Bulwark Takes - Trump Fires Nat-Sec Staff After Meeting With Conspiracy Nut

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer is apparently calling the shots in Trump’s White House. Tim Miller and Will Sommer take on the chaotic power struggle, Loomer’s shocking Oval Office influence, and the explosive fallout from MAGA’s latest witch hunt.

Hey, it's Tim Miller of The Bulwark here with my colleague Will Sommer, author of our False Flag newsletter that looks at what is happening in MAGA crazy land. And once again, MAGA crazy land has come to the highest levels of the White House. We had two stories out this morning, one from the New York Times about how conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who if you don't know her, good for you, we'll explain who that is in a second. But a rather crazy individual was in the White House. And now we have a follow-up from Axios about how there have been multiple firings on Trump's National Security Council after the Loomer visit. No, the firings were not firing the people who let Laura Loomer anywhere near the White House, it seems like the firings were of the targets of Loomer, people that these MAGA online folks think are too aligned with the neocons or the old Bush Republicans. So that is at least my understanding of the contours of the story. Will, why don't you go a little deeper for us? Yeah, sure. So Laura Loomer is a conspiracy theorist. She has many unsavory incidents in her

past. Most recently, among other things, she called 9-11, said it was an inside job. I mean, this is someone you don't want setting the policy or the personnel policy at the National Security Council. But for a few weeks, ever since Signalgate, which I guess was just a week ago, if you can believe it, she has been on the war path trying to oust various people on the National Security Council via posts on X. And incredibly, I mean, I talked to her a week ago, and she said basically that she was being iced out, that they wouldn't even let her come to a White House press briefing. Now, cut to a few days later, she's meeting with Trump in the oval office on wednesday uh and basically laying out her arguments for why these people should be fired and you know according to

this axios report that just came out it seems like she succeeded i mean this is insane i can addition i gloom and i'm not you know uh every uh one man's conspiracy theorist is a number another man's truth teller but so in addition to all of her wild views that she's promoted, she's been unapologetically Islamophobic at times, has described herself as such. I mean, she has advanced some anti-Semitic views at times. It's like this is somebody that it was a big deal during the campaign when she was on the plane.

There were people even inside Trump world that were like, this person's too crazy for us, which is a pretty high bar, to say the least, when, you know, the weekend insane Axios story is true, to get some scalps inside the White House, I guess it really speaks to what the true power base is here and why your beat is your beat. Yes. I mean, I think that's right. We can see how these figures who are just, you know, you would imagine sort of just shooting off these posts into oblivion. In fact, they're able to gain, you know, some amount of credence in the White House. And I think also here, it's curious, I'm wondering how much, a lot of the stuff she's been posting is almost like, reads like opposition research or something. I'm curious about if she's getting this from rival factions in the White

House or the National Security Council, this idea that, you know, if we could just convince Trump to get rid of this person and this person, you know, our sort of more perhaps America first faction would gain more power. Yeah. Okay. So you never have to hand it to Laura Loomer, but I'm going to do it anyway on two points. All right. Number one, for long time viewers of the feed, you will know that when

Carrie Lake accosted me at a bar in Phoenix, Laura Loomer was the peacemaker. That's a real thing that happened. Okay. So I appreciated that. Thank you, Laura. Second, peacemaker, or the de-escalator, maybe, rather than peacemaker. She kind of told Kerry to take a chill pill. In addition to that, the other thing I got to hand to her is that like, well, you know, whatever you think, and I think pretty negatively about her foreign policy worldview, et cetera, and the word neocon has kind of lost its descriptive value because it's been used, you know, as a pejorative for so long, but like, was like essentially a Bush neocon type on foreign policy, bipartisan type.

And I had Tom Malinowski on the podcast a while back, who's a Democratic, tough on national security Democrat. And he was just like so disappointed in Waltz, because like him and Waltz had seen eye to eye on so much. And Waltz had kind of flipped to get in Trump's world. So and then obviously, there's Marco Rubio at Secretary of State, some of the staffers that Waltz brought on. So it's not not true, like at least that like narrow point that Loomer is making that Trump has some people around him in the national security world who are maybe more aligned, or at least had been more aligned with like, the traditional Bush like worldview than the America first worldview.

