I don't want to alarm anyone unnecessarily, but the following things are going on right now, at this very moment, around the world: India and Pakistan are shooting at each other's airplanes but have not yet decided to drop nuclear bombs on each other. A summit aimed at defusing tensions on the Korean peninsula collapsed before lunch in Hanoi. There is an Ebola outbreak in the Congo to which Doctors Without Borders has had to stop responding because there's also a civil war in the Congo. (One infected person from that area lands at Kennedy and Camp Runamuck goes to ClownCon 1.) And the foreign policy of the United States is not far removed from the days in which it was being run by crazy people.

This astonishing—and frankly, terrifying—tale of the early days of this administration* appears in Politico, and it genuinely makes you wonder how we all happen still to be alive.

What [Susan] Rice didn’t — couldn’t — tell these government employees was that the dawn of the Trump administration would be a time of extraordinary personal and professional torment for them; that they’d be asked to make ethically, and legally, dubious decisions while ignoring facts and evidence on basic issues to fit the president’s whims; that they would be vilified as “Obama holdovers” and treated like an enemy within, to the point where some of their lives were threatened; that they’d grow so paranoid they would seek “safe spaces” to speak to each other, use encrypted apps to talk to their mothers, and go on documentation sprees to protect themselves and inform history; that at least one career staffer would cry on the way home from work every night; and that another would call Trump a “dumpster fire” in a farewell message.

When NSC employees today recall the events, they use words like “crazy,” “nausea” and “fear.” Some liken the experience to surviving a traumatic event.

Talking to mom in code. Lovely.

Michael Flynn Win McNamee Getty Images

The story illustrates that the administration* came into office determined to "disrupt" the workings of the National Security Council, but with no earthly idea how to do it—or, for that matter, what the NSC was supposed to do in the first place. Security clearances were handed out like chocolate eggs at Easter. (Hi, Jared!) Michael Flynn was the primary agent of chaos, but there was a whole brigade of bungling elves behind him.

Then there were the wild-card roles played by people such as Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, and chief White House strategist Steve Bannon, who early on was granted the privilege, unusual for a political adviser, of participating in Principals Committee meetings. Kushner, for his part, seemed to run his own show; he would, for instance, negotiate directly with Mexican officials without telling even senior NSC staff. (Kushner got better about coordinating over time, former NSC staffers noted. A White House official told POLITICO that Kushner has “always meticulously followed protocols” on interactions with foreign leaders.)

One Trump appointee, conservative commentator Sebastian Gorka, would show up at random meetings, even though it was never clear whether he had the proper security clearance, and he would often raise unrelated points. One former White House official recalled Gorka saying such things as, “‘If you look at what Napoleon did ...’ and we’d all be like, ‘I don’t even know how to respond to that.’” (Asked for comment, Gorka told a POLITICO reporter, “Take a long run off a short pier, you utter hack.”)

Gorka then returned to the crypt for a long, leisurely siesta in the soil of his native land.

Sebastian Gorka Alex Wong Getty Images

Are there apologists for this carnival of fools? You bet there are.

“The purpose of the NSC is not to make the president conform to the NSC, but to make the federal government enhance the way a president gets to good decisions,” argued James Carafano, a foreign policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank friendly to Trump. “The president is a very outcome-focused guy. He is not worried about winning pretty. He’s just worried about winning. Not only do I think he doesn’t care about the process, he sees the process as potentially an impediment.”

Does the hypnosis ever wear off? An anxious nation yearns to know.

According to two former NSC staffers, immediately after Trump took office, the NSC staff sent Flynn and his top deputies a detailed memo around 10 pages long that laid out the pros and cons of arming the Kurds, along with every document Trump needed to sign off on a decision. A few weeks passed, and a Flynn deputy told the staffers that what they’d sent up was too long and complicated — could they shorten it?

Ten pages was too long and complicated for our outcome-focused president*.

MANDEL NGAN Getty Images

So the staffers cut the memo in half. Days later, a new instruction: Could they cut it down further and turn much of it into graphics? The president preferred pictures.

Five pages is too long and complicated for our outcome-focused president*. Plus there were too many words. What was next? Colorforms?

So the NSC staffers, with aid from intelligence officials, devised a graphical version. The issue dragged on anyway; it wasn’t until May that Trump decided to arm the Kurdish fighters.

I repeat the question: how in the name of our bearded Lord are we all still alive?

But by far, the most vivid look into how the administration did business is the long section regarding the executive orders signed by the president* in the early days of his administration, most notable of which was what became known as "the Muslim ban." The president* indeed did sign them, but all indications are that they were drafted by lemurs.

The executive order episode badly rattled career staffers on several levels. For one thing, they — the nonpartisan experts — had not been consulted before the orders were drafted, and when they finally were, their advice was ignored. It also was the first real indication that some of Trump’s most fiery campaign rhetoric, which many hoped he’d abandon when in office, would translate into policy. Today, several former officials admit they saw the targeting of refugees in particular as malicious. But some also said that if Trump really wanted to bar refugees or citizens from specific countries, they would have helped him do it in a smarter way.

Steve Bannon Mark Wilson Getty Images

“I’ll never forget the morning I fell apart,” one former staffer said. “I was reading a New York Times article about a refugee named Mustafa. ... I just lost it. I was bawling. A few days later, I confessed I’d given a bunch of money to some refugee agency. And everyone around me said, ‘I did, too!’ We just wondered how many thousands of dollars had come from the NSC staff.” The former staffer continued, head shaking in wonder: “These [executive orders] were, like, written in crayon, like The Heritage Foundation intern just came up with them. They just weren’t very good. … It wasn’t just bad policy. It was bad policy poorly executed. I could have done it better.”

And, as an added bit of flavor, there was addle-brained, talk-radio paranoia from the administration*'s political appointees. One poor bastard got singled out by the apparatchiks, and the journalistic hacks that they fed, because he'd attended the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas.

Read the whole thing. Nothing But The Best People is never not going to be funny.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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