President Trump has accused US intelligence agencies of being "naive" and suggested that some of his top officials need to "go back to school".
The President's intervention followed a day of testimony on Capitol Hill in which the Director of National Intelligence and the head of the CIA openly disagreed with the President's viewpoints on Iran, Syria, and the threat posed by illegal immigration from Latin America.
Our Washington Correspondent Simon Marks reports.
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It can't be easy willingly agreeing to serve in President Donald Trump's inner circle….particularly when you know that on a whole variety of international issues….he's talking rubbish.
So, if you're one of the President's top intelligence officials…many of whom have spent a life-time steeped in foreign and defense policy…..it must be especially galling to wake up to a Presidential tweet coming from a man with no background in global affairs who accuses you of being "passive and naive" and even of being "wrong".
That's the fate that has befallen the Director of the CIA Gina Haspel and five other top officials who had the temerity yesterday to tell the truth in Congressional testimony.
In Director Haspel's case she was talking about Iran.
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In compliance with the nuclear deal that the US is no longer party to because according to President Trump they were not in compliance.
And then there's North Korea.
President Trump says Pyongyang and its weapons of mass destruction no longer poses a nuclear threat to the world and is disarming.
His Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats disagrees.
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He disagreed too on the President's contention that in Syria the forces of Islamic State have "been defeated and defeated badly".
According to the President's own Director of National Intelligence, that's not really true.
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Rubbing salt into the wound….the leader of President Trump's Republican Party in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.
He took to the floor of the Senate to propose legislation that would actually block his own President from withdrawing US troops from Syria and Afghanistan as Donald Trump has proposed.
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The Republican pushback against President Trump is taking many forms.
The "Worldwide Threat Assessment" presented by his intelligence chiefs yesterday doesn't mention illegal immigration across America's southern border until page 41 of 42 page document….hardly an endorsement of the President's view that it's the top security crisis.
Then there are the restive Republicans in the countryside.
A new ABC News poll shows 32 per cent of them - one in three - do not want Donald Trump to be the Republican Party's Presidential candidate in 2020….boosting the likelihood that he'll face a challenge for the Party's nomination.
And then there's the weather.
It is perishingly cold in much of the United States, with Chicago scoring lower temperatures than Antarctica.
President Trump used the news to launch a new attack on the concept of global warming.
And then his own weather department - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - took to Twitter to disagree with him,
"Winter storms", its scientists wrote, "don't prove that global warming isn't happening".
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