gabbard has regurgitated Kremlin talking points and whispered favourable things about former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. After Gabbard's resignation in June, Trump's nominee for DNI, Jay Clayton, gave a pantomime performance in the Senate where he refused to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election."

Election Meddling Claims

Walton contends that loyalty to Trump's belief that he did not lose the 2020 election has become the sole qualification for these appointments. Last month, Trump took to primetime television to share intelligence documents he claimed proved Chinese electoral interference.

"In fact," Walton writes, "the intelligence assessments he declassified show nothing of the kind. The centrepiece of Trump's evidence was that China had obtained voter records of 220 million US voters. In reality, US voter records are widely available, and Trump produced no evidence that China interfered with votes."

Walton characterizes these allegations as part of a broader strategy to preemptively contest the November election results in the event of a Republican defeat.

"Ironically," he notes, "one of the declassified US intelligence assessments says that Russia – not China – was seeking to undermine public confidence in the 2020 election. Trump is acutely sensitive about Russian election meddling after the 2016 US presidential election, when he sought and welcomed Kremlin support. Admitting Russian interference in that election would, in Trump's mind, undermine the legitimacy of his presidency." The US Intelligence Community's 2017 assessment concluding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election — a finding affirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee's multi-year bipartisan investigation — has been a persistent point of tension between Trump and his own intelligence agencies.

China Identified as Principal Beneficiary

Walton draws a stark conclusion about the global consequences of these dynamics.

"Trump's conspiracy theories about the election and his war with Iran are destroying American soft power," he writes. "The greatest beneficiary of Trump's chaotic second term is China. By contrast to the White House, China is able to present itself as a stable and sober player on the world stage. Trump's policies are doing more damage to American interests than any hostile foreign intelligence operations could do. The President is Moscow and Beijing's greatest asset."