NSA and Five Eyes Get Loomered

Trump’s Deep State purge accelerates, but MAGA’s real target is the Western intelligence alliance -- who is really behind it?

Last week was an unprecedented rollercoaster for American national security. Thursday brought a purge of the National Security Council, with several staffers, some of them senior, getting abruptly fired. This represented significant churn for the NSC, just ten weeks into the second Trump administration.

The cloud of scandal was hanging over the NSC, especially its boss, Mike Waltz, since press exposure of the misuse of Signal, the encrypted messaging app, by White House senior national security officials. Waltz had implausibly invited star liberal journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, a longtime Trump nemesis, into this elite chat. Worse, Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth then proceeded to share what appeared to be highly classified defense and intelligence information, which Goldberg reported to the world after Trump’s Intelligence Community leadership stated that no classified information was contained in that Signal group chat.

This was a needless debacle for Trump 2.0, a two-day scandal that was mishandled into a week-long ordeal, which Waltz miraculously survived, despite the president’s anger and Waltz’s own questionable online habits. The price for the disgraced Waltz keeping his job was his participation in the theatrical mass purge of the NSC that followed. The oddest aspect to this strange turn of events in the White House was the central role played by Laura Loomer, the crank-right MAGA superfan and conspiracy monger. Loomer is so far beyond the GOP pale that last year Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who’s nobody’s idea of a moderate, denounced Loomer for her “rhetoric and hateful tone” while the Congresswoman declared that Loomer’s unhinged comments represent “a huge problem. And that doesn’t represent MAGA as a whole.”