One of comedy’s greatest stock characters is the guy who’s his own worst enemy. You know the type: Kramer from Seinfeld; Michael Scott from The Office; the fanatical Wile E. Coyote who stalks the desert in perpetual and fruitless pursuit of his nemesis, the Road Runner. Each one embodies the archetype of the self-sabotaging schemer, destined to have their grand and elaborate plans dashed by a potent combination of hubris, ambition, and pure incompetence.
I used to think that this character was a staple of fiction because he was too ridiculous to exist in real life — but that was before I became aware of Laura Loomer. Loomer is a 31-year-old self-described “investigative journalist” who rose to a narrow sort of fame as the architect of political stunts that combine the ethos of Project Veritas with the subtle elegance of MTV’s Jackass. Her first foray into the genre was a video in which the then-21-year-old Loomer secretly recorded herself asking authorities at her university for help forming a student organisation in support of ISIS.
The video itself caused little stir, because it wasn’t actually all that exciting — but it did get Loomer suspended and charged with a third-degree felony for recording someone without his consent, which is pretty much typical of her oeuvre.
Over the years, Loomer has periodically broken into the mainstream news cycle with some stunt which is ostensibly meant to own the libs, but which so invariably backfires that it’s hard to believe she isn’t doing it on purpose. Like any self-respecting buffoon, Loomer’s various attempts at political engagement — from storming the stage of a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, to handcuffing herself to the door of Twitter’s headquarters, to her two failed runs for electoral office — tend to draw less attention to her cause, whatever it is, than to Loomer herself, squawking with righteous indignation as she’s escorted out by security guards.
The thing is, this was fine. You might not like Loomer (indeed, most people — even those on her side — seem not to be fans), but like the Wile E. Coyotes and Cosmo Kramers of the world, she was doing her part to keep the cultural ecosystem in balance, even if it was just by acting as a living signpost for the place where absurdity tips over into irrelevance. It takes all kinds to make a world, after all, including the buffoons — who are harmless enough, as long as they keep to the sidelines, where their antics may make for an entertaining spectacle but they can’t hurt anybody but themselves. In the circus of American politics, people like Loomer were understood as one of those novelty acts you’d find in a dilapidated tent furthest from the midway, hanging out in between the guy who bites the head off a live bat and the off-duty clowns smoking cigarettes in their underwear.
At least, that was the understanding. But lately, one can’t help noticing that Loomer seems to be getting awfully close to the political mainstage, and awfully cosy with some of its biggest players. Loomer has not only been the subject of approving commentary by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on X, where she has upwards of a million followers, but Donald Trump himself welcomed her to the White House earlier this month — not just as a supporter, but as an adviser. Loomer reportedly waltzed into the Oval Office bearing a list of National Security Council members who she identified as insufficiently loyal to the President; some days later, several of those same officials were fired.
Trump claimed that the proximity of these two events was a coincidence, which seems unlikely, but also doesn’t really matter. The extent of Loomer’s influence is for other people to debate; what’s inarguable is that she has been an unwavering supporter of Trump’s political agenda for over a decade, and that for whatever reason (but probably that one), he likes having her around. And in this, Loomer’s White House welcome is also emblematic of a broader feature of the second Trump administration, which lately seems to double as a jobs programme for the kind of troublesome person whose antisocial tendencies would ordinarily disqualify them from working at a Cinnabon, let alone in a position of government authority.
Consider former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who is currently serving as the Secretary of Defense despite allegations of sexual assault and a documented history of problematic day-drinking. His own mother even called him “despicable”. Or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who went from conspiracy theorising about vaccines and leaving bear carcasses in public parks to heading the Department of Health and Human Services. Consider the Department of Government Efficiency, run by an intemperate billionaire whose hobbies include space exploration, internet trolling, and impregnating his female followers for sport — or the official White House X account, which currently appears to be run by a 12-year-old edgelord who someone hired directly from the bowels of 4Chan.
Some of this is not new. Trump has always attracted a coterie of loyalists as ridiculous as they are devoted, from Rudy Giuliani to Sidney Powell to that guy who sells pillows on infomercials. But the people who surround the POTUS now are something more than mere fans: this is a professional coalition of the aggressively undignified. Many of them hold positions of authority within the Federal government; some of these no doubt have top-secret security clearances.
Most important, all of them occupy a position, official or otherwise, that was previously held by someone significantly more competent — and this is perhaps the biggest difference between Trump’s first and second terms. As chaotic as that first term was, it was at least somewhat mitigated by the comforting sense that the President’s advisors were serious people, even if the president himself was not, and that they would form a protective barrier between the country and its impulsive Commander in Chief.
Today, the serious people have left the building; in their place, the President has sent in the clowns. And even if you believe (as I do) that this is a problem but not a catastrophe — that the Constitution was designed to withstand precisely the sort of assault represented by someone like Trump, and as such will always be more powerful than any one tyrannical executive’s desire to subvert it — it is nevertheless true that things feel different. A White House full of sycophantic buffoons will necessarily lack the gravitas of one that is buffoon-free, and the downstream effects of this on the culture and discourse are already observable.
“Today, the serious people have left the building; in their place, the president has sent in the clowns.”
Clearly, not everyone is bothered by this. For Trump’s most fervent supporters, a world in which the official White House account tweets Studio Ghibli memes of deportees weeping in handcuffs is just another encouraging sign of the much-heralded vibe shift — even if one can’t help but notice that the only thing shifting is the proverbial face-stamping boot from Orwell’s 1984, from the Left’s foot to the Right’s. As such, those in favour of our new authority figures tend to respond to criticism with the same dismissive scorn as the most sanctimonious scolds of the woke era: we’re trying to change the world here, and you’re complaining about the tone? As the meme goes, what did you think Making America Great Again looked like? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
And yet the tone, the vibe, the fundamental dignity of the office, are all things that matter. And not only that: this is the one sphere in which the American president enjoys virtually limitless power — where he can hold court like a king. The Supreme Court may constrain Trump’s ability to make policy or issue orders, or a successor may reverse them. The culture, on the other hand, has no such guardrails for those politicians who are capable of corrupting it.
It’s unsettling to realise what this may portend for the next four years — and how much the workings of our government rely on the willingness of officials to honour not just the letter of the law, but all the unwritten social norms that signal politeness and the intention to play well with others. And while Congress can decide who gains admission to the president’s cabinet, it gets no say over who sits at his lunch table. Trump can fill the seats next to him with fools and flatterers; he can invite the Laura Loomers of the world to picnic on the White House lawn every weekend. He shouldn’t, of course. But he can. The uncomfortable truth is that the Constitution has nothing to say about decorum, except insofar as it enumerates the freedom of the American people, including the president, to be as indecorous as they want.
And while I’m not personally ready to panic about this, I also understand why some people are. Donald Trump may not be able to destroy the country, but he can definitely transform the milieu in which we conduct our national business for the worse; he can definitely drag the discourse down into a mire of vulgarity until the only people still willing to engage in politics are the ones who love to roll around in the mud as much as he does. American democracy is resilient. Our social norms, on the other hand, are only as durable as people’s willingness to sustain them — and once shattered, they aren’t easily replaced. And it is this, the replacement of propriety with coarse buffoonery, which I suspect will be the true legacy of the current president. I also suspect it will be a regrettably durable one.
