Advertising helps fund our podcasts, but it's not for everyone. If you prefer to listen without ad

breaks, you can back us on Patreon for an ad-free experience. Just follow the link in the show notes.

Hello and welcome to The Bunker. I'm Jacob Jarvis. With each passing day, it becomes more and more clear that Donald Trump is a threat to America's national security, which unfortunately makes him a threat to global security. The latest scandal at the time we record, anyway, is that he fired six National Security Council staffers, reportedly at the behest of Laura Luma, a conspiracy theorist who is believed to be, I'll say, pretty close to the president, and I'll leave it at that.

To discuss Trump's dismantling of the United States security apparatus, I'm joined by Ben Makou, an independent national

security reporter and frequent contributor to the Guardian US. Ben, thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me. Ben, first of all, can we talk about some of the characters involved here?

Is Laura Luma someone you're pleased to hear about making high-level decisions in the government.

Funny enough, I'm in, I mean, as many journalists are, I'm in like a group chat with, you know,

various reporters from different places. And I'm kind of like not always the person who's saying

that everything's going to shit, but I'm definitely someone who might have insights into the chaos that could come.

And I think that that first New York Times article on Lumer being the person that

potentially advised Trump on firing all these people, I immediately saw it.

And I think it might have been Axios, just to give a credit where credit is due.

I immediately was like, this might be the most disturbing thing that I've seen

since Trump came to power. Yeah, yeah. I first heard about her when I was covering the far right

domestically in the U.S. and she was one of these figures that would be touting 9-11 truthorisms.

Some of the stuff she would say was incredibly offensive.

She's not afraid of a lawsuit is the other thing we should mention right now.

Just truly bonkers individual fringe character in many ways,

but I would say she's even

crazier than that. An acolyte, a protege of Roger Stone. We all know who Roger Stone is. If you

don't know who he is, he's kind of this, probably the most American-looking man of all time,

...