THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The Tangerine Shitgibbon has declared that his presidency will not begin until the Monday after he is sworn in. Some say this is because he is a lazy dumb fuck who would rather party but the truth is he has no functioning team to work with yet. And the most disturbingly disfunctional team is in the area of National Security.

The Obama administration has written 275 briefing papers for the incoming Trump administration: nearly 1,000 pages of classified material on North Korea’s nuclear program, the military campaign against the Islamic State, tensions in the South China Sea, and every other kind of threat the new team could face in its first weeks in office.

Nobody in the current administration knows whether anyone in the next has read any of it.

Less than three days before President Obama turns the keys to the White House, and the nuclear codes, over to President-elect Donald J. Trump, Mr. Trump’s transition staff has barely engaged with the National Security Council below the most senior levels. His designated national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, has met four times with his Obama counterpart, Susan E. Rice, most recently on Tuesday afternoon.

But the chronic upheaval in Mr. Trump’s transition, a delay in appointing senior National Security Council staff members, and a dearth of people with security clearances have deprived the Trump team of weeks of prep work on some of the most complex national security issues facing the country.

“We really wanted to make sure there was nothing a new team needed to know that we hadn’t told them,” Ms. Rice said in an interview. “It took them more time than we expected for them to be ready to engage with us.” Now, she added, “we’re racing to make up lost time.”

In a statement, Mr. Flynn said, “Members of our incoming team have held extensive meetings with their N.S.C. counterparts.” He thanked Ms. Rice for her “cooperation and assistance.” Last week, the two engaged in a public display of harmony, shaking hands at a “pass the baton” conference sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace.

Still, officials from both the Obama and Trump teams acknowledged that the transition had been rocky, in no small part because Mr. Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton caught both the outgoing and incoming administrations so completely by surprise. Had Mrs. Clinton won, her staff planned to place a transition team in the N.S.C. within a couple of days.

In Mr. Trump’s case, the first contact with the National Security Council did not come until Nov. 22, two weeks after Election Day. That delay was caused by the purge of the original transition team led by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. Among those swept out was Matthew Freedman, who had been chosen to run the N.S.C. transition but quickly came under scrutiny because of his foreign lobbying ties. Mr. Freedman’s replacement, Marshall Billingslea, a former Pentagon and State Department official, arrived in the West Wing with six people, only two of whom had security clearances.

Trump's team may nnot have read those national security transition papers, but it is a safe bet that Putin has and will keep his puppy up to speed on what he nedds to know and do.