The Conspiracy Theorist Advising Trump

For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.

The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday. If you don’t spend a lot of time online, you probably don’t know who Loomer is, and that’s healthy. To say that she is a “conspiracy theorist” is not quite enough: She has referred to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and has claimed that 9/11 was an “inside job”; she has charged that some school shootings were staged, accused Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis of “exaggerating” her struggle with breast cancer, and questioned whether the “deep state” might have used an atmospheric-research facility in Alaska to create a snowstorm over Des Moines. (Why? So that foul weather would suppress the turnout in the 2024 Iowa GOP caucuses and hurt Trump’s campaign.)

Loomer has even alienated her ostensible allies in the MAGA movement, to say nothing of the hostility she has engendered among various other Republicans. (Peter Schorsch, a former Republican operative who now runs the website Florida Politics, described her to The Washington Post as “what happens when you take a gadfly and inject it with that radioactive waste from Godzilla.”) Indeed, Trump’s own aides found Loomer so toxic that they tried to keep her away from the 2024 campaign, as my colleague Tim Alberta reported last year. A source close to the Trump campaign told Semafor last fall that Trump’s people were “‘100%’ concerned about her exacerbating Trump’s weaknesses,” but that attempts to put “guardrails” around her weren’t working. Trump clearly likes the 31-year-old provocateur, and in Trumpworld, there’s apparently very little anyone can do once the boss takes a shine to someone.

And so Loomer reportedly walked into the Oval Office yesterday with a list of people who should be removed from the National Security Council because of their disloyalty to Trump and the MAGA cause. (Asked for comment, Loomer declined to divulge “any details about my Oval Office meeting with President Trump.” She added, “I will continue working hard to support his agenda, and I will continue reiterating the importance of strong vetting, for the sake of protecting the President and our national security.”)

The next day, at least six staff members, including three senior officials, were fired. If Loomer had nothing to do with it, that’s a hell of a coincidence. (The NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes told The Atlantic that the NSC does not comment on personnel matters.)

Today, an unnamed U.S. official told Axios that Loomer went to the White House because she was furious that “neocons” had “slipped through” the vetting process for administration jobs. The result, according to the official, was a “bloodbath” that took down perhaps as many as 10 NSC staff members. Most reports named Brian Walsh, the senior director for intelligence, and Thomas Boodry, the senior director for legislative affairs; other reports claim that David Feith, a senior director overseeing technology and national security, and Maggie Dougherty, senior director for international organizations, are among those dismissed. Walsh formerly worked as a senior staff member for Marco Rubio on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Boodry was National Security Adviser Michael Waltz’s legislative director when Waltz was a House member, and Feith was a State Department appointee in the first Trump administration.

The firings at the NSC represent an ongoing struggle between the most extreme MAGA loyalists and what’s left of a Republican foreign-policy establishment. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, for example, has been in an online tussle with the Republican fringe—a group that makes Cotton seem almost centrist by comparison—over Alex Wong, another Trump NSC official, whom Loomer and others have, for various reasons, accused of disloyalty to Trump. Other conflicts, however, seem to center on a struggle between Waltz and the head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, Sergio Gor, who has reportedly been blocking people Waltz wants on his team because Gor and others doubt their commitment to the president’s foreign policy.

Such internal ideological and political food fights are common in Washington, but the national security adviser usually doesn’t have to stand by while his staff gets turfed on the say-so of an online troll. If these firings happened because Loomer wanted them, it’s difficult to imagine how Waltz stays in his job—or why he’d want to.

Waltz, of course, is already slogging through a mess of his own creation because of the controversy surrounding his use of the chat app Signal to have a highly sensitive national-security discussion about a strike on Houthi targets, to which he inadvertently invited a journalist—The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. (Waltz’s week wasn’t getting any better before Loomer showed up: New reports claim that the meeting about the Yemen strikes was only one of many conversations about important national-security operations that Waltz held over Signal.) Trump reportedly kept Waltz on the team purely to deny giving “a scalp” to the Democrats and what he perceives as their allies in the mainstream media.

Now Waltz’s authority as national security adviser is subject to a veto from … Laura Loomer? It’s one thing to dodge the barbs of the administration’s critics; that’s a normal part of life in the capital. It’s another entirely to have to stand there and take it when an unhinged conspiracy monger walks into the White House and then several accomplished Republican national-security staffers are fired.

The reason all of this is happening is that in his second term, Trump is free of any adult supervision. The days when a Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis or a Chief of Staff John Kelly would throw themselves in front of the door rather than let someone like Loomer anywhere near the Oval Office are long gone. Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants who are apparently so scared of being exiled from their liege’s presence that they can’t bring themselves to stop someone as far out on the fringe as Loomer from advising the president of the United States.

Meanwhile, a person close to the administration told my colleague Michael Scherer today that “Loomer has been asked to put together a list of people at State who are not MAGA loyalists.” Waltz might yet get fired, but whether he stays or goes, he doesn’t seem to be in charge of the NSC. Perhaps next we’ll see if Marco Rubio is actually running the State Department.

Laura Loomer is where Republicans draw the line. (From September)
The MAGA honeymoon is over. (From December)

Michael Scherer contributed reporting.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

The president of the European Commission said that the bloc is “prepared to respond” with countermeasures to President Donald Trump’s tariffs but will attempt to negotiate with him first.
Hungary announced that it will pull out of the International Criminal Court. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an ICC arrest warrant, landed in Budapest today for a visit.
At least seven people have died after intense flooding, tornados, and storms hit the central United States. More extreme weather is expected to continue affecting the area this week.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: RFK Jr.’s nostalgia for the past obscures a longer history of America’s struggle with weight-related chronic illness. The truth is, America was never healthy to begin with, Lila Shroff writes.

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