It can always get worse. There’s no reason to think that President Donald Trump will stop at causing chaos in world trade and stock markets, the American executive branch, the legal profession and public health. He’s also well on the way to making America less safe under the most immediate definition: by undermining his own national-security staff, and thereby endangering the nation’s security.

In recent days, the White House has been orchestrating what you might call a Week of the Long Knives among the ranks of people who are normally expected to advise the president on foreign threats. More than half a dozen top counselors have already been let go, and others are at risk. In the latest neologism coined for this White House, they have been “Loomered.”

The word comes from the eponymous Laura Loomer. She calls herself an “investigative journalist” but is nothing of the sort. Having botched two runs for Congress, she’s instead a failed politician better known for her sycophantism toward Trump and her conspiracy theories, which are outlandish even by MAGA standards. In that way, she represents a rising demographic of more-or-less loony right-wing influencers who are famous just for being famous — and for being able to get near the president.

She had his ear again last week in a meeting in the Oval Office, where, like a Spanish Inquisitor of the TikTok age, she accused a raft of national-security experts of disloyalty toward Trump, prompting the president to have them fired. Her evidence was circumstantial at best.

She went after General Timothy Haugh, the respected head of the National Security Agency and of U.S. Cyber Command. Her reason was that Haugh had been recommended by General Mark Milley, whom Trump and Loomer consider a traitor for the spine he showed while advising Trump as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the president’s first term. Haugh’s deputy was dismissed because she was close to a former spymaster who has criticized Trump. And so on.

You’d think that Michael Waltz, the national security advisor, would have interrupted this witch trial, throwing Loomer out of the meeting. But Waltz is in no position to throw anybody out of anything, because he must fear instead that he’s next to get the boot.

It was Waltz who made the administration look amateurish and unprofessional by accidentally adding a journalist to a chat on the messaging app Signal, where Trump’s foreign-policy lieutenants were discussing air strikes on the Houthis in Yemen. It was subsequently reported that Waltz ran many such Signal threads, all of which America’s enemies would have loved to eavesdrop on. His team also used private Gmail accounts for some emails.

Trump apparently weighed firing Waltz but desisted, wanting to avoid the impression of White House dysfunction that dogged him in his first term. If so, inviting Loomer as an ad hoc personnel director doesn’t exactly serve that purpose.

Waltz, moreover, was weak in his role even before the Loomering and Signaling. He used to represent the traditional and more hawkish wing of the Republican party, which strives to achieve Ronald Reagan’s vision of “peace through strength” by maintaining American primacy and global deterrence. Like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he used to speak with moral and strategic clarity about the aggression of Russia under Vladimir Putin, say — until he started auditioning to work for Trump.

But Waltz has been foiled by the foreign-policy culture that now dominates the MAGA movement, which is sometimes called restraint but is close to isolationism. The restrainers in the administration are the ones heaping scorn on the NATO alliance and Ukraine, say, while finding surprisingly kind words for Putin. They include the high-profile vice president, JD Vance, and the low-profile but influential personnel manager, Sergio Gor, who has blocked several of Waltz’s staff preferences.

What, then, do these developments portend for the grand strategy of the world’s preeminent military power? They suggest that cultivating and rewarding expertise and integrity inside the White House — “speaking truth to power” — are out, while passing loyalty tests and expending energy on internal politics are in.

“Peace through strength” was apparently no more than a campaign slogan for Trump, whose actual foreign policy will feature chaotic, fitful and incoherent displays of power for its own sake (as when bombing the Houthis), paired with a more general retreat from America’s old role as a stabilizer in crisis regions.

More simply, the literal and metaphorical loomering of U.S. national security is also sucking the brain out of American foreign policy, just as foreign threats — emanating in General Haugh’s former domain of cyberspace or anywhere — are metastasizing. America’s adversaries, from Moscow to Beijing or Pyongyang, must be delighted.

So is Laura Loomer, no doubt. She recently launched Loomered Strategies, a firm doing opposition research and vetting. The president, for his part, seems unconcerned about the current direction, which leads away from peace and toward chaos, away from strength and toward weakness.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

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