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2024-09-24 | WebClipping | 2024-09-24 | https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2024/05/02/laura-loomer-donald-trump/ | true |
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For Laura Loomer, a Trump comeback is everything
VERO BEACH, Fla. — It would be easy enough for Laura Loomer to prove how much she means to Donald Trump. She just needed a way for us to bump into him.
The plan: Leave Vero Beach at 9 a.m. on Wednesday morning. That would give us enough time to swing by Starbucks — “I’m not one of those conservatives who hates Starbucks,” Loomer said — and hit Interstate 95 southbound as rush hour waned. Arrive at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach around 11:30 a.m.; her name would be on the list, as a guest of a club member who routinely plays golf with the former president. Head to the oak-paneled dining room, or maybe the veranda, for lunch. Trump would finish his round of golf not long after that. If he came by the dining area — though he often came by the dining area — he would say hello.
“Tomorrow we’ll go down and you’ll get to see firsthand that it’s a bunch of bulls--- that they say that Trump doesn’t like me,” she said. “Because Trump likes me.”
Loomer, a far-right activist and former Republican congressional candidate, has plenty of evidence that Trump likes her. There are all the times he’s boosted her videos on Truth Social. There was the event last summer, at Trump’s New Jersey golf club, when the former president spotted Loomer on the rope line and invited her onto his private balcony. There was the shout-out at a rally in Iowa, in January, when Trump praised her as “a very important person, politically.” There were the former president’s invitations to fly on Trump Force One, his Boeing 757 — Loomer remembers being a passenger three times, Trump aides recall only two — bobbing along to Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” en route from Palm Beach to Des Moines last January.
There’s also the fact that Trump reportedly wanted to hire her for a campaign role last spring, before aides intervened.
So she’s been working toward a second coming of Trump on her own, as something of a cheerleader-slash-opposition researcher. Loomer has made Trump’s causes her own since 2015, when Trump accused Mexico of sending “rapists” across the border and called for a “complete and total shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States. That kind of incendiary rhetoric didn’t keep Trump out of the White House, but Loomer’s anti-Islam utterances, among other alleged terms-of-use violations, cost her access to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. She can’t use Lyft or Uber (including Uber Eats) because she criticized the companies for employing “Islamic immigrant driver[s].” (“I’m not anti-Muslim,” she told me, “but I am anti-Islam.”) She claims PayPal, Venmo, Cash App and GoFundMe also booted her.
None of this has chastened Loomer, who maintains she’s done nothing wrong. “I actually collect Mohammed cartoons,” she told me at one point, referring to the prophet of Islam, the depiction of whom is considered offensive among Muslims. She has a copy of a January 2015 cover of Charlie Hebdo — the one depicting a tearful Mohammed, published in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the headquarters of the French satirical magazine. “It’s iconic,” she says of the magazine cover. “It’s about free speech. It’s a testament to how barbaric Islam is.”
Loomer is too much for even her ostensible allies in the MAGA-friendly media to stomach. She often claims Fox News has blacklisted her and laments that the right-wing media personalities of Turning Point USA and the Daily Wire don’t invite her on their shows — even though they’re quick to applaud her handiwork online. A Fox News spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Turning Point USA said that Loomer has attended their events and that hosts have shared her reporting. In a recent post on X, Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing called Loomer “occasionally effective,” if also “occasionally hyperbolic” and “prone to seeing correlation as causation and connection as conspiracy.”
Loomer isn’t a fan of her hero’s disciples on Capitol Hill, either. She calls Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) a “bulls--- artist” for not doing more to hold House Speaker Mike Johnson accountable after Gaetz led Kevin McCarthy’s ouster. She refers to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), whom Loomer criticized for supporting McCarthy (among other things) as “Marjorie Traitor Greene.”
“I get calls all the time — from our allies in the House, for example — ‘How can you have that sewer rat on?’” says Stephen K. Bannon, the MAGA field general and “War Room” podcast host, of Loomer.
“Laura Loomer is a political science experiment gone wrong,” says Peter Schorsch, a former Republican operative who now runs the website Florida Politics. “She’s what happens when you take a gadfly and inject it with that radioactive waste from Godzilla.”
