A LOOMING APPARITION

By Bill Piekney

The president’s confounding decision to dismiss General Timothy Haugh and his civilian deputy, Wendy Noble, as well as a half dozen other seniors on the National Security Council, has rightfully rattled the country’s national security experts, lawmakers, and senior military officers. Everyone is puzzled and the only working explanation is that Mr. Trump’s palace whisperer, Laura Loomer, put him up to it by making accusations of disloyalty.

The peculiarity of one of these firings, that of General Haugh, is that he is perfect in every way for the job. Highly capable, deeply respected, and the job itself is one of immense importance and sensitivity. The director of NSA and Cyber Command truly lies at the heart of our country’s ability to defend itself and to counter hostile activity through computer operations. Nestled away at the sprawling National Security Agency in Maryland, Haugh was quietly doing work that only a handful of Americans understand or can fully appreciate.

So, quite apart from the absurdity that personal loyalty should in any way be a dominant factor in filling such critical positions as that of General Haugh, Ms. Loomer is swimmingly out of it; she is not on the government payroll, not a member in good standing of any legitimate political party, does not lead a nongovernmental organization, is not an academic, subscribes to idiotic conspiracy theories, and she is not qualified by any stretch to give advice by virtue of having deep and longstanding friendships with great Americans.

Stop for a moment and consider: Trump inexplicably fired four female flag and general officers of outstanding achievement in a man’s world, yet he trusts and acts on the spacey insights of Ms. Loomer, whose information comes from unknowable, undocumented sources.

She is utterly wrong to make such recommendations.

Ms. Loomer’s apparitions recall the dark days of Trump 1.0 and his selection of callow John MacEntee, 29 at the time, as his personal guarantor of the loyalty of everyone from cabinet secretaries on down. MacEntee went from low level campaign staffer, unqualified, puerile and starry-eyed, to a dedicated, Stasi-like figure rooting out departmental disloyalists, exercising extraordinary power over the leadership machinery of the US Government. Ms. Loomer’s tickets that allow her to saunter into the Oval Office at will and throw around such political weight are as unsubstantiated and are unsettlingly reminiscent of Mr. MacEntee’s destructive history.

Now why a female Rasputin should be necessary to a president in a nation rich with men and women of widely recognized and remarkable range of experience in all forms of national security can only be explained in one way.

Mr. Trump is using Ms. Loomer as one of his many political fringe supporters to help screen everyone of power and influence in his administration. In the USG there are many thousands of extremely important people he has no idea are there, and, more important, far too many for him to be confident of them on his own. So, he feels it important to have at his disposal many MacEntees to spy on them and ensure their reliability.

He obviously only wants those seniors in his government who he is sure will accept and act on any order or decision he might deliver, regardless of the questionable propriety or morality that ight be involved.

The last thing Mr. Trump wants: professional, thoughtful and independent input from wise advisors based on their experience gained from years of managing delicate and not-so-delicate crises and conflict. People, in other words, who might attempt to manipulate his behavior as he plows, impulsively, his own narrow trough through a quarter millennium of American history and the artfully constructed harmony of what was today’s Western world.

But even if this assessment from afar begs to be close to the final truth, there is the ultimate question that hangs over the nation as Damocles’ sword: what things will Mr. Trump be likely to ask one day of his newly hired and eager to please subordinates, the kind of request that would be rightfully expected to raise objections from men and women of principle, faithful to what America stands for?

Bill Piekney served 4 years in the US Navy, 30 years with the CIA retiring as a Senior Operations Executive, and 5 years as a senior consultant at ODNI, International Consultant in Intelligence and National Security. He is a member of The Steady State, an organization of former national security officials.