In mid-August, Laura Loomer—a woman
who has posted lewd and evidence-free tweets about Kamala Harris’s sexual history,
who calls people she disagrees with “cunt,” and who has called for Gaza to be
flattened and glassed, picked up the phone and got Marco Rubio on the line, the
evening after he attended negotiations in Alaska with Vladimir Putin. The Loomer
emergency that the American secretary of state needed to attend to? A U.S.-based
charitable organization had obtained visas for about 60 severely ill Gazan
children to come to the United States for treatment. After talking to Loomer, Rubio
turned from negotiations with the world’s other nuclear-armed superpower to
shut down that visa program.
In her
power and profanity, in her smashing of walls between “influencer” and “journalist”
and “presidential adviser,” Loomer is a mile-marker in the descent of
the American political discourse into depravity, and of our government into chaos
and farce. One of the most outré political actors
ever to appear on the American scene, eclipsing even Alex Jones in bug-eyed
malice and paranoia, she is also one of the most powerful women in Trumpland. She
has taken credit for over a dozen “scalps”—her word
for people let go within hours or days of her public assaults. Among them are a
surgeon-general nominee; national security apparatchiks, some with decades of
experience in China-U.S. relations and cybersecurity issues related to Russia; the
director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation
and Research (who later returned to his job); and random Biden holdovers who
seem to have been targeted by MAGA co-workers.
As self-appointed truffle pig for
rooting out Trump’s enemies, Loomer has a signature methodology: She doxes and slanders
her targets, often with references to cannibalism, oral sex, and other eating-related
images that suggest some sort of Hannibal Lecter–ish pathology. She eschews
sleep and social life, scouring social media and other public histories of
government officials and politicos, looking for hints of disloyalty and then
hounding these enemies publicly, on Rumble, Twitter, and Telegram. She solicits tips, some of which she claims, in tweets, come
from intelligence sources, others clearly from MAGA appointees and maybe others
with obscure special interests.
The White House itself tries—and
fails—to keep Loomer away from Trump. But “the president likes her tenacity and
loyalty,” Steve Bannon told me. “He sees her as a killer. And the fact that people are blocking her makes him pay
attention more.” Clearly, he wants her around. “She is his Omarosa,” said
another source who has worked with Trump, referring to now long-forgotten Trump
ex-amanuensis Omarosa Manigault Newman. “He understands people and ratings. He
understands how to get coverage.”
But increasingly, Trump
supporters—including several of the former mentors who helped build Loomer’s
career—are cowering themselves. The right-wing Christian producer Lauren Witzke,
who launched Loomer’s podcast Loomer Unleashed, put it this way: “Trump
needed a pit bull, and we went all in to create his pit bull.… And we created a
monster.”
Many a MAGA influencer could be
awarded the red-H Badge of Hypocrisy, but in the wake of the Charlie
Kirk assassination, Loomer has performed a triple axel. In July, she went on a
tear about Kirk’s supposed disloyalty to Trump. “I don’t ever want to hear
Charlie Kirk claim he is pro-Trump ever again,” Loomer posted on X on July 13,
after Kirk demanded Trump release the Epstein files. “After this weekend, I’d
say he has revealed himself as [a] political opportunist and I have had a front
row seat to witness the mental gymnastics these last 10 years. Lately, Charlie
has decided to behave like a charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while
he stabs Trump in the back the next. TPUSA was only able to thrive thanks to
the generosity of President Trump.” After Kirk’s murder, that didn’t escape
attention. She has so far brazened out a wave of criticism while demanding the
doxing and firing of people who have posted critically about Kirk, or about the
White House effort to martyr him.
This latest unblushing mendacity
has, I’m told, put Loomer even further on the back foot with Washington MAGAs,
many of whom have been living in terror of her notice.
Loomer, 32, has emerged as the radical right’s Madame DeFarge, the remorseless,
bloodthirsty woman in A Tale of Two Cities, the Dickens novel about the
French Revolution, knitting the names of enemies while sitting beside the
guillotine. Loomer is adamant that the sole reason for her freelance
“vetting” is that Trump’s own staff has failed to root out Biden holdovers and
other current and prospective hires wobbly on the president and his policy
whims. But one MAGA Republican, who asked not to be named because of fear of
retribution, likened Loomer’s M.O. to shakedowns. “It’s extortion, political
intimidation, and trying to eliminate competition in the dirtiest backhanded
disgusting tactics,” they said.