“Some people say, ‘Oh, Laura has a personality disorder,’” Loomer says. “I don’t. I just don’t like how disloyal people are.”
But never mind all that, because Trump himself likes her — which makes her, potentially, a player. A person of relevance. An influential figure, despite it all. The presumptive Republican nominee for president “appreciates her fearlessness and tenacity,” according to a senior Trump campaign aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
People around the former president apparently see her as a liability at a time when the Trump campaign (if not the candidate himself) is making a conscious effort to make their man appear less extreme, according to several sources close to the campaign’s inner circle. Loomer is friendly with Trump’s campaign staff and hung around with them at hotels in Iowa and New Hampshire. And yet, no one wanted to discuss Loomer on the record. “No thank u,” texted Justin Caporale, Trump’s deputy campaign manager for operations, when I asked whether he’d chat with me about her. (The Trump campaign later clarified that the text was not intended to be related to the request to speak about Loomer but was declining to speak to The Post.)
“She scares people in Trumpworld,” says Bannon. “They would refer to her as a grenade with a pin in it.”
But even if top aides wish Trump would keep his distance from Loomer, there’s not much they can do — he just loves her so much. Loomer says that he’s called her and sent handwritten notes thanking her for her efforts. In March, at Mar-a-Lago, Trump wrapped his arm around her waist, telling onlookers, “She’s a lot softer than people realize.”
Loomer is dead set on landing a role in a second Trump administration, no matter what his aides think. (“That will never happen in any way shape or form,” said a person close to Trump’s advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak for the campaign.) Either way, she sees the stakes of his reelection as dire — not just for the country, but for her.
“I don’t really have much of a life, you know?” Loomer says. “So I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.”
The day before we were supposed to casually encounter Trump at his golf course, I met Loomer at a seaside diner. She’d just refreshed the “MAGA red” highlights in her ink-black hair and wore a brick-colored cashmere sweater over her jeans. It was a homage to “the orange man,” she said — an effort to reclaim liberals’ disparaging description of Trump’s carrot-tinged tan.
She is less frenzied in person than her online presence would suggest, but still intense. A server came by to take our order and Loomer interrogated her about the hash browns: Were they freshly grated or frozen? What about the home fries — were they fresh, too?
“I try to eat really healthy,” she explains after the server leaves. She says she’s lost 25 pounds since last spring. “I want to work for Trump. He doesn’t really like ...” She trails off, considering her words. “I’m not saying you have to be thin to work for President Trump. I’m just saying that if I wanted to work for the president and have a communications job, I’d have to look presentable.”
The majority of her current work centers on digging up whatever she can on Trump’s enemies — as well as shoving her iPhone in the faces of various political figures and demanding to know why they’ve failed to demonstrate sufficient fealty to the former, a practice she calls “Loomering.”
“Hey Governor, when are you gonna drop out?” Loomer asked Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) after chasing him into a hotel gift shop in Iowa in January. “Answer a question, Ron!” she continued, after DeSantis and a bodyguard shimmied past her into the lobby. “I thought you were ‘Never back down!’” She followed him toward an elevator. “You betrayed President Trump,” Loomer yelled as the elevator doors closed, “you betrayed the people of Florida, and you’re going to lose!”
DeSantis, who was seen as perhaps Trump’s most formidable challenger in the Republican primary, did end up dropping out, but not before enduring several flavors of Loomering. In March 2023, she staged a Trump rally outside a DeSantis book-signing and filmed an officer explaining that DeSantis’s staff had asked her to leave. She mocked outfits worn by DeSantis’s wife and even suggested that Casey DeSantis was exaggerating her breast cancer diagnosis, calling on the campaign to release her medical records.
“Every time President Trump sees me,” Loomer says, “whether he’s golfing on or the plane, he says, ‘This is the woman who destroyed Ron DeSantis.’”
That might be overstating her influence. But not her tenacity.
“Once she sets her mind on something, Zeus himself could send down a lightning bolt and I don’t think that would stop her,” says Jacob Engels, a conservative writer.
