Through battles big and small since President Trump took office, one intense conflict stands out for the president’s openness to once-fringe views and voices. It is the struggle by some of his aides to contain Laura Loomer.
Ms. Loomer, the right-wing agitator whose proud Islamophobia and self-styled role as an ideological purity enforcer have made her toxic to some members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, got the upper hand in late March. Her posts on X about several National Security Council aides she deemed insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump got his attention. He asked her by phone to come to the Oval Office the following week.
On April 2, Ms. Loomer sat with a thick folder on her lap, facing the president at the Resolute Desk. She elaborated on her findings about the deputy national security adviser, Alex Wong, who she pointed out had worked on the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, a critic of Mr. Trump, and whose wife had clerked for Justice Sonia Sotomayor and been involved in the prosecution of the Jan. 6 defendants. She criticized a dozen other aides in the presence of several administration officials, including Michael Waltz, then the national security adviser, who had stepped in uninvited midway through the meeting.
After her presentation, Mr. Trump barked to Mr. Waltz, “I want all of them fired.” He dismissed the group and hugged Ms. Loomer on her way out. Mr. Wong survived the day, but six employees in Ms. Loomer’s folder were ousted. Two months later, White House staffers scored a small victory. On June 11, Mr. Trump attended the opening night of “Les Miserables” at the Kennedy Center. So did Ms. Loomer, who ascended the stairway to the V.I.P. section, where the president awaited the curtain. But she was stopped at the top by a White House aide. Ms. Loomer insisted that she had permission to visit Mr. Trump’s section. The aide held his ground. A Kennedy Center employee joined the scene. For several minutes, the employee and the aide blockaded Ms. Loomer’s path to Mr. Trump. Finally, furious, she stormed back down the stairs.
But the slight has hardly deterred her from using her prominence on social media to promote her own take on supporting Mr. Trump’s agenda. Last week, in an apparent reference to the entire Hispanic population of the United States, she expressed relish over the prospect of people being eaten alive while trying to escape the swampland immigration detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
“The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we start now,” she posted on X.
In one of more than a dozen interviews with The New York Times for this article, Ms. Loomer, 32, dismissed the notion that she was an interloper who lacked credible standing with the president. “My point of access to the White House is Donald Trump,” she said. “And that’s really hard for people to comprehend.”
Within the White House, Ms. Loomer is regarded as an uncontrollable and toxic force whose deep loyalty to Mr. Trump is tempered by her tendency to turn on almost anyone, even her allies. No member of Mr. Trump’s inner circle in the West Wing would speak about her on the record. The same character traits that endear her to the president and lead him to call her several times a month — particularly her seemingly total lack of fear — make many top aides treat her gingerly, as if she might unpin a hand grenade.
She has filed a defamation lawsuit against the comedian Bill Maher and HBO for Mr. Maher’s suggestion on his show last September that Ms. Loomer was sexually involved with Mr. Trump. “Just because a woman is able to get access to the president, and she isn’t a millionaire and doesn’t work for the Republican Party, she must be sleeping with the president?” she said in another interview. “I don’t like using the term, because I don’t want to sound like a liberal, but there really is a lot of misogyny.”
Still, Ms. Loomer acknowledges that the president is central to her life. “President Trump comes first,” she says she has told her boyfriend, “and if you can’t handle that, then go find somebody else.” After one meeting with Mr. Trump in 2023, she wrote effusively on X, “I love him so much.”
Mr. Trump, for his part, frequently praises Ms. Loomer, calling her “a fantastic woman, a true patriot” at one rally and “amazing” at another.
“She’s got the same intensity Roy Cohn had,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the podcaster who was a senior adviser to the first Trump administration, referring to the pugilistic lawyer who helped Mr. Trump become a player in New York decades ago.
Ms. Loomer has taken great pains to make herself worthy of the part. She styles herself as Mr. Trump’s pre-eminent loyalist, declaring on X last month that “America First is whatever President Trump says it is.” And she’s hyper-conscious of the value Mr. Trump places on appearance. “Every time I go and see the president,” she said, “I always buy a new outfit, because I want to look my best.”
