Former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA), one of President Donald Trump's harshest center-right critics, had nothing but hair-on-fire warnings to offer MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace in response to reporting that the president forced out the National Security Agency's director on the advice of a conspiracy theorist.
"National security folks felt like the country could survive one Trump term, but not two, and that is a dire assessment of most folks I still talk to," said Wallace. "What does that mean that we can't survive two Trump terms?"
"I think the American public needs to know there's a reason that you're seeing what you're seeing right now, is that loyalty trumps competence," said Riggleman. "And when you have somebody like Laura Loomer, who's a 9/11 truther, an election denier, somebody who's a fantasist, and somebody who might, and I would humbly submit, need psychological help — when that person is actually assisting the president in decisions like [firing NSA Director] Tim Haugh, who I met when he was a colonel at Nellis Air Force Base, this is an incredible man."
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"I think what you're seeing right now is you're seeing loyalty over competence, but you're seeing madness over facts," he continued. "And when those two things happen, that's why, I think, people are saying we can't survive a second term, because the crazies are running the asylum and the sane have been pushed out."
"The whole post-9/11 construction to counterterrorism was staying left of boom, meaning doing everything to avoid an attack — is that gone? Is that over?" asked Wallace.
"I think it is," said Riggleman bluntly. "I mean, when you're looking at this ... the rise of AI and the rise of polymorphist threats going after our networks, because I have an AI company, right? When you see the rise of threats, why are we taking the locks off the doors ... with cyber command? Why are we? Because at this point, we have a company like DOGE, and you have people with a bunch of twentysomethings underneath sort of this mad billionaire who actually doesn't understand how the government works. So you're bringing in people from the outside who doesn't know the nuance of the security apparatus."
"You have, really honestly, neophites and wet-behind-the-ear idiots that are making decisions for the United States of America, and we shouldn't have twentysomethings running this country," Riggleman added.
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