Former CIA Director John Brennan told an MSNBC host on Monday that he believes Iran more than he believes the President of the United States. The White House fired back Tuesday, calling the remark "shameful" and a product of "Trump Derangement Syndrome."
Brennan appeared on MS NOW, where host Symone Sanders asked him about what could be happening in negotiations between Washington and Tehran. Sanders herself expressed caution, noting she was "wary of taking the word of Iran … an authoritarian regime that's known to lie." Brennan went further, but in the opposite direction that anyone with a security clearance should go.
"Well, I tend to believe Iran more than I do Donald Trump."
That's a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency choosing the word of a hostile foreign regime over his own country's commander-in-chief. On cable television. Without hesitation.
The administration did not let the remark pass quietly. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told the New York Post:
"Believing a terrorist regime that has chanted 'Death to America' for decades over the United States of America is shameful and Trump Derangement Syndrome at work."
White House aide Patrick Adams was more direct on X:
"Barack Obama's disgraced CIA Director John Brennan backs the word of Iranian regime terrorists over the United States of America."
The timing makes the comment even more striking. On Tuesday, the Trump administration sent Iran a 15-point plan aimed at ending the war. President Trump has said Iran has already agreed to the biggest point: ending its nuclear program. The Iranian regime has denied it is talking to the Trump administration, but serious diplomatic engagement is underway, and the administration is pursuing it with purpose.
Brennan, rather than acknowledging any of that, cast doubt on Trump's claim that negotiations were underway, accused Trump of "flailing," and suggested the President was unlikely to negotiate with "anybody speaking authoritatively right now on behalf of the Iranian government."
This is not a man who misspoke. This is a man with a record.
Brennan was one of the 51 ex-intelligence officials who claimed in an infamous letter that The Post's bombshell scoop on Hunter Biden's laptop emails was part of a "Russian information operation." That letter was deployed as a political weapon weeks before a presidential election. The laptop was real. The story was real. The letter was disinformation dressed in the authority of intelligence credentials.
Brennan is also reportedly under criminal investigation for his alleged role in the "treasonous conspiracy" to peddle claims that Trump's campaign colluded with the Russian government ahead of the 2016 presidential election. That narrative consumed years of American political life, paralyzed an administration, and ultimately collapsed under its own weight.
So when Brennan now says he trusts Tehran more than the sitting president, the question isn't whether to take him seriously. It's why anyone still puts him on television at all.
Conservative communicator Steve Guest called it "beyond parody," adding that "Obama's Communist CIA Director John Brennan on MS NOW runs cover for the world's leading sponsor of terror." Heritage Foundation visiting fellow Steven Bucci offered a blunter verdict: "No one (in their right mind) believes Brennan about anything."
One X user captured the irony perfectly:
"If John Brennan says he doesn't trust Trump, that actually makes me want to trust Trump!"
Something is clarifying about moments like this. The left's foreign policy establishment has spent years insisting it holds the moral high ground on national security. They claim expertise. They claim sobriety. They claim to be the adults in the room.
And then one of their most prominent voices goes on television and sides with a regime that has chanted "Death to America" for decades, that funds proxy wars across the Middle East, and that has been the leading state sponsor of terrorism for a generation. Not because the facts compelled him. Because his opposition to one man overrides everything else.
That's what Trump Derangement Syndrome looks like at the highest levels of the former intelligence community. It doesn't manifest as garden-variety partisanship. It manifests as a willingness to grant moral credibility to a hostile theocracy over your own government because the wrong person sits in the Oval Office.
Sanders, to her limited credit, at least acknowledged that Iran lies. Brennan couldn't even manage that. The man once entrusted with America's most sensitive intelligence operations now publicly vouches for the credibility of a regime that executes dissidents and enriches uranium in underground bunkers.
The Trump administration is actively negotiating, sending concrete proposals, and pressing for results. Brennan's contribution is to undermine those efforts from a cable news set.
This is who the former intelligence establishment has become. Not watchdogs. Not analysts. Partisans so consumed by opposition that they will stand with America's enemies before they stand with its elected president.
The mask didn't slip. Brennan took it off himself.
