Have you ever woken in the morning steeped in a sense of nonspecific dread? It’s undefined, and even though you have no idea what it’s about, it’s palpable. You recognize that it’s just a feeling, not a fact, yet the heaviness presses. You scan the night’s memories for a bad dream… nothing in jackboots chased you through a field, the mean girls didn’t take your coat. With dreams coming up empty, you look around. Did your psyche manage to bury something horrific, just to give you the mercy of sleep? Did yesterday bring a terminal illness diagnosis? An IRS audit? No. And yet. That foreboding sense, ominous and ill-defined, persists. Writing days don’t always go as planned That’s how I woke up one day last week: Marinating in apprehension worthy of a straightjacket. It was a planned writing day, and I had it all laid out: coffee, pickleball, then up to the rooftop sofa to write under a tattered pergola. The morning dreads smashed that. Scanning for the source of what woke me up scared for the world, I remembered. Of course. It was something I stupidly read right before bed the night before. It was a deep dive on Trump’s total dismantling of U.S. counterintelligence and counterterrorism efforts. Trump has systematically removed U.S. counterterrorism and counterintelligence assets, the professionals tracking communications and operations of adversarial governments and terrorist cells planning bombs, manipulating politics, and sowing dangerous division in the U.S., and reassigned them instead to monitor Trump’s domestic political adversaries. Trump gutted foreign risk monitoring functions under the DOJ, the FBI, and DHS, while deliberately elevating terrorism risks those divisions were created to track. The threat environment from Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Mexico, and Cuba is now at an all-time high, and we have a weakened detectionsystem in place.