The President’s Good News Diet.
What’s that Looming over the horizon?
I live far from America, yet that country across the seas and the man who runs it have, over the past couple of years, drawn me into their orbit. I mean, here’s a guy who somehow landed the top job in the world, and when he did, he surrounded himself with some of the weirdest, crookedest, and most incompetent advisers imaginable.
Do you think he found them on LinkedIn?
When I worked at Ogilvy’s, the founder, David Ogilvy, taught me a valuable lesson. “If you surround yourself with people who are better than you, you will become a giant. Surround yourself with people who are less than you, and you will become a dwarf.”
Has anyone out there noticed that Donald Trump is shrinking?
One thing I do know is that a functioning organism needs two things to survive: a way of taking the world in and a way of putting itself back out into it, a bit like a root system and a flower.
The President of the United States has decided to outsource both of these functions to a couple of dim-witted freelancers!
The candidates he chose are two women carrying out very important work, because between them they have built something genuinely new in the history of statecraft:
America now has a President who neither reads nor speaks for himself, but is instead curated at one end and deployed at the other, like a man who has hired one person to chew his food and another to feed him a diet of good-news slop.
Perhaps it’s best to start with the input, as it’s the gentler of the two horrors.
Her name is Natalie Harp, and she follows Donald Trump around, carrying a portable printer and a battery pack, and printing out kind and uplifting messages for him. True story!
These are primarily notes that flatter him. Polls showing him leading by a fair margin or gushing Hannity headlines. The tweets, the segments, the stray paragraphs of praise are diligently printed, stacked, fastened with gold paper clips (I kid you not), and placed in the president's hands as if she were handing him communion wafers.
She has her own chair outside the Oval Office.
Apparently, she loves him as much as his wife and children do, which is either the most embarrassing thing ever said by an office intern or the single most alarming sentence in modern American governance.
I cannot, in good grace, decide which, so I'm going to leave it there and let it work on you the way it's working on me.
The part that actually matters is the man does not read the news. He reads her. Every fact that reaches him has already passed through the hands of a human being whose sole purpose is to keep him "in a really good mood." What does that say?
To me, it suggests the President of the United States receives a version of reality that has been pre-chewed in case he chokes on a bad headline. There is now a printer running non-stop, manufacturing a fictitious country in which nothing has gone wrong, and feeding it directly into the mind of the person meant to be running the real one.
Now it’s time to discuss the output.
If Harp is the filter that decides what gets in, Laura Loomer is the conduit through which what leaks out. Like Harp, nobody appears to be filtering her at all.
Who the F&*k is Laura Loomer?
Laura Loomer holds no title. The White House insists she holds no title, as if someone in the family were to say that the stray cat in the attic is not a pet. Yet this mischievous pet has the power to have officials removed from the National Security Council after raising "concerns" in the Oval Office.
She has also taken credit for a pause in humanitarian visas (isn’t she a lovable darling)? If that wasn’t enough, in July she was in a bomb shelter in Ukraine, sitting opposite President Zelenskyy. She was not there as a journalist filing a story, nor as a diplomat. She was there as an influencer with 1.7 million followers and a direct line to the president.
They sent her, or rather did not officially send her, because no one sends her anywhere; she simply arrives as an influencer. The reports of that meeting will no doubt travel back through channels no one has ever acknowledged directly to the Oval Office.
So, just to recap, a President receives news of the world from a woman who hands him a flattering diorama and then projects himself into the world through a second woman with no job description, no oversight, and an open channel to foreign heads of state.
Nothing gets in unfiltered. Nothing goes out unsupervised. He is insulated from reality at both ends of the pipe. The two women managing that insulation answer to no process anyone can point to, only to him. This is closer to devotion than to employment.
For some reason, I keep musing on the gold paperclips holding the stack of good news together. The woman obviously cares about her job, ensuring the stack looks nice, which is unsettling. What makes it unsettling is that this care, misapplied at this scale, doesn't resemble malice; it’s just making sure the most powerful man in the world never has a bad afternoon.
While several thousand miles away, another woman is in a bunker, conducting America's foreign policy unpaid, unaccountable, and entirely reliant on the ‘vibes.’
Remember when Americans used to worry about who whispers in the President's ear? Well, someone somewhere should be worried.
Paul v Walters is the author of several novels and an anthology of short stories and is fortunate enough to live on the island of Bali. His latest work, RITUAL, was recently launched at the Ubud International Readers and Writers Festival.