Her growing celebrity was on display one evening last month, when she dined at the Capital Grille, a prominent Washington steakhouse, with a Times reporter and her lawyer, Larry Klayman, who had spent the day helping his client prepare for her deposition in the suit against Mr. Maher. In the crowded dining room, Ms. Loomer traded warm hellos with Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, while James Blair, a White House deputy chief of staff, came to her table to give her a hug.
Over dinner, Ms. Loomer recalled that just 15 years earlier she had been an overweight teenager who “used to cry in the bathroom” because she couldn’t fit in trendy clothes. At times, she said, her weight exceeded 200 pounds; now she weighs about 125. Picking at her scallops, which she ordered despite her fondness for steak, Ms. Loomer added, “I’ve got to stay thin.”
In interviews, Ms. Loomer took exception to what she said was the characterization of her as a “conspiracy theorist and anti-Muslim activist.” Rather, she maintained, she was a person of considerable influence: “On a daily basis, I communicate with the most powerful and wealthiest people in the world.”
Both descriptions, of course, can be true.
Ms. Loomer once posted a video on X saying that the Sept. 11 attacks were “an inside job,” though she now says the post was misinterpreted. She routinely refers to Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020 — the same year she lost a congressional race in Florida — as “the stolen election.” After losing in a congressional Republican primary two years later, Ms. Loomer refused to accept defeat, explaining on social media that, “YOU DO NOT CONCEDE WHEN THERE IS THEFT INVOLVED!”
Her anti-Islamic rhetoric has been even more prolific. She labeled herself a “#ProudIslamophobe” on Twitter in 2017, a year before the platform banned her for hateful speech toward Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who is one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.
“I don’t believe Islam is a real religion,” Ms. Loomer said, claiming baselessly that the Qatari government was “the biggest financier” of the Black Lives Matter movement. After Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, won the recent Democratic mayoral primary in New York, she warned on X that “there will be another 9/11 in NYC and @ZohranKMamdani will be to blame.”
Her 1.7 million followers on her reactivated X account include Vice President JD Vance; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; Kash Patel, the F. B.I. director; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and Stephen Miller, the president’s chief domestic policy adviser. Republican political candidates clamor for her endorsement; last month Mr. Vance invited Ms. Loomer to meet with him in his office.
As she patrolled the halls of Capitol Hill one recent morning, armed only with a mobile phone, it was easy to spot the look of terror spreading on the faces of Republicans who crossed her path: Nobody wants to be the next lawmaker to be labeled a disloyal RINO, or Republican in Name Only, by Ms. Loomer.
“She’s like a child wielding a loaded firearm called Twitter,” said Tucker Carlson, the right-wing media host, whom Ms. Loomer recently attacked on social media for criticizing U.S. military involvement in the war between Israel and Iran. “I don’t blame her. I blame the adults who take her seriously.”
Being feared more than loved appears to suit Ms. Loomer. “I don’t want to be friends with people,” she said. “That’s why I’ve got four dogs.”
She lives with her rescue dogs on Florida’s Gulf Coast in a modest red brick ranch-style rental, splitting the costs with her live-in boyfriend. One bedroom has been converted into a studio for her twice-weekly podcast, “ Loomer Unleashed,” which has 80,000 followers on Rumble. The walls are filled with photographs of herself in combative moments, including when she was ushered out of a House hearing in 2018 for disrupting the testimony of Jack Dorsey, the Twitter chief executive.
That freeze-frame seems apt for a person who remains defiantly outside the mainstream. She is still locked out of her original Facebook and Instagram accounts. She is under the binding terms of a settlement not to speak disparagingly about the Council on American-Islamic Relations and is paying the nonprofit $1,200 a month to reimburse it for legal costs and other fees after a lawsuit she filed was dismissed as meritless. (Ms. Loomer is currently suing her original lawyer in that case for malpractice and will use any proceeds to help pay her debt to CAIR.) She was denied a concealed-carry firearms permit in Florida.
Ms. Loomer professes indifference. “At the end of the day,” she said, “I play for an audience of one.”
