Copyright newyorker
As Loomer saw it, civil disobedience was the only tool she had left to save Western civilization from the menaces of immigration, Antifa, feminism, liberalism, Islamic terrorism, the Chinese, wokeness. She had already been kicked off most mainstream social-media platforms for things like “hateful conduct” and being a “dangerous individual.” She took to carrying a bullhorn around and contemplated driving her car off a cliff. In 2020, she ran for Congress, in the Florida district that included Mar-a-Lago, but she couldn’t make a candidate Facebook account or use PayPal to raise money. Her Democratic opponent refused to say her name, instead referring to her as a woman with the darkest heart she had ever known. Loomer lost the election by twenty points. She descended even further into what she called her “oubliette.” Increasingly, she had the sense that she was taking part in an ongoing conversation with Trump, almost like a shared inner monologue. “I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, President Trump is me,’ or, ‘I see myself in Trump.’ But I do. I mean, I do,” she told me recently. “Every time I listen to him speak, I feel like I’m listening to myself speak to myself. Does that make sense?” We were at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist, at a football stadium in Glendale, Arizona. (Kirk, who founded the youth organization Turning Point USA, had just been assassinated while speaking at a campus event in Utah.) The service, which was attended by nearly a hundred thousand mourners, began with three hours of live Christian rock. A man dragged a large wooden cross around the arena; babies wore noise-cancelling headphones while their parents swayed to the music. Loomer, who is thirty-two, casts herself as the President’s chief loyalty enforcer. She lives her life largely online—her Twitter account was reinstated in 2022, after Elon Musk purchased the company—where she posts long threads questioning the credentials and allegiances of Trump Administration officials, among other suspects. It’s always a bit disorienting to see her in person. She is slight and fairly sedate. At the memorial service, she wore a blue blouse, black slacks, and white loafers. “Since they tried killing Trump, I try not to go to events,” she said. “I’ve just been hiding in my hotel room.” For twenty hours a day, from about 5 a.m. to 1 a.m., Loomer releases torrents of accusations and invective, an infinite scroll of alleged misdeeds and nefarious connections. She writes with the urgency of an Amber Alert, or of an incensed traveller tweeting at United Airlines in the middle of a flight delay. (“NEW: Anti-Trump, Islamist, Pakistani Immigrant State Department Employee Who Attacked Trump’s Islamic Travel Ban And Advocated For Islamic Foot Washing Stations At @StateDept Still Employed At US State Department Under Trump’s Administration. SHE JUST DELETED HER LINKEDIN!”) Though many of Loomer’s posts read like empty threats being pushed out into the void, they often reach more than a million people. She has credited herself with purging dozens of people from both the Administration and high-ranking roles in the private sector. Her motives apparently range from a desire to save the country to unabashed, petty vindictiveness; the two often overlap. She has a receptive ear in the White House. Despite never working for Trump in an official capacity—a job offer was rescinded after staffers opposed bringing her on—he has, since retaking the Presidency, allowed her to “come and visit occasionally,” Loomer told me. Trump, she insisted, is the only “other person on this planet who I think can actually empathize with me and who I can actually empathize with. I really do believe that.” He recently told her, “You’re great, and you’re difficult.” On the floor of the stadium, the music was so loud that it was almost impossible to hear anything. I stood behind a woman who was swirling her white dress around before falling to her knees to pray. Above, I could see Trump in his glass-encased skybox. Two planes full of Administration officials, practically the entire Cabinet, had come from Washington for the funeral, as had a cross-section of the wider MAGA universe—from Tucker Carlson to the guy who shows up at rallies dressed as the border wall. Near the stage, where V.I.P. guests were filtering through the crowd to take their seats in a roped-off section, a woman on a motorized scooter backed up to hug Loomer and congratulate her on her work. Two teen-agers in Trump hats asked her for selfies. “I love when you drop the teasers and it’s, like, ‘I’m going to kill you later!’ ” one said. (Loomer will often post a red siren emoji with a directive to keep watching her account for a bombshell reveal.) Jacob Wells, a founder of GiveSendGo, an online fund-raising platform that Loomer has used to solicit donations for her “lawfare fund,” came up to shake her hand. Sean Curran, the director of the Secret Service, approached the V.I.P. area, flanked by a coterie of other agents. Loomer recognized him immediately; Curran had jumped on Trump during the attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania. “Oh, my God, that’s the hero that saved President Trump!” Loomer said. She went up to say hello. They, too, hugged and took a photo together. “I’d love to talk to you sometime,” Curran said. “I’ll give you my contact.” He pressed a Secret Service commemorative coin into her palm. Loomer has described her work by quoting Plato: “No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” At the memorial, at least in some corners, she was being received with reverence. “People who are entrusted with the life of the President value the work that I’m doing,” she told me. She radiated a sense of weariness that this grand task, of being Trump’s protector and soothsayer, fell to her. “Why is it that I’m the one that has to identify people who are actively working against him?” Loomer had started to attack Warner the previous week, after he visited an ICE detention center. (Members of Congress are allowed to conduct such visits for oversight purposes, but many have been turned away or arrested.) “I don’t follow Ms. Loomer’s tweeting,” Warner told me. “But I was told that she’d gone on a screech for some time, calling me out.” He wasn’t sure whether to categorize her as a “trolling blogger” or a shadow member of the