Loomer’s ability to remain visible to Trump is, perhaps, a testament to the former president’s media diet — which apparently includes content on the platforms where the self-described “most banned woman in the world” still freely posts. Her show, “Loomer Unleashed,” airs via Rumble. She’s also on Gab, Gettr, Telegram — and now X, formerly Twitter, where she was unbanned after Elon Musk took over. “It’s pretty amazing,” she says of her reinstatement. “It’s given me an opportunity to have a comeback.”
And, of course, she’s on Truth Social, the platform that Trump himself founded after he was kicked off Twitter. This is where Trump’s affection for Loomer’s work shines the brightest. He’s “re-truthed” dozens of her “truths,” many of which evoke the former president’s own posting style: one calling Republican Rep. Tom Emmer (Minn.) a “communist enabler” beholden to “the Uniparty” (a disparaging term for the political establishment); one about how “President Trump was 100% right to FIRE THAT DIRTY COP JAMES COMEY!!! #WitchHunt #LockComeyUp”; one calling for a “MISTRIAL!” in Trump’s New York civil fraud trial based on the social media activity of the judge’s wife.
Loomer categorizes herself as an investigative journalist, and lately she’s been focused on what she sees as the sinister forces behind Trump’s legal woes. In the case of another judge — Juan Merchan, who is overseeing Trump’s New York criminal case — Loomer surfaced details about Merchan’s daughter’s work at a Democratic-aligned digital marketing firm. Trump’s lawyers echoed those details in a court motion asking the judge to remove himself from the trial. (The judge denied the motion but expanded Trump’s gag order to include members of Merchan’s family after he called the daughter a “Rabid Trump Hater.”)
Loomer saw in the episode a direct line between herself and the former president. “Trump saw my posts,” she says. “I know he saw them.”
She’s also been focused on immigrants — “I call them ‘invaders’ because that’s what they are,” she says. (She means all immigrants, not just those who are undocumented, and would like to see a 20-year moratorium on all forms of immigration.) Before my visit, Loomer had floated the idea of me accompanying her to the Florida Keys, where we’d take a boat to “track down illegal aliens.” (I declined, and we decided to try to track down Trump instead.)
We finished breakfast and walked along the beach as Loomer made calls to prepare for that day’s episode of “Loomer Unleashed.” She had to finish her opening monologue about, as she summarized it to me, “the left embracing barbaric ideologies and then also endangering Americans under the guise of diversity, like Islam and the Haitians and the cannibals.” She texted with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) to see whether she might be free to come on and talk about President Biden’s impeachment. She checked in with Charles Downs, her apprentice on Capitol Hill, who was planning to accost Gen. Mark A. Milley after a committee hearing.
Milley had served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the end of the Trump administration and, concerned about Trump’s mental state, reportedly intervened to avoid an armed conflict with China. “He’s going to ask him whether or not he’s going to apologize to the American people and to President Trump for undermining President Trump’s authority,” she said.
“We make all of our questions about Trump.”
For Loomer, Trump is also an answer.
She hasn’t been home to visit her parents in more than two years. She went to boarding school at 13 — “it’s hard to feel a close connection when you go away that young,” she says. She’s not close with her two brothers. She says she doesn’t date, blaming her notoriety for her views on Islam. Dating apps are a non-starter: Her time undercover with Project Veritas taught her how to use those platforms to trap targets.
She says she watches no TV, reads only political books and listens only to political podcasts. She’ll occasionally treat herself to an episode of “Fresh and Fit,” a “men’s self-improvement podcast,” which she enjoys for how its hosts “shame women into making better decisions.” She claims no extracurriculars — unless you count walking her dogs, a graying Yorkipoo named Mecca (“She came with the name,” Loomer insists) and a loafing bulldog named Loomer (“She was supposed to be that animal version of me, but you know, she’s not exactly energetic”). She canceled an April vacation to Mexico she’d planned with her best friend because it coincided with Trump’s hush money trial in New York. Loomer instead spent the week parked outside the courthouse reporting on and cheering for Trump.
“She’s like a monk in medieval France,” says Bannon. “I don’t know anybody who has dedicated their body and soul to not only Trump, but MAGA, the way she has.”