‘If Anybody Is a Victim, It’s Me’
Ms. Loomer has spent most of her life searching for an audience of any kind.
She grew up in Tucson, Ariz., in a tumultuous household. When she was 11, her parents divorced. Five months later, one of her two younger brothers, who had already been hospitalized multiple times “due to uncontrollable behavior problems,” according to medical records, attacked her mother and was placed in a government group home. A decade after that, the same brother tried to choke his father to death and was charged with aggravated domestic assault, although he eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser crime.
By the time Ms. Loomer was 12, her mother had ceased playing a meaningful role in her life. Eventually a state court awarded full custody to her father, Jeffrey, a rheumatologist. In an interview, Mr. Loomer said that he saw only one solution to maintaining peace in the household, which was to keep the violent child under his watch while sending his daughter and youngest son off to boarding school.
“If anybody is a victim, it’s me,” Ms. Loomer said of her upbringing. She spoke of binge-eating and suffering severe anxiety and depression throughout her adolescence, as well as feeling ignored. “I was subjected to a lot of adversities that a lot of other people would not have been able to overcome, and I’m proud of myself for that. I think I did a good job.”
At the Orme School, a small racially and ethnically diverse coed institution in Mayer, Ariz., which had an annual tuition of around $38,000 and alumni including Ronald Reagan’s daughter Patti, Ms. Loomer did what she could to fit in. She was manager of the football and rodeo teams and forged a warm friendship with her roommate, who was Black. But according to two of her former classmates, she began openly espousing anti-Islam ideas, insisting that the Quran taught its followers to be terrorists and that Barack Obama, then president, was Muslim.
“Laura often expressed extreme views,” one of the classmates, Hasan Barkcin, who was born in Turkey and is Muslim, recalled. “I’d correct her, she’d say, ‘OK, got it,’ and then she’d go back to repeating the same misinformation.”
Ms. Loomer said she first started thinking about Islam after the Sept. 11 attacks, when she was 8. She often justifies her attacks on Muslims by invoking her religion: Though she admits she’s not particularly observant, she calls herself a “feisty Jewess” and frequently wears a Star of David pendant around her neck.
Her father said he disagrees with her stance on Islam. “I am not opposed to any religion,” Mr. Loomer said in an interview.
At Orme, Ms. Loomer expressed the desire to be famous and aspired to be valedictorian, according to another classmate. She came close, but fell short, and was disappointed again when she wasn’t admitted to Dartmouth, a school her father attended.
Instead, she spent a semester at Mount Holyoke College and then transferred to Barry University in South Florida, where she majored in broadcast journalism, immersed herself in conservative politics and became the campus president of the College Republicans.
Her campus activism drew the attention of James O’Keefe, the founder of the right-wing undercover media group Project Veritas. Mr. O’Keefe hired Ms. Loomer at the beginning of 2015, a few months before she graduated. Her first stunt for the group, in which she infiltrated Black Lives Matter gatherings and recorded people making unflattering comments about the Rev. Al Sharpton, netted a front-page story in The New York Post.
But over time, her anti-Muslim rants began to catch up with her. By 2019, she was banned by every major social media network and even by the car services Uber and Lyft after she posted that “I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver.” At just 25, Ms. Loomer had lost her megaphone and feared that her media career was over.
“It was a massive blow to Laura,” said Shane Cory, a digital fund-raising specialist who assisted Ms. Loomer in amassing online donors to support her activities, which included handcuffing herself to Twitter’s New York City headquarters with a yellow Star of David affixed to her clothes in late 2018.
That same year Ms. Loomer relocated to Palm Beach, and in 2019 she prepared a run for Congress. Political neophyte though she was, she proved to be an energetic campaigner and fund-raiser, enough so to win the Republican primary and gain Mr. Trump’s endorsement. Still, she lost by close to 20 points in a deep-blue district in 2020 to the Democratic incumbent, Representative Lois Frankel.
She lost again in 2022, this time in the Republican primary in a different district, to the incumbent, Representative Daniel Webster. Mr. Trump had refrained from endorsing anyone in the primary, which Mr. Webster won by nearly seven points. Ms. Loomer claimed fraud and refused to acknowledge defeat. Mr. Webster’s campaign said in a statement that she had “lost all sight of truth and reality.”