And in the face of all this, the Washington
political media—flailing under the avalanche of Trump’s second-term abuses of
power—has been sane-washing Loomer for months. CNN
and The Washington Post
have run essentially normalizing features. Politico harvests her opinions for
articles like those of any other strategist. And why not? Besides strolling
into the Oval Office to denounce national security aides with orders of
magnitude more experience and education than herself, she meets personally with
the vice president and the secretary of state, who apparently also takes her
calls while in the middle of superpower negotiations. She claims to have spoken
to Trump on the phone about 50 times. The New York Times
profiled her recently as “Trump’s Blunt Instrument.” In fact, the
opposite is true: She is a blunt instrument for getting to Trump. A
close read of her Loomerings suggests her project surpasses just hunting down crypto-libs
in government. As she’s gained mainstream
notoriety, she’s been the recipient of ever more “tips,” as she puts it. And she
appears to have attracted actors who might want to use her to channel their own
influence. As one of the most reprobate nodes in the influence system around
Trump (Boris Epshteyn perhaps a notch above), Loomer is a textbook gauge of the
rise of corrupt authoritarian cronyism in American politics today.
“LLP. Activate.”
On a
recent spring evening at the Kennedy Center, as staff and security were waiting
for Trump and Melania’s motorcade to arrive for a performance of Les Misérables,
a certain code crackled across all advance-team comms: “LLP. Activate.”
Everyone
with an earpiece in the vicinity understood the acronym. Laura Loomer Protocol.
According to my source, this is an actual strategy understood by White House
advance teams. When a sighting is shared, the teams know to keep eyes on her
and, in the patois, “initiate containment.”
Somehow,
Loomer had slipped into the VIP room without a ticket, positioning herself
within a clutch of donors waiting for photos with Trump and Melania. “It was a
very small group, he wasn’t there yet, it was pre-staging, and she’d positioned
herself as the first person in line,” a source close to the advance team said.
“They removed her from there and put her in an outer perimeter. As she was
being gently guided away, she was talking the whole time, strenuously
objecting. ‘I’m supposed to be here! I have to let the president know what
press to talk to! The president wants to see me, and in the presidential box.’”
That LLP activation was successful.
But successful Loomer containment has not been the norm in Trump’s second term.
With the help of well-placed insiders, Loomer has frequently found ways to
hustle past perimeters and into Trump’s inner sanctums—most famously when she
spent at least two hours in the Oval Office with Trump and other top government
officials naming supposed internal national security enemies before he ousted
six of them, followed by national security adviser Mike Waltz later.
That day, she was not on the
president’s schedule, according to the White House press office. She might have
leveraged an invitation to the Rose Garden celebration of Trump’s first big
tariffs announcement to work her way over to the Oval Office. “She finds a way to get herself on the campus wherever he
is, and then uses her cunning and ability to speak her way past people, to get
them to get her closer to him, until he sees her,” a source close to the White House
told me. “Once he recognizes her, there is a 50-50 chance he will say, ‘Hey
Laura, come on over here!’” (After Kirk’s death and other critical notoriety in
late summer, the source revised those chances down to 70–30.)
Loomer insists, “I had a meeting on
his calendar.” She said Trump personally invited her to come two days earlier,
but she was delayed when bad weather in Florida canceled her flight.
Fame
via Islamophobia
Loomer’s
audacity and attention seeking were always aspects of her personality. She grew
up in Arizona, in what she described, in a memoir, as a climate of fear
and violence in her home. “The
truth is, at a very young age, I learned that most people can’t relate to the
horror show that was my childhood,” she wrote. “Having friends over at my house
was never an option because my brother’s severe mental illness and
unpredictable violent episodes meant the police were at my home on a weekly
basis. Most of the time I didn’t even have a bedroom door,” she wrote, because
her brother would kick it down if she locked herself in “to escape getting
beaten or stabbed.”
Loomer spent high school
hundreds of miles away at a ranch-style boarding school in northern Arizona
with a graduating class of 32. She was blonde and pudgy, nearly
unrecognizable from the raven-haired sylph of today. One classmate recalled an
awkward teen who acted out in bids for attention that elicited classmates’
pity. “We were all close, you kinda just dealt with Laura,” this classmate
said. “You felt bad for her.” The
classmate recalled one incident that exemplified her situation: At one point,
she had to have a surgery. Neither her mom, a nurse, nor her father, a doctor,
traveled the few hours’ drive from Tucson to be with her. She was nursed in the
dorms by the mothers of two other students. “I think they just placed [her] there, her
dad wanted her gone,” the classmate said.
Her conservatism was already
chiseled: As a teen John McCain supporter, she often unleashed extreme
anti-Islam sentiments, even screaming at two Turkish exchange students that
they were terrorists while they were praying, according to the high school classmate.
