Opinion

Trump is ‘perfectly reasonable’: Former CIA director

A senior intelligence expert who headed up the CIA during the Clinton administration recommends people relax their opinions of President-elect Donald Trump.

“I think a lot of people’s concerns about some of the things he’s said, probably they have to relax and give him a chance to get going here in this new and very big job,” says James Woolsey, who was CIA director in the early 1990s and served as Under Secretary of the Navy for the Jimmy Carter administration.

He knows what he’s talking about too. Woolsey served as an adviser on nuclear and strategic issues for the Republican candidate’s campaign. He got to know Trump’s personality and style through recent one-on-one meetings and telephone conversations.

“I think his style is that he is perfectly reasonable and easy to talk to in small groups and when he’s one-on-one,” Woolsey told the Sun in an exclusive interview. “When he gets behind a podium and particularly if he’s in a stadium full of 30,000 young people cheering him, he basically performs and he has what in vaudeville is called shtick.”

He points out that some of Trump’s more criticized statements are likely to be altered: “Like how the Muslim immigration issue has been reassessed to instead mean looking at people from that part of the world with a thorough vetting system.”

Woolsey has recently been vocal about protecting the North American electricity grid from an electromagnetic pulse attack as well as critiquing the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration.