When Donald Trump flew to Pennsylvania this week for the 9/11 commemorations, he had an unusual companion: a 9/11 conspiracy theorist named Laura Loomer.
Loomer has been a far-right quasi-journalist for about a decade, prone to saying things that would make even die-hard MAGA types flinch. She’s a self-described “proud Islamophobe,” who has glorified the deaths of immigrants and called for banning Muslims from driving for ride-hailing apps. She ran for Congress twice, in 2020 and 2022, but lost both times. Most recently, Loomer called Kamala Harris a “drug-addled whore” and warned that if she wins, “the White House will smell like curry and White House speeches will be delivered via a call center.”
Despite all this, Trump has long shown warmth towards Loomer, endorsing her for her congressional bid in 2020 and trying to get her to join his 2023 campaign only to back away after aides pushed back. But undeterred, he hosted her at Mar-a-Lago after the election, repeatedly promoted her content on Truth Social, and accompanied her on his 2024 campaign tour.
It’s unclear what Trump gains from the relationship, but the relationship between Trump and Loomer has been a hotly contested one since the 9/11 attacks, with some of the former president’s closest allies publicly criticizing Loomer.
“This person’s record is really toxic,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Huffington Post. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who has claimed Jewish families are using space lasers to start wildfires, thought Loomer had gone too far, calling her tweets about Harris and Curry “horrifyingly racist.” (Loomer responded by accusing Greene of sleeping with “someone dressed as Zangief.”)
It’s hard to take these accusations too seriously. Trump and his running mate have been promoting conspiracy theories this week about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets, which appear to have sparked real-world hate crimes. If you’re worried about racism and conspiracy theories, you might want to look to the top of the candidates’ list.
But what makes Loomer different from Trump is that she literally has no filter: She says the quiet parts out loud. every timeThe more time Trump spends with her, the harder it becomes to deny that his thin-skinned bigotry is inauthentic. And for the Republican Party, that’s a very big problem indeed.
While Loomer is not a household name to most Americans, she has long been a presence in conservative media circles.
She first came to prominence in 2015, as a senior at Barry University in South Florida, when she was secretly filmed meeting with university officials trying to form a campus club that would support ISIS. The video was made public by Project Veritas, a conservative group that specializes in (questionably edited) undercover videos.
Loomer learned to make a career out of political stunts while working for Project Veritas during the 2016 presidential campaign, and she gained national attention in June 2017 when she stormed into a Shakespeare production. Julius Caesar In New York, people dressed up as Roman generals to resemble Donald Trump, a furor that led Loomer to appear on Sean Hannity’s show.
“You made a very strong case, and I applaud you for doing so,” Hannity told her.
Rumor said, Julius Caesar The incident has made her a kind of internet celebrity among Trump’s right-wing supporters, but the problem with celebrity is that it gives you too many opportunities to promote yourself, and Loomer has turned out to be someone with some truly outlandish views.
After an ISIS sympathizer killed eight people in a truck in November 2017, she launched an Islamophobic rant on Twitter, accusing popular ride-hailing apps of hiring Muslim drivers. “Someone needs to make a non-Islamic version of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support Muslim immigrant drivers again,” she wrote. The two services subsequently banned her, the first of many bans from well-known tech platforms.
In 2018, Loomer partnered with conspiracy site Infowars to cover the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. She suggested in a tweet that Students Against Gun Violence were spies: “It’s clear these kids are reading screens and notes written for them.” After the May 2018 school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, Loomer went further, tweeting that the entire incident was staged.
“Speaking to reporters today outside the hospital in Santa Fe, Texas, where a school shooting victim was taken, a doctor said that a ‘mass casualty drill’ had just taken place at the hospital at roughly the same time as the drill at the school,” she wrote. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help but notice these ‘coincidences.'”
This mix of hate speech and conspiracy misinformation has become a hallmark of Loomer’s political style and led to her being banned from major social media platforms.
For example, a defining moment on Twitter came in November 2018, when Loomer tweeted that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) supports female genital mutilation because she is Muslim.
