The latest far-right whacko to gain Main Character status in the broader political arena is a 31-year-old “pro–white nationalist” named Laura Loomer, who was most recently seen in public getting super handsy with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, with no Melania in sight. In other words, it’s an extremely normal moment in American politics.
Loomer is, unfortunately, already quite well-known to those of us who remember the times she crashed a 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production and handcuffed herself to Twitter’s New York City offices just a year later. However, less-online readers may have only learned of her this week thanks to two high-profile incidents: Loomer’s appearance at the 9/11 Memorial with Trump—in spite of Melania’s persistent absence, and in spite of Loomer’s professed belief in “inside job” conspiracies—and her online spat with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon), which further escalated into spats with Sens. Lindsey Graham and Thom Thillis. It’s becoming quite the headache for Trump’s Republican allies and his campaign aides, many of whom think Loomer is too extreme even for them and would like to cut off ties with her as soon as possible, before Trump gets dogged with even more rumors that he, uh, may be having an affair with her? (To be clear, these rumors are unfounded, for now.)
Who is this person, why do you have to know about her, and could she really become First Lady in Waiting? With great regret, I shall break it all down for you below.
Oh god, what now?
So, Laura Elizabeth Loomer is an Arizona-born Jewish American who, as she once told the Spectator, was drawn to far-right politics as a child, pushed toward Islamophobia by 9/11 and the war on terror, and inspired by the Fox News pundits her dad would watch every night. That media diet, coupled with her enthusiasm for hidden-camera prank shows like Punk’d (seriously), eventually got Loomer interested in broadcast journalism.
In the early 2010s, she enrolled in the Massachusetts women’s college Mount Holyoke but dropped out after a semester because, Loomer told the Forward, she felt ostracized as a student conservative. She then transferred to Barry University in Miami, where she became known as the “campus Islamophobe” and got hired by far-right sting operator James O’Keefe to film a sting of her own: persuading school administrators to allow her to start a pro-ISIS student group.
When Project Veritas published that video in 2015, Loomer was suspended from campus—and catapulted right into the world of Trump-era conservative media. She kept up her surreal attempts to bait liberals on film, with the goal of having them “Loomered”—an ethos she described as “a more political and profound type of Punk’d.” Some of her pranks included: dressing up in a hijab and attempting to vote in New York City by identifying herself as Huma Abedin, interrupting and screaming at a 2017 Shakespeare in the Park show of Julius Caesar that reimagined the titular monarch as a Trump-like figure, and asking Hillary Clinton about Benghazi at a What Happened book event.
Loomer garnered even more attention in late 2018 for her antics to call out Twitter for its supposed anti-conservative bias. She popped up at Capitol Hill for a congressional hearing in September with Jack Dorsey and began yelling from the back of a House committee hall, appealing to then–President Donald Trump (who wasn’t there) to “please help us, Mr. President, before it is too late, because Jack Dorsey is trying to influence the election, to sway the election, so that Democrats can steal the election!”
Her stunt didn’t land well with elected Republicans who otherwise may have agreed with that sentiment; conservative lawmaker Billy Long began rattling off an auctioneer-style chant to drown her out as she was escorted by security guards from the premises. Two months after that, Loomer was kicked off Twitter for posting hateful tweets about Ilhan Omar, who’d just notched her historic victory as one of the two first Muslim women elected to Congress. (Among other things, Loomer had accused Omar of being “pro-Sharia law.”) In response, Loomer handcuffed herself to Twitter’s NYC headquarters, wearing a sweatshirt that featured a Star of David and a “#StopTheBias” slogan.
Yeesh. But if she was annoying Republicans even then, how did she get to such a prominent place within the GOP?
So, from 2019 onward, Loomer kept pranking, occasionally got pranked herself, and was gradually kicked off every mainstream online platform—even from Uber and Lyft, whose drivers she targeted with Islamophobic hatred. All this fueled a persecution grievance that drove her to run for Congress in 2020, contesting the Republican primary in Donald Trump’s home district—and winning the nomination, along with Trump’s own tweeted endorsement. Though she lost that general election in a landslide, Loomer tried again in 2022, vying for the GOP nomination in a different Florida district. She lost that primary to incumbent Rep. Daniel Webster.
And she just … continued to fail upward?
Well, it helped a lot that Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022 and reinstated her account, allowing her to keep doing what she does best (i.e., posting racist nonsense and disinformation). It also helped that Trump, smarting from bruising GOP losses in 2020 and 2022 and facing multiple challenges for the presidential nomination, wanted to bolster his team with people who’d been consistently loyal—including Laura Loomer, whom Trump wanted to bring onto the campaign back in 2023. However, after the New York Times reported on that hiring proposal, Trump’s own advisers expressed their reservations about having her on board, and that plan was scuppered.
Kinda seems like she’s still in his good graces, though.
No kidding. He continued hanging out with her at his golf clubs and even shouted Loomer out at campaign rallies, even though, as she claimed to the Washington Post Magazine, the pro-Trump mediasphere (Fox News, the Daily Wire, etc.) considers her way too toxic to associate with, which is really saying something.
Really!?
I kid you not; she mostly made do with her own show on the right-wing video platform Rumble and fellow extremists like Steve Bannon (before he went off to prison, that is). Much of it, paradoxically, has to do with how unflinching she’s been in her pro-Trump advocacy. Case in point: In early 2023, after the debacle over Kevin McCarthy’s confirmation to be speaker of the House, her one-time friend Marjorie Taylor Greene called out Loomer for “spen[ding] months lying about me and attacking me just because I supported Kevin McCarthy.” (Loomer resented McCarthy for supporting Webster in their primary matchup.)
And now they’re fighting again??
Indeed, though this is mainly significant because Greene and Loomer were once pals, back when the former was herself a part of the political fringe. As Greene explained in a recent X post, she “used to be friends” with Loomer as far back as 2018 and helped support her first congressional campaign in 2020—the same year Greene successfully won her election to the House. They seemed to split, however, when Loomer attempted to challenge Webster and Greene “told her to run in another district, so she could win, but she refused.” After that, Greene wrote, “she turned on me and began attacking me” and “has lied so much about me and others like Matt Gaetz, even though we are Pres Trump’s most loyal and fierce elected Members of Congress.”
What spurred this latest fight, though?
Last week, Loomer—who now advises the Trump campaign’s social media efforts—quote-tweeted a post Kamala Harris wrote about her Indian heritage, claiming that “If @KamalaHarris wins, the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center”—a statement that not only seems to be too racist for Elon Musk’s X, which has “limited the visibility” of that post, but even for Greene, who has a lonnnnnnnng history of bigoted remarks against House colleagues of color like Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett, and Rashida Tlaib (along with plenty of interesting comments about “Jewish space lasers”). It’s fair to assume Greene’s indignation here is less about Loomer’s blatant racism than it is about their personal grudge.
But, no matter what even these folks say, Trump will not ditch Loomer.
He might never ditch her. She will definitely never ditch him, having confessed to the Washington Post Magazine that “if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.” (Sad!) And again, we all know how much Trump values loyalty, so you can keep expecting him to brush off Loomer’s most insane remarks and keep appearing with her in public, no matter how much his aides and fellow Republicans object.
Wait, but what does Melania think?
No one knows, since she’s currently spending her time making weird videos and promoting her upcoming book. Hey, maybe she’s happy for her husband and for Loomer.