She emerged from the 2022 contest broke and despondent, but soon found two lifelines. One was the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, who began restoring banned accounts, including hers, soon after taking over the company. The second was a deal she struck with Rumble, a right-wing video streaming platform, that paid her $15,000 a month to make content with a Vero Beach, Fla., media company.
Repositioning herself as Mr. Trump’s fiercest advocate, she focused on attacking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — who figured to be Mr. Trump’s chief rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Over the next 18 months, her attacks were relentless; she once went so far as to suggest that the breast cancer experienced by Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, had “been over exaggerated in a desperate effort to get votes.”
In February 2023, Ms. Loomer had just returned from staging a ruckus at a book-signing event for Mr. DeSantis when her cellphone announced that an “unknown caller” was on the line. “Hello Laura, it’s your favorite president,” Mr. Trump said on the other end. “I love what you did today.” It was the first time the former president had called her, and he asked her to come visit him in person.
“I was so excited,” Ms. Loomer recalled. Weeks later, she drove to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, where Mr. Trump met her, accompanied by Ms. Wiles.
The former president encouraged Ms. Loomer to take another shot at Congress. She demurred and said returning Mr. Trump to the White House took precedence. Mr. Trump turned to Ms. Wiles, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation, and said: “Let’s hire her. Let’s put her on the campaign.”
Ms. Loomer filled out a W-9 tax form and was told that her start date would be April 1, 2023. But April 1 came and went. The next week, The Times reported that Mr. Trump was considering hiring Ms. Loomer, and by the end of the day, a campaign official announced that the job offer had been withdrawn.
“I was so depressed,” Ms. Loomer said. “I cried so much. I locked myself in my apartment for like a month. I lost like 15 pounds.”
She has been outside looking in ever since.
‘Pleasure in Humiliating People’
This March, Sergio Gor, the White House’s director of personnel, called Ms. Loomer and asked her to pay a visit. Ms. Loomer was delighted. From her perspective, this could mean only one thing: that she was finally about to be offered a White House job. She booked a flight to Washington and met in Mr. Gor’s office adjacent to the White House. To her chagrin, Mr. Gor wanted only to engage in small talk.
Sitting in her hotel room, fuming, Ms. Loomer began digging into Mr. Wong’s background, combing through websites looking for signs of disloyalty. Her best work, she said, comes “in the aftermath of when I’ve been disrespected.”
She then set her sights on two holdovers from the Biden administration, Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, the director of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, and his deputy, Wendy Noble. Both were fired after her Oval Office meeting with Mr. Trump in early April.
Weeks later, the White House withdrew the nomination of Janette Nesheiwat, the sister-in-law of Mr. Waltz, for surgeon general after Ms. Loomer savaged her on social media as “not ideologically aligned” with Mr. Trump.
It is hard to say how decisive a role Ms. Loomer played in these personnel decisions. Asked to put a number on the job casualties — which she calls “scalps” — that she could take credit for, Ms. Loomer replied, “I don’t even know.”
But she added: “I really enjoy and take great pleasure in humiliating people who suck at their job.”
Mr. Trump publicly denied that she had influenced his decision to fire the National Security Council aides, and White House officials have suggested that Ms. Loomer has tended to claim credit for work done quietly in the administration. But some close allies of the president believe that there are those in the government who have furtively supplied Ms. Loomer with information so she can do their dirty work of publicly disparaging certain personnel for them.
Ms. Loomer spends at least 14 hours every day on her phone, scrolling through X, reading hundreds of incoming text messages, taking phone calls and pounding out lengthy posts.
While researching a prospective appointee or a perceived adversary of Mr. Trump, she relies on basic online tools, including Google, LinkedIn, Instagram and the Federal Election Commission website. In her quest to find damning information, she will often focus on the subject’s spouse and their children.
