There’s a funny clip circulating on social media in which the American comedian John Mulaney likens the Trump presidency to a horse loose in a hospital. “It’s never happened before,” he says in a tone of demented despair. “No one knows what the horse is gonna do next, least of all the horse. He’s never been in a hospital. He’s as confused as you are.”
Ok, it’s not very funny: it’s too near the knuckle. But it does come close to capturing the terrifying absurdity of the lives we’re now all condemned to living—wondering on an hourly basis what new madness the 47th president will unleash on the world.
The latest irrational nightmare is the bizarre imposition of a system of protectionism, which may, for all we know, have been calculated by ChatGPT. It feels like a gratuitous act of self-harm by a man whose obsession with tariffs is matched only by his ignorance of how they work.
But that Rose Garden announcement rather eclipsed an even more deranged story which is worth revisiting for what it tells us about our current predicament. If you missed it, let me introduce you to one of the crazier acolytes in Trump’s court, one Laura Loomer. It seems to me that Loomer has—how can one put it delicately?—a tenuous grasp on reality.
She once promoted claims on X that 9/11 was an “inside job”. She falsely suggested that the 2018 school shootings in Parkland, Florida and Santa Fe, Texas, were staged and involved “crisis actors.” You get the drift? She believed the “deep state” manipulated the weather to disrupt the Iowa caucuses in 2024. She promoted the baseless claim—later repeated by Trump—that Haitians were eating cats in Springfield, Ohio. She also asserted that, were Kamala Harris to win the election, the “White House will smell like curry.”
Permanently banned from Twitter in November 2018 for hate speech, she chained herself to the organisation’s HQ wearing a yellow star of the sort that Jews were compelled in Nazi Germany. Needless to say, Musk invited her back in, and she now has a following of around 1.6m.
She uses her platform to attack [vb: “loomer”] anyone she perceives as being hostile or disloyal to Trump and has occasional run-ins with the very nearly equally barmy Republican Representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has called Loomer “appalling and extremely racist… Her outright lies, instability and manic toxicity have no place in Maga.”
There’s much more of this, but perhaps you have got the point. In no rational world would any US president go within a million miles of someone like Loomer, far less invite her to the White House and listen to her advice.
And yet he did. In the most recent fireside chat between them, Loomer is reported by the New York Times (citing eight sources) to have warned Trump that six of the nation’s security officials, including General Timothy Haugh, the chief of the National Security Agency (NSA), were less than loyal. The following day, they were fired, although Trump denies that Loomer had anything to do with the dismissals. There’s a horse loose in the hospital.
Loomer promptly took to X to promise she would “out” more victims in future. In a long, rambling post, she claimed: “There are a lot of bad actors embedded all over the FBI, DOJ, NSC, NSA, DOD, and State Department. It’s going to take time to hunt these people down, publicly expose them and have them fired and removed from their positions… Hopefully, they face consequences for their actions.”
No evidence has been promoted that any of the six fired officials had done anything wrong. Three things follow from this bizarre episode. One is a further confirmation that membership of Trump’s closest circle is now limited only to those who can be relied on for loyalty. Talent, sanity, expertise, knowledge, experience, wisdom, courage, humanity—none of these appear to count for anything. The Oval Office has become a small, sound-proofed echo chamber for the craven.
The second lesson is that, as far as any outsider can tell, this claustrophobic bubble is increasingly detached from any form of reality. Trump appears to have relied on a deluded conspiracy theorist for advice on national security. Read that sentence again: Trump appears to have relied on a deluded conspiracy theorist for advice on national security. Reflect on what it means that a loopy social media influencer has carried more weight with the president than a four-star general.
Finally, consider what this means for the future of one of the world’s most powerful intelligence operations. Cast your mind back to the first interview the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave in June 2013 when he told of his unease at the panoptic capabilities he had as a mere 28-year-old analyst.
“The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone,” he told the Guardian reporters who had flown to Hong Kong to meet him. “It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system, and it filters them, and it analyses them, and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time, simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends.”
“Not all analysts have the ability to target everything, but, sitting at my desk, I certainly have the authority to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge—to even the president if I had a personal email.”
At the time, some wise old intelligence hands saw no problem with any of this because of the guardrails in place to ensure this astonishingly intrusive capability would never be misused—checks and balances and all that. I wonder what they think now that Trump has bulldozed the guardrails and torched the supposed checks and balances.
I recently asked John Sawers, former head of MI6, what he thought of the possibility of the intelligence machinery falling into an authoritarian despot’s hands. He made it clear that he was alarmed by some of the appointments Trump had made in security and law enforcement—and that was before he summarily sacked the chief of the NSA.
He pointed to parts of Europe where the security service was already “basically at the call of elected leaders” and went so far as to question whether the Five Eyes intelligence sharing system that includes the UK could survive “Trump’s concept of unified executive authority where everything within the system is visible to, and controlled from, the top.”
In his second term, Donald Trump combines a form of paranoia with a strong desire for revenge against anyone he considers to have slighted him or to stand in his way. And now he reportedly takes advice on national security from fruitcakes and could have his hands on the ability to spy on anyone he wants.
There’s a horse loose in the hospital, and no one knows what to do about it.
