What Laura Loomer's meeting with Donald Trump means for America, according to out national security expert

Last week, conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer made headlines after she attended an Oval Office meeting with Donald Trump, targeting national security officials who she lamented were essentially not MAGA enough. Soon after the meeting, Trump fired several national security officials.

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Loomer celebrated online and claimed credit for the purge, naming names and spinning half-truths and conspiracy theories as justification for the firings.

Luke Schleusener, CEO of Out in National Security and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, spoke with The Advocate, warning about the implications of someone like Loomer having the ear of the president of the United States. The organization he leads, Out in National Security, works to support queer national security professionals.

“Some of Loomer’s statements regarding the people who were fired are clearly not truthful,” Schleusener said. “She arranged information in a variety of ways that just weren’t true. And she should not have a say in who gets fired or hired with [the National Security Council]. In fact, no one who isn’t the president or the White House chief of staff should, or anyone at a very high-level should be deciding.”

“Everything that this administration is doing is out of the ordinary,” he added.

The NSC purge follows a growing pattern of loyalty to Trump above experience, qualifications, or national interest. The people fired in the wake of Loomer's visit, Schleusener said, “were eminently qualified to be on a Republican-run NSC. But this isn’t about ideological disagreement. It’s about dismantling institutions in favor of allegiance to Trump.”

And this decapitation strategy isn’t limited to the NSC, Schleusener explained.

“The purge of the [National Security Administration] director is concerning the same way the purge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the chief of Naval Operations is concerning,” Schleusener warned. “These are people who have earned their roles through decades of service and were confirmed by the U.S. Senate. But now, in Trump’s return-to-chaos era, experience is an impediment and loyalty tests are the new standard.”

To fire a seasoned national security leader is to disrupt a network of alliances built over generations. "Those fired probably had built strategic relationships over decades, Schleusener said.

“Those relationships, with NATO partners, with allies, with regional commanders, are not plug-and-play,” he said. “Replacing them is not only hard, it raises deeply upsetting questions: Can you find someone both qualified and sufficiently Trump-loyal? And if you can't, what happens then?”

What happens, it turns out, is chaos. Schleusener noted that he read an article in The Economist that called U.S. national security “shambolic,” with contract workers stepping into roles once held by seasoned experts. The secretary of Defense, he said, has even told the NSA to “stand down” in its intelligence gathering on Russia.

“What this does is insert fear and political favoritism into what is supposed to be a professional and nonpartisan system,” Schleusener said. “And it creates organizational gridlock, rather than anything effective.”

And while Americans might be slow to notice, our allies are not.

“Our allies are surely distressed,” Schleusener said. “They’re watching people disappear from U.S. leadership overnight. These aren’t just nameless staffers, they are trusted partners. This sends a chilling message about continuity and reliability.”

There is also the matter of trust. Schleusener noted that this is the same Trump administration that once invited Russian officials into the Oval Office and declassified Israeli counterterrorism operations. Loomer’s ascent doesn’t inspire confidence. She’s not the only one. Tulsi Gabbard’s leadership role in national intelligence for the administration is also concerning.

“She’s at the very least a strong sympathizer of Vladimir Putin, if not worse,” Schleusener said.

The signal to allies is clear: Share intelligence with the U.S. at your own risk.

And the signal to adversaries? That’s even more dangerous.

“It presents a huge problem for sure since the United States, once a model of institutional strength, now looks like a brawl between personal grudges and fringe influencers,” he said.

And the danger is not theoretical, he said.

“This kind of internal strife with our national security makes it easier, for example, for the Chinese to invade Taiwan at some point,” Schleusener said.

When leadership is this chaotic, and when expertise is replaced with conspiracy and vengeance, there are global consequences.

“The Trump administration wants to reshape the military from one of the most organized, effective, and lethal on the planet to a partisan puppet,” he said. “With the tariffs and talk of invading other countries like Greenland, we could literally end up in a war with our own NATO allies.”