Laura Loomer sowed doubts about Mike Waltz, Donald Trump’s departing national security adviser, during a meeting in the Oval Office last month that resulted in the dismissal of multiple staffers on the National Security Council.
In a podcast interview on The Tara Palmeri Show released Thursday, Trump’s favorite far-right conspiracy theorist said that she’d had concerns about Waltz’s loyalty after he signed off on the hiring of individuals who’d previously criticized the president.
In the infamous meeting where she presented her so-called evidence to support the firing of several more traditionally neo-conservative foreign policy hawks, Loomer had wanted to present a supposedly damning video of Waltz to the president, too. Loomer claimed she’d been unable to show the video to Trump because Waltz had entered the room, but she shared the video on Palmeri’s podcast.
Loomer played a 2016 advertisement for an anti-Trump PAC featuring Waltz, in which he criticized Trump’s statement mocking servicemembers who’d been captured in combat. “It’s something that I just personally can’t stomach,” Waltz said in the video.
“So if you can’t stomach it, why do you want to work for President Trump? If you can’t stomach it, why do you want to work for the administration?” asked Loomer, who evidently has a strong stomach for moral bankruptcy as she has described herself as “pro-white nationalist” and a “proud Islamophobe.”
The far-right activist clarified that she hadn’t been gunning for Waltz during the meeting. “No, I was not trying to fire Michael Waltz. My question is, if Michael Waltz is telling the president of the United States that these people are good people, that he personally signed off on, and that he personally vetted, well, what does a Michael Waltz vet entail? And is it biased given the fact that he himself has made anti-Trump comments in the past,” she said.
“I wasn’t trying to get him removed, I was just making the point that, you know, he’s not exactly a Trump loyalist,” Loomer said.
Loomer was adamant she hadn’t been trying to get Waltz sacked, and claimed she was simply doing her due diligence while stressing her own enduring loyalty to the commander-in-chief.
“I don’t want you framing this as, ‘Oh, Laura Loomer tried to get Michael Waltz fired!’ I didn’t go in there trying to get him fired, I was just making the point that I’m a Trump loyalist. I never said—I never campaigned against Trump. Michael Waltz was working with a PAC that was trying to actively campaign against Donald Trump in 2016. So my point was Michael Waltz is not going to have the same standard of loyalty that I have because he himself was a trump hater, right? So I was trying to explain that,” she insisted.
“But how would that not make Trump want to fire him?” Palmeri asked.
“I think it’s important that President Trump see these things,” Loomer replied. She said that she didn’t know if Trump had been made aware of the video before tapping Waltz.
When Palmeri asked the White House whether Waltz had ever spoken to Trump about his critical comments, a Trump administration official responded with the following statement: “Mike has supported President Trump since after the primaries of 2016. He is a steadfast supporter of the president’s America First agenda, and works everyday to implement it.”
Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong, are expected to leave their posts by the end of the day Thursday, but Trump announced that afternoon that he was nominating Waltz to serve as the ambassador to the United Nations.
Crucially, it’s not clear that Waltz was removed from his post over concerns about loyalty. The hapless national security adviser had been the subject of multiple scandals during his brief time in the Trump administration, including mistakenly inviting a reporter to join a Signal group chat about plans to bomb Yemen.
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