Yeah, I mean, I think what we're seeing is this idea that Mike Waltz is weak after Signalgate, and so maybe he's not going to get fired. But that, that people undermining him see this as an opportunity to strike and kind of clear out some of his deputies. Yeah. So are there any names that have been mentioned that Laura's been going after? Yeah, so she's really been on a tear. I mean, she was just like, there's a trans staffer. We've got to find out who this trans staffer is and get him out.

Is that true? Yeah, no. I mean, she didn't even have the name in that case. She was just like, I hear there's a trans person. Let's get him. I mean, she's posting this publicly. And that's who's meeting with Trump. It's crazy. There was another guy who, last name of Canapathy,

who had worked with, like, previously worked with some Intel official who signed the, you know, the Hunter Biden laptop as disinformation letter. And so there's kind of like this, like, very strained guilt by association. And then the big one is a guy named Alex Wong, who is the deputy national security director or advisor. And basically, she's really been focusing most of her fire on him. Her arguments that he's, you know, I mean, she basically alleged that he's a Chinese spy and that he was somehow involved in the signal fiasco to embarrass Trump. She was really basically no

evidence of this. She says, well, his wife was a prosecutor and she prosecuted some J6 people. And then his father-in-law was a large stakeholder in a big Chinese tech company. Perhaps, but I mean, at the same time, one imagines that goes into the security clearance and everything. And so it really feels like, I guess, for me looking at it, like there is just basically like, let's get rid of this guy because he's of Chinese descent. Certainly, you could never go wrong assuming that motivations are related to racism here in mega world. I think there's another level of this, though, particularly with Alex Wong. I hadn't followed this as closely as you did.

So I'm interested that he is one of the main targets. I got to tell you, when he got hired for that job, I raised an eyebrow. It surprised me because I'd worked with Alex in 2012. He was a young but kind of up and coming person in Romney world. And at the time, obviously, this happened to a lot of my former colleagues, where it's like invasion of the body snatchers. There's definitely been invasion of the body snatchers for some people that I used to work with. But Alex, like even into the Trump world, I just from afar, I watched him, he seemed like still to be a pretty kind of even keel kind of traditional conservative views on on most things, you know, adapting where you need to for MAGA, you know, kind of more in the, I don't know, what, like three years ago, Rubio, Malt type. And so when he got that job, when somebody told me that he did back in January, I was like, that's just a weird fit.

And I don't know if that works. And I've had several people text me who are not Laura Loomer types, who are regular people who don't have any evidence. They're not really making an accusation, but they're like they wouldn't be surprised if Alex Wong had Jeffrey Goldberg's number in his phone. Right. If he's Waltz's deputy, like if you're kind of going to start looking around for how did Jeffrey Goldberg get into this would not be a crazy person to look at. Right. Because it's like he's been a traditional strong on national security kind of republican that is like kind of and jeffrey goldberg has a lot of those types of people as his sources right so um it is one of those scenarios where it's like you know the mega folks or see a staffer that like does not fit their crazy ilk. And like, rather than like, try to make a policy argument, you see them falling back on, I guess, you know, Kung flu type anti-China attacks.

Yeah, I mean, you can see that there's, you know, I don't think it's an accident that she, previously, Laura hadn't like really focused a lot on the personnel of the National Security Council. So I think there are agendas at play here. And, you know, this is also something that doesn't I don't think the MAGA base is like, talk to me about the deputy undersecretary or whatever. You know, and so I think this is really an argument for Trump that she's making. Man, wild times, Will. I've got to tell you, Laura Loomer, I guess, having enough influence over the president of the United States to get members of the National Security Council fired. Not like random people in the Department of Commerce. The National Security Council, the staffing there is being dictated by the online right.

I'm glad you're out there monitoring it for us. All right. Everybody else, subscribe to the feed. We'll be seeing you soon.