Hours after ordering his surprise assault on Iran, President Donald Trump did not, apparently, call world leaders to garner support for his divisive new war.
Instead, he picked up the phone to call Laura Loomer.
The far-right influencer, 32, who has no meaningful expertise in international affairs, has spent years cultivating a position as one of Trump’s most trusted outside voices.
Loomer told the Financial Times she had assured the president: “I said it’s a great job and people all around the world are cheering you on,” adding that he was “making us proud to be American.”
The president is said to call his devotee Loomer—a MAGA supporter who proudly identifies as an Islamophobe—on a near-monthly basis, according to the New York Times.
Despite deep unease within the West Wing—where senior officials have privately described her to the Times as an “uncontrollable and toxic force”—Trump has publicly praised her as “a very nice person” and “a patriot,” and last December announced her engagement to the room at a White House Christmas party before she had made it public.
Loomer revealed to the FT that she also used the call to warn Trump about Tucker Carlson, alerting him to the “threat” that the MAGA media personality apparently “poses to his administration.”
Carlson had on Saturday denounced the bombardment as “disgusting and evil,” and later charged that the “war is waged purely because Israel wanted it to be waged”—a position that drew ferocious pushback from pro-war voices across the movement.
Loomer seized on the conflict to amplify her anti-Muslim rhetoric, calling on Trump to deploy both the military and the Department of Homeland Security to forcibly round up and deport every Muslim non-citizen in the country.
She told the FT she hoped for “a massive anti-Islam awakening in our country, because that’s what we need,” and said Americans needed to “wake people up to this barbaric ideology that has been imported into our country.”
The war Loomer was cheering—Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran that began in the early hours of last Saturday—was greeted with enthusiasm by many Republican lawmakers and hard-right commentators.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was among those killed in the strikes. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, 70, called the attack “the most significant thing that’s happened in the Mid-East in a thousand years,” telling reporters on Sunday: “The gold standard for Republican foreign policy is no longer Ronald Reagan: It’s Donald J Trump.”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, 55, told CBS News’ Face the Nation that he had “spent the entire day” with Trump the previous Friday, pressing the case for intervention.
“My counsel to him was that the Iranian regime has never been weaker, that it was teetering, and now was the time,” Cruz said, predicting that Iran no longer “being led by a theocratic, murderous dictator—that makes America much, much safer.”
Even commentators with a history of opposing foreign military adventures fell in line. Jack Posobiec, who built his following partly on hostility to U.S. military interventions abroad, told Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast that the president now had a chance to “find that stable leadership [in Iran], cut the deal, ensure peace and do so swiftly and smartly rather than get into a prolonged and protracted conflict.”
Right-wing radio host and Trump ally Mark Levin went further still, demanding war critics be deported. On X, Levin declared that Americans must “unite around our president and armed forces and against these plotters and connivers.”
Not everyone on the right was cheering, though. Former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, 51, who resigned from Congress on Jan. 5, labeled the conflict “AMERICA LAST” on social media. “Now Americans are once again coming home in flag-draped coffins from another stupid pointless foreign war for foreign regime change on behalf of Israel,” she wrote.
Conservative social media duo the Hodgetwins declared that “President Trump has completely LIED to his voters, backstabbed our country and has disgraced his legacy beyond repair at this point.”
Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative magazine, told the FT that the split exposed a fundamental tension within the coalition. “[Trump] was the ‘no more endless wars’ candidate in 2016 and 2024, particularly, and this looks like an open betrayal of the base,” he said.
Public sentiment appears to align more with the skeptics than the cheerleaders. A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted over the weekend found support for the strikes at 27 percent among all adult respondents.
Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank, told the FT she believed that the political calculus could shift sharply if the conflict drags on.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and Loomer for comment.
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