The ban came a year after Twitter stripped Loomer of her blue checkmark (which was then given to celebrities, not a badge you could buy) as punishment for making similar false and offensive claims, leading her to chain herself to Twitter’s headquarters in New York while still wearing a Nazi-style yellow star. It’s worth noting that Loomer, who is Jewish, has long had close ties to the white nationalist movement. For example, she is close to Nick Fuentes, an avowed anti-Semite who once dined with President Trump in 2022 and loudly boasted, “I’m going to fight for white people.”
Laura Loomer was ejected from the Bitcoin 2021 Convention, a cryptocurrency conference held at the Manna Convention Center in Wynwood, Miami, Florida on June 4, 2021, after interrupting Twitter’s Jack Dorsey’s onstage speech.Joe Raedl/Getty Images
She presented herself as a victim of censorship by big tech companies and found allies in Washington, including popular far-right outlets like Breitbart. In December 2019, then-President Trump retweeted a tweet from Loomer’s supporters encouraging them to donate to her campaign. In May 2020, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) wrote Attorney General Bill Barr asking him to open an investigation into Loomer’s ban from Facebook. She returned to Twitter after Elon Musk bought the site.
GosalAlong with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Trump endorsed Loomer in her 2020 run for Congress in Florida, helping to normalize her and bring her into the mainstream of political debate by positioning her as a victim of Big Tech censorship (a major concern on the right today).
In 2020, she won the Republican primary but was defeated by a Democrat in the general election. In 2022, she ran in another Florida district but narrowly lost the Republican primary.
In theory, Donald Trump hates underdogs. Yet somehow he keeps coming back to Loomer, inviting her to Mar-a-Lago, posting praise for her on social media, and trying to recruit her into his campaign. Her recent travels with Trump are also a mystery. Axios reports that Trump is increasingly ignoring the advice of his advisers as his poll numbers fall, and is more likely to trust followers like Loomer.
But this is just a theory: Trump has been murky about his relationship with Loomer throughout the affair, and his campaign has not been particularly supportive.
“Anyone who thinks they know what’s going on, whether they’re an outsider or a reporter, is a liar,” Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Chang told Axios.
There’s a reason why Laura Loomer is panicking Marjorie Taylor Greene, too, and it’s not just because of some personal feud between the two of them, but because Laura Loomer is giving other Republican senators a bad rap.
For decades, the right has been peddling racism through dog whistles and coded messages. Ronald Reagan’s attacks on “welfare queens” didn’t actually involve racist slurs, but they conjured up images for some white voters of poor, lazy black women living comfortably off taxpayer money. Liberals called it racism, conservatives said liberals were just trying to shut down legitimate debate, and the cycle went round and round.
In theory, Donald Trump should have changed the situation: By calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and proposing a ban on Muslim immigration, he made little secret of the racial resentment that underpinned his political appeal.
But after bowing to Trump, the Republican Party reverted to old habits. No matter how outrageous Trump’s words and actions became — from the Muslim ban to family separations — liberal criticism was met with the same dismissal. Trump’s words and actions on immigration and crime aren’t racist, they would say. He’s simply speaking the language of forgotten Americans left behind by globalization. Liberals, they would say, are making everything a racial issue when it isn’t.
Trump and his key allies like Tucker Carlson were usually careful to keep these defenses plausible, repeatedly insisting that they were not racists, no matter how similar their words might have been to those of hardened bigots.
Bigots like Laura Loomer, for example.
By bringing her into his inner circle, Trump has upended his entire game. No one would suggest that the woman who says the first Indian-American president made the White House smell like curry is merely a race-neutral populist. No one would suggest that the woman who calls herself a “proud Islamophobe” isn’t a bigot.
If Trump endorses Loomer, as he has done so many times before, he would be implicitly saying that these ideas are part of his world, legitimizing liberal criticism that his movement is driven by simple bigotry and erasing any veneer of plausible deniability that Trump, a professed opponent of racism, might have had. Every time Trump posts in support of Loomer, and every time Loomer accompanies him, Trump’s reputational shield weakens.
That’s why this week’s heated debate matters: By bringing to the 9/11 memorial an avowed bigot who claims 9/11 was an “inside job,” Trump has shown that the lines separating him from those who represent his unbridled identity are fading. And Republicans know that’s a recipe for political disaster.
This is an updated version of an article about Loomer first published in 2020.