As she came of age, Islamophobia became her brand. At Florida’s Barry
University in 2014, Loomer caught the attention of Gateway Pundit and Breitbart
News with an Islamophobic Facebook post about how her school’s interfaith
service on 9/11 was opened by, as she put it, “an imam … literally chanting
Allahu Akbar.” That bit of notoriety got her invited to a 2014 David Horowitz
Freedom Center gala in West Palm Beach, where she met, and offered her services
to, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe.
At Veritas, she pulled stunts like
going undercover in Hillary Clinton’s campaign to try to get aides to accept
illegal contributions on hidden cameras. She appeared as a contestant on a show
as one of three women vying to date “Cannibal Cop” Gilberto Valle, who had just
finished a 21-month prison stint for going on chatrooms and fantasizing about
raping, killing, and eating various women he knew, including his wife.
Her bilious communication style
attracted a devoted and large social media following. But by 2019, she was
wandering in the cold, attention-less world of the canceled. Loomer’s
Islamophobia (Islam is a “cancer,” Muslims are “savages”) got her booted from
Twitter, Facebook, Uber, and Paypal, and even, she has said, de-banked by
Chase. Broke and desperate, she cried over her plight on a cringeworthy Alex
Jones Infowars broadcast. “My life is ruined!” she sobbed.
Her emotional volatility was well known
among her peers. As Trump 1.0 wound down, Loomer, wandering in the desert of
social media banishment, decided to try her hand at retail politics in Florida.
Shortly before her first election loss in 2020 (in a Republican congressional
primary), Loomer texted mentor Roger Stone that she was driving past Lowe’s and
“thinking of buying rope.” She has alienated other mentors and friends along
the way, most notably in a long, bitter feud with her former friend and
campaign communications director Milo Yiannopoulos, who claims he cut ties
because she sexually harassed a young male campaign aide—an accusation she
denies. It wasn’t the first time she’s fielded such an accusation: A prominent
MAGA Republican recorded a six-minute video accusing her of sexual aggression
and stalking that is still online.
But in late 2022, Twitter, now
owned by Elon Musk and renamed X, reinstated her account, allowing her to get
back to her brand, turning her name into a verb and “Loomering” adversaries, and
allowing her following to grow, now, to one that is roughly the size of the
city of Phoenix. She started her own show, Loomer Unleashed, eventually
joining the unmoderated right-wing streamer Rumble. In the first episode,
posted in October 2023, she talked with her mentor Roger Stone about Hamas.
Fateful Day at Bedminster
Loomer apparently first attracted
Trump’s attention in February 2023, with a stunt at a DeSantis book signing.
But her easy access to Trump seems to date to later that summer, when she was
delivered to Trump’s country club in Bedminster, New Jersey, by Paul Ingrassia, a New York Young Republican, now in the
Trump administration. Ingrassia brought Loomer to Trump, helping her pick out a
“fuchsia bodycon
dress” on the drive over from New York. On Instagram, Ingrassia
posted a picture of himself, Loomer, and his sister in the back seat of a car,
with the caption: “Trump’s posse off to the #livgolf
tournament at Bedminster to see the King!” At
Bedminster, one of Trump’s aides reportedly pointed her out to Trump in the
handshake line, and the rest is social media history.
Loomer
later that day posted pictures of herself with a grinning Trump on a balcony overlooking
the golf course. Over the next 14 months, Trump shared Loomer content 86 times. By the end of the 2024 campaign, she was riding around
on Trump Force One, most famously swanning down the Trump jet stairs when he
arrived for a debate with Harris, and later standing by his side in huge dark
glasses on a trip to New York for a 9/11 memorial service. Trump’s late-campaign buddy inspired raised eyebrows—and intra-campaign
panic. Social media buzzed with allegations that their friendship was more than
platonic. Loomer’s own tweets—including hand-holding emojis, expressing her
“love” for Trump, and even crowing that he “blew me a kiss” at the Republican National
Convention—did not cool the gossip.
Last
September, Bill Maher took the proverbial bull by the horns and said he
believed Trump was “fucking” Laura Loomer. After that broadcast, according to
Loomer, she was officially banished from rides on Trump’s plane. And there was
no further discussion of a job in the administration.
Loomer blamed Maher and hired Larry
Klayman, the former longtime head of the right-wing group Judicial Watch, to
file a defamation case that is currently wending its way through a court in
Florida. Maher’s lawyers are mounting a spirited defense, and the judge has so
far seemed unsympathetic to Loomer, demanding to see her financial information,
an order to which she has so far not submitted. Her case is not being helped by
“four White House officials” who recently leaked
to Bari Weiss’s Free Press that “Laura is more trouble than she’s worth”
and speculated that she is influenced by lobby firms. Loomer responded to that with a set of tweets
threatening to expose the leakers.