For example, she seized on the background of the wife of Stanley Woodward, who has defended allies of Mr. Trump in court and is awaiting Senate confirmation to be associate attorney general. Ms. Loomer determined that Mr. Woodward’s wife, Kristin McGough Woodward, was a lawyer who supported the Black Lives Matter movement.
“In any revolution, you do have a purity police,” Mr. Bannon said.
But Ms. Loomer’s influence has limits. Mr. Woodward is still on track for confirmation despite Ms. Loomer’s protestations. She has not succeeded in dislodging Morgan Ortagus, the deputy U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, whom Ms. Loomer has personally disliked for years and has described as being “all about self enrichment” and “AMERICA LAST.”
Stefanie Spear, the deputy chief of staff to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been accused by Ms. Loomer of being a “Marxist” but she remains in her job. For that matter, Ms. Loomer said that she finds Mr. Kennedy to be “a very problematic person” who “is running a shadow presidential campaign” from his office. But Mr. Kennedy’s job seems safe for the moment, as does that of Attorney General Pam Bondi, whom Ms. Loomer derisively refers to as “Pam Blondi.”
On Monday evening, Ms. Loomer posted on X that Ms. Bondi needed to resign for not delivering promised new information about the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Today Ms. Loomer derives her living from the attention economy, gaining paying subscribers on X as well as donors from everyday provocations. On a hot Thursday last month on Capitol Hill, she and her employee Charles Downs accosted several members of Congress, shooting video as they asked them whether they would support designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Two House Democrats, Representatives Maxine Waters of California and Daniel Goldman of New York, did what they could to ignore her. A third, Representative Ted Lieu of California, said that he would have to do some reading on the matter.
Ms. Loomer separately tasked Mr. Downs with lying in wait outside a House committee hearing room for Ms. Omar, a holding pattern that consumed more than three hours until the congresswoman finally materialized in the corridor. To Mr. Downs’s repeated question about the Muslim Brotherhood, she responded, “Enjoy your clicks, have a nice day!”
Even many Republicans Ms. Loomer approached, like Representatives Mary Miller of Illinois and Andy Ogles of Tennessee, regarded her tentatively, as if she might just bite. She received a warmer welcome from Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina. Ms. Loomer entered Ms. Mace’s office with a beagle named Oliver rescued from a military testing laboratory to accentuate her recent success in persuading the Navy to halt such testing on dogs and cats.
“You’d be a hero,” Ms. Loomer said, urging Ms. Mace to lead Congress in designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. Ms. Mace pledged to do so. Later, Ms. Loomer said that she and Ms. Mace “have a mutual hatred of Marjorie,” referring to another close female ally of the president, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
It has not escaped Ms. Loomer’s notice that many of her peers in the MAGA ecosystem have become rich. Recently, in hopes of improving her financial fortunes, she started a consulting business, Loomered Strategies, with a business partner in New York State.
“I’m kind of like pivoting,” she said. “I do journalism, but also I’m now going to be doing a lot of advising in terms of opposition research, executive-level vetting and advocacy.” She says that she has five clients and that overall her activities earn a gross income of about $300,000.
Even when working with clients, Ms. Loomer remains mindful of her primary audience. A rare slip came in May, when her anti-Islam impulses led her to criticize the Trump administration for accepting a luxury 747 from the Qatari government, which she labeled “jihadists in suits.”
Mr. Trump called her the next day from Air Force One en route to Saudi Arabia and, according to several people with knowledge of the exchange, conveyed his deep displeasure with her. She apologized in a lengthy post on X in which she also reminded others of her special access to the president: “I know I could have probably just had a private conversation about the plane instead.”
Ms. Loomer said that she has had at least four conversations with Mr. Trump since that time and is confident that their relationship is as strong as ever, despite continuing efforts by some White House aides to marginalize her. She is less sanguine about what lies ahead.
“I feel like Western civilization is in a death spiral,” she said, likening Mr. Trump with the lone source of light in an otherwise dark world. “Eventually, a candle burns out. But it’s a slow burn.”
And once that dim source of optimism was snuffed out? “I don’t know what my life is going to look like when President Trump is out of office,” she said.
Ken Bensinger covers media and politics for The Times.
Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades.
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