Loomer’s dream of officially joining Trump’s team nearly came true last spring. “I’ll never forget it,” she says, recalling her meeting with the former president at Mar-a-Lago. “He says, ‘Make sure she gets on the team, we gotta hire her.’ And he goes, ‘She’s a lot smarter than a lot of these other people who have worked for me.’”
This was in March 2023, right around the time she was laying into DeSantis. Loomer had been invited to meet with Trump and campaign co-chair Susie Wiles. The president lavished praise on her, Loomer recalls. She’d been set to start work on April 1 of last year.
And then everything fell apart. The New York Times reported that the Trump campaign was about to hire Loomer. Later that day, the Times updated its story to say that the news had caused outrage among some Trump supporters, and that a campaign official was now saying Loomer would not be hired after all. (An aide to the Trump campaign declined to comment, other than to say that the New York Times story had nothing to do with ultimately not hiring Loomer.)
Whatever the reason, Loomer felt humiliated.
“I really viewed being able to work for President Trump as an opportunity to rebuild my reputation and life after so much had been taken from me,” she says.
Throughout her career, Loomer has struggled openly with a sense that she’s been robbed of the better-paid, more respected position she thinks she deserves in the right-wing media apparatus just because people don’t like her. She’s constantly trying to land the job or the scoop that will give her life some stability.
“Donald Trump is, like, hope for me,” she says. “I don’t really feel like I have anything in my life. I got canceled everywhere for what, speaking the truth? And they treat me like a criminal. Half the world thinks I’m a Nazi. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
I never got to witness Trump’s affection for Loomer in person; the scheme to encounter the former president fell apart as quickly as it had come together. Loomer called Tuesday night to say we wouldn’t be going to Trump’s golf club after all. Her fixer had second-guessed the wisdom of bringing a Washington Post reporter onto a Trump property, she explained to me, and had proposed coffee with me and Loomer instead — not quite as exciting of a plan, since the likelihood of running into the former president at a coffee shop seemed next to nil. But that also fell through, in the end. “Too much to do ahead of the Palm Beach boat show,” Loomer explained on behalf of our would-be host.
There was still business in Palm Beach, however. Dan Fleuette, a filmmaker and former producer for “War Room,” was in town to shoot portraits for a coffee-table book of Bannon’s past podcast guests. He’d set up shop at the headquarters of Real America’s Voice, the far-right network. Here was a corner of political media where Loomer could get a warm welcome: When she arrived, network founder Robert Sigg popped out of his glass-walled office to greet her.
Loomer sat on a stool before Fleuette’s backdrop. She tossed her head back, her red highlights rippling against a black sweater. As she posed for his camera, Fleuette asked her whether she had any favorite quotes, something he could include alongside her portrait in the book.
“I like a Trump quote about always getting even,” Loomer said. “I think it’s just, ‘I love getting even.’”
Many of MAGA’s leading lights had posed for Fleuette: Kari Lake. Alex Jones. Tucker Carlson, with his signature half-smirk. Sebastian Gorka, cradling one of his antique pistols. Bannon, of course. But he was missing someone.
“Can you get me Trump?” he asked Loomer.
She considered the request. Maybe she could interview the former president and Fleuette could shoot it. “I want to have a really nice photo with him,” she says. She made a couple of phone calls. She texted Jason Miller, one of Trump’s senior advisers. Not today, but maybe later in the week? Loomer promised to let me know. “Maybe you could come back and see.”
A week later, my phone buzzed, the vibrations of several texts sent in rapid succession. They were all X posts from Loomer sharing a video from that evening’s fundraiser for Kari Lake at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump, in the middle of delivering remarks, found Loomer, in a forest green dress, standing among the gathered crowd. “Laura, how are you?” he cooed. “You look so beautiful as always.”
He turned his gaze to the gathered crowd. “That’s a woman with courage,” he continued. “You don’t want to be Loomered. If you’re Loomered, you’re in deep trouble.”
Will Sommer contributed to this report.
clarification
This article has been revised to clarify that when Trump's deputy campaign manager for operations declined via text message to speak to The Washington Post about Loomer, he was declining to speak to The Post in general, not specifically about Loomer.
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