The Maher case has already produced a
revealing and extremely combative 228-page deposition. Maher’s lawyer forced Loomer
to read some of her own tweets on videotape at her deposition at the Washington
office of the law firm Davis Wright Tremain, accusing Kamala Harris of “sucking
dick” for professional gain, having “an infested snatch,” and having “been
ridden harder than the community bikes in San Francisco, but no kids ever”—implying
that she’d had abortions.
Loomer and
Klayman snickered throughout.
Asked how
she knew those sexual allegations were “facts,” she replied that they must be
true since Harris never denied any of it. “In reality, I’m a
professional person,” Loomer stated. “I dress very professionally. I can carry
myself very professionally. I am an investigative journalist.”
Waltz’s Last Waltz
The Oval Office National Security
Council bloodbath in April was the first—but not the last—time Loomer was
publicly linked to firings by the Trump administration. The move was clearly a
coup for the MAGA camp of isolationists, a group including Steve Bannon.
The diminishment of the NSC is a longtime project of Bannon’s
“smash the administrative state” program. “No
one in the history of the National Security Council has ever taken out six guys
like that,” Bannon exulted to me over the phone, explaining that Trump had
wanted to drastically cut the NSC in his first term and failed. Bannon said the
Loomerings enabled Rubio to cut an additional 125 people from the NSC. “Nobody
has had that effect on the NSC, including Kissinger and Brzezinski, that Loomer
has had,” he said, referring to former national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski.
Much—but not all—of what she
advocates for falls in line with garden-variety MAGA paranoia, isolationism,
and Zionist propaganda. But other Loomer passions are
more niche. The breadth of her areas of “expertise” and the extent of her
influence is beginning to resemble that of a D.C. lobbying firm that might sell
its connections to a wide array of clients. She told The New York Times
in early summer that she had five clients—but wouldn’t name them. That list
appears to have grown, but she remains cagey about them. She told The
Atlantic’s Michael Scherer recently that “several billionaires” have
retained her for “political vetting.”
Her first
“scalp” in the second Trump administration was that of an obscure,
California-based assistant U.S. attorney named Adam Schleifer. Less than two hours after she targeted
him as a “Trump hater” on X, the White House fired him. Schleifer has since
filed a wrongful termination case, arguing that Andrew Wiederhorn, an American
businessman under indictment for a multimillion-dollar fraud charge, had engineered
a targeted smear funneled through right-wing influencers like Loomer. The DOJ recently
dropped charges against Wiederhorn, and Loomer fired off a celebratory post on
X.
In late July, Loomer accused hematologist-oncologist
Vinay Prasad, who was named in May to run the FDA’s Center for Biologics
Evaluation and Research, of being a closet leftist Bernie bro. He soon resigned.
But a small group of influential MAGAs—in a highly unusual move, given the
climate of Republican terror around Loomer—fought back. They accused Loomer of
working on behalf of a genetic medicine company, Sarepta, that makes an
extremely expensive drug—$3.2 million per patient—that the FDA had just banned.
Loomer began her campaign against Prasad a few days after the
ban. Prasad’s supporters smelled a rat. American Majority CEO Ned Ryun, a
legacy right-winger, son of Jim Ryun, a Trump Medal of Freedom recipient and
former Olympic athlete, unleashed a volley of tweets claiming Loomer
essentially lobbied for Sarepta, speculating she was paid six figures by a firm
called Michael Best Strategies.
Loomer
replied by tweet: “This is
a blatant lie.” Ten days later, Susie Wiles brought Prasad back into the
fold.
The Best firm also represents a right-wing
group called the Puerto Rico Statehood Council, with a history of lobbying around the Puerto Rican economy, and specifically a debt-restructuring
plan. In her years as an influencer, Loomer
has mentioned Puerto Rico mostly in the context of body-shaming “Porky Puerto
Rican” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On July 17, she took a sudden interest in
Puerto Rico’s 10-year-old debt-restructuring program. “This smells like USAID 2.0,” she wrote,
“another scheme where corrupt bureaucrats and well-connected insiders get rich
off of other people’s suffering.” Trump soon fired the majority of the board of
the bankruptcy authority.
Loomer vehemently
denies taking direction or money from lobbying firms. To admit to doing so is,
of course, the kiss of death with Trump. The eat-or-be-eaten foundation of the
MAGA movement does presume everyone has a side hustle, a grift, something to
upsell. If you’re not making bank on your access and advantages, you’re a
chump, leaving money on the table like the libtard betas who pay their taxes on
time. But the flipside is that if you’re making bank off your access to the
Boss and not cutting him in, you are very much risking his rage and your own
banishment. And without him, as one MAGA Loomer critic put it to me, “You’re
just a speck of dust.”
The post Everybody Around Trump Hates the Unhinged Laura Loomer. Except Trump. appeared first on New Republic.
