When Donald Trump flew to Pennsylvania for a 9/11 anniversary event this week, he brought an unusual entourage: 9/11 conspirators The name is Laura Loomer.
Lumer has been a right-wing quasi-journalist for nearly a decade, with a penchant for saying things like: Hardened MAGA type recoil. He is a self-described “proud Islamophobe” who has cheered the death of migrants and called for a Muslim driving ban for the ride-hailing app. He contested for Congress twice in 2020 and 2022 and failed both times. more recentlyLumer called Kamala Harris a “drug-using whore” and warned that, if she wins, “the White House Smells like curry And the White House speech will be facilitated through the call center.”
Despite all this, Trump has long displayed a soft spot for Lumar. He supported her House bid in 2020 and tried to give her a spot in his campaign in 2023 — Only to return after the auxiliaries revolted. Discouraged, he is Later hosted him at Mar-a-LagoBarbar Truth has boosted his content on social, and traveled with him during the 2024 campaign.
It’s unclear what Trump got out of the relationship. But his relationship with Lumar has become a major controversy since the events of 9/11, with some of the former president’s close allies speaking out against Lumar.
“This man’s history is really toxic,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). told HuffPost. Rep. Major Taylor Green (R-GA) — who claimed a Jewish family was using space lasers to start fires! — thinks Lumar is a bridge too far, calling Lumar’s tweet about Harris and Curry “horrible and extremely racist.” (Lummar responds by accusing Greene of sleeping “Zangif Cosplayer.”)
It is hard to take all these criticisms seriously. Trump and his vice-presidential picks have spent this week pushing what appears to be a sinister conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating people’s pets. Inspired by real world hate crimes. If you’re concerned about racism and conspiracy theories, take a look at the top of the ticket.
But what separates Loomer from Trump is that he literally has no filter. He says the quiet part out loud. every single time. The more time Trump spends with him, the harder it is to deny that his thinly veiled bigotry is anything but the genuine article. And that, for the Republican Party, is a really big problem.
Who is Laura Loomer?
Lumer isn’t a household name for most Americans, but she’s been a presence in the conservative media ecosystem for quite some time.
He first gained attention in 2015 when, as a college senior at Barry University in South Florida, he secretly filmed a meeting with administrators in which he tried Forms campus club supporting ISIS. The video was released Project VeritasConservative groups that specialize in (Suspiciously edited) sting video.
Loomer worked for Project Veritas during the 2016 presidential campaign and learned to build a career outside of political stunts. She grabbed the national spotlight in June 2017 when she stormed the stage In a Shakespeare performance Julius Caesar The Roman general who dressed up as Donald Trump in New York. disruption Lumar gets booked on Sean Hannity’s show.
“You made very strong points. I applaud you for what you’ve done,” Hannity told him.
Notoriety parlayed from Loomer Julius Caesar The phenomenon among a kind of internet celebrity on the pro-Trump right. The problem with celebrity though is that it can give you a lot of opportunities to show yourself off. And Loomer proved to be someone with truly outsider views.
After eight ISIS supporters were killed A truck in November 2017He went on an Islamophobic rant on Twitter, blaming the popular ride-hailing app for recruiting Muslim drivers. “Someone needs to create a non-Islamic form of Uber or Lyft because I would never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver,” he wrote. Later two services Banned himThe first of many bans from high-profile tech platforms.
In 2018, Loomer teamed up with conspiracy theory site Informs to cover the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. he had A tweet suggested Students who are out there speaking out against gun violence were plants: “It’s obvious these kids are reading a screen or someone else wrote it for them.” In May 2018, after a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, Loomer went further, suggesting in a tweet that the whole thing was staged.
“Doctors speaking to the media outside the hospital in Santa Fe, TX where a school shooting victim was taken today, said they had a ‘mass casualty drill’ at the hospital at the same time as the school drill.” He wrote. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help noticing this ‘coincidence’.”
This particular cocktail of hate speech and conspiracy theory misinformation became the hallmark of Loomer’s political style, prompting bans from major social media platforms.
For example, the straw that broke the camel’s back on Twitter came in November 2018 when Lumer tweeted that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) Supported female genital mutilation Because he is Muslim.
In response to the ban, which came a year after Twitter stripped it of its blue check mark (then giving things to notable people rather than badges for purchase) as punishment for similar false and offensive claims, Loomer Physically chained himself to Twitter’s headquarters Wearing a Nazi-style yellow star while in New York. It is worth noting here that Luma has a long association with the Jewish but white nationalist movement. He, for example, Stop with avowed anti-Semitism Nick Fuentes who dined with Trump in 2022 and once boasted widely that “I’m going to fight for the white man.”
By presenting himself as a victim of Big Tech censorship, he found allies Popular right-wing publications choice Breitbart as well as in Washington. In December 2019, then-President Trump retweeted a Luma supporter Calling for donations to his campaign. In May 2020Rep. Paul Gosser (R-AZ) sent a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr urging him to open an investigation into Lumar’s Facebook ban. He was reinstated on Twitter After purchasing Elon Mask of the site
GosarRep. Along with Matt Gaetz (R-FL), endorsed Loomer during his 2020 House bid in Florida. Positioning him as a victim of Big Tech censorship — a major concern on the right — helped normalize him and bring him into the mainstream of political debate.
In 2020, he actually won the Republican primary, only to be defeated by a Democrat in the general election. In 2022, he ran in a different Florida district but narrowly lost in the Republican primary.
In theory, Donald Trump hates losers. But for some reason, she keeps coming back to Lumar — hosting him at Mar-a-Lago, posting his praises on social media and trying to get him on his campaign. Why she only recently started traveling with him is also a mystery; A report by Axios This is attributed to an embittered Trump increasingly dismissing the advice of his advisers as his poll numbers fade and leaning toward believing sycophants like Loomer.
But this is just a theory. Trump has become unclear During the current dust-up about her relationship with Lumar, and the Trump campaign, it hasn’t been very helpful.
“Anyone who thinks they know what’s going on — whether outsiders or reporters — is full of shit,” said a Trump campaign spokesman. Steven Cheung told Axios.
Why Laura Loomer Matters
Laura Loomer has a reason even Marjorie Taylor Green is terrified of, and it’s not just two There are reportedly personal beefs. It’s that Laura Luma makes the rest of the Republican Party look terrible.
For decades, the right has flirted with racism through dog whistles and coded messages. Ronald Reagan’s attack on “welfare queens” did not involve actual racist slogans but created a mental image for some white voters of a poor lazy black woman living a comfortable life by exploiting taxpayer dollars. Liberals will call this rhetorical racism, conservatives will say liberals are just trying to shut down legitimate debate, and back and forth we go.
In theory, Donald Trump should have changed the game. By calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and proposing a ban on Muslim immigration, he does little to hide the racial resentment at the core of his political appeal.
But after capitulating to Trump, the GOP reverted to its old habits. No matter how offensive Trump’s rhetoric and even his actions — from the Muslim ban to family separation — liberal criticisms were met with similar dismissal. Trump’s rhetoric about immigration and crime can’t be racist, they’ll say; He is simply speaking the language of Americans forgotten by globalization. Liberals, they like to say, are making everything about race when it isn’t.
Trump, and his top allies like Tucker Carlson, have been careful enough to keep these defenses reasonable. They will insist over and over again that they were not racist – no matter how similar their language is to what you hear from outside fanatics.
Like Bigots, Laura likes Loomer.
By bringing him into his inner circle, Trump blew up the whole game. The woman who talks about the first Indian-American president, the woman who makes the White House smell like curry, is a mere race-neutral populist. No one can say that a woman who claims to be a “proud Islamophobe” isn’t bigoted.
If Trump is endorsing Loomer, as he has repeatedly said, he is clearly saying that these kinds of views are part of his world. He is validating liberal criticism that his movement is animated by plain old bigotry and peels away the thin veneer of reasoned denial of his professed opposition to apartheid. Every post she sends endorsing him, every second she travels with Trump, weakens her reputational shield.
So this week’s firestorm is important. By bringing an outspoken bigot who suggests that 9/11 was an “inside job” to a 9/11 memorial, Trump showed that the lines separating him from the people his unabashed ID represents are evaporating. And that, as Republicans know, is a recipe for political disaster.
This is an updated version of a part of Loomer that originally appeared in 2020.