Administration. “When Laura Loomer tweets, Trump’s Cabinet jumps,” he said. Some of Warner’s Republican friends on the Hill had been attacked by her, too. Warner went on, “She’s an equal-opportunity offender.” By then, Loomer’s interference in government matters had become a regular occurrence. In early April, Mike Waltz, then the national-security adviser, walked into the Oval Office to find Loomer sitting across from the President, in the midst of a presentation that questioned the allegiances of a number of members of his National Security Council. After the meeting, Trump hugged Loomer, then promptly fired six members of the N.S.C. He also fired General Timothy Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and of U.S. Cyber Command. According to Loomer, Haugh, a thirty-three-year veteran of the Air Force, was close with General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Trump had appointed and then clashed with during his first term. Wendy Noble, Haugh’s deputy, was also fired; she was apparently connected to another Trump critic, James Clapper, Barack Obama’s director of National Intelligence. Loomer wanted Waltz gone, too—he had been tagged as a neocon who, in her estimation, was contravening Trump’s desires. She was also concerned about his judgment: his deputy, Alex Wong, was married to a career prosecutor who had worked at the Department of Justice during the Biden Administration. A few weeks later, they both departed. Loomer posted, “SCALP.” According to three people with direct knowledge of Waltz’s ouster, Loomer had nothing to do with it. “It wasn’t working out with him,” someone with close ties to the White House told me. “She ends up getting the credit for it because she’s the one out there talking.” (Weeks before, Waltz had inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, to a Signal chat in which members of the Administration were discussing plans to bomb Yemen.) Still, White House officials—and operatives across Washington—have no choice but to deal with her. “I was on an hour-long Zoom call, which probably cost, when you think of how much everyone was getting paid, at least fifty thousand dollars, to talk about what to do about Loomer,” a consultant who works with the Administration told me. Her screeds are routinely cited in major newspapers and footnoted in lawsuits; her targets range from low-level government employees to the Pope. Recently, Loomer posted that an official at Customs and Border Protection was “Anti-Trump, pro-Open Borders, and Pro-DEI.” Three days later: “Now he’s FIRED.” She described Lisa Monaco, Microsoft’s new head of global affairs—and Joe Biden’s Deputy Attorney General—as a “rabid Trump hater,” and demanded that the company’s government contracts, which total billions of dollars, be revoked. “Wait till President Trump sees this,” she wrote. Not long afterward, Trump called for Monaco to be fired. Loomer picked up the baton, tagging Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s C.E.O. “Are you going to comply? Or continue to be two-faced?” she wrote. “How dare you.” Loomer’s influence extends beyond the realm of personnel. In August, a group of Palestinian children who had been severely injured in the war in Gaza arrived in San Francisco after the State Department issued around two hundred temporary visas for medical treatment. Loomer posted a video of the children being received with flowers at the airport. “Why are any Islamic invaders coming into the US under the Trump admin?” she wrote. “Who signed off on these visas? They should be fired.” She tagged Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, who was with Trump on Air Force One, having just met with Vladimir Putin in Alaska to try to broker an end to the war in Ukraine. “Look, President Trump has said he wants to crack down on Islamic terror, that he wants to crack down on Hamas,” Loomer told me. “I’ll tag whoever’s in charge of the agency, the offending agency, and I’ll say, ‘Are you going to be prepared to tell President Trump how this is in compliance with his agenda?’ ” She and Rubio spoke that evening. “He took a hands-on approach,” Loomer told me. The next day, the Administration suspended all visitor visas for anyone from Gaza. Republican lawmakers celebrated online. “I’m not saying Rubio is trying to run a fast one on Trump, but obviously there’s a lot of people at the State Department who shouldn’t be working there,” she said. “Bad actors.” During Trump’s first term, his agenda was frequently stymied by what maga acolytes consider disloyal political appointees and deep-state bureaucrats. “Trump One was a disappointment in a lot of ways,” a strategist with close ties to the Administration told me. “People got let in that were not aligned. Everybody is super psycho afraid of being screwed over again.” This time, rooting out perceived internal enemies has become an obsession. Cabinet secretaries have required staff members to take random polygraph tests. A high-level Administration official told me that, during one of the interviews for her position, her interlocutor opened his mouth to reveal that he had a maga tattoo on the underside of his lower lip. “It’s over the top, but it’s the currency of the realm,” the high-level official said. As the strategist put it, “We’ve fought too hard to get here—that’s just the feeling that permeates everything.” At dinner one night, a lawyer with ties to the Administration told me, “We took power, but we’re in a cold war, and we may not win.” Loomer thrives in this paranoid ambience. “I am screenshotting everyone’s posts and I’m going to deliver them in a package to President Trump so he sees who is truly with him and who isn’t,” she wrote recently. (Like Trump, she prints everything out.) Her vetting crusades have brought about a new Washington colloquialism. “Bro, I got Loomered,” a current Administration official said over drinks. David Sacks, Trump’s A.I. czar, mentioned on a podcast that A.I. critics ought to be “Loomered.” Trump himself has said, “If you’re Loomered, you’re in deep trouble. That’s the end of your career, in a sense.” Loomer describes her project as a constant purge. “Every day, I find a new one,” she told me. “It’s never going to end.” Growing up, her household was generally conservative. Loomer has two brothers, one of whom suffers from schizophrenia, and when she was twelve her father enrolled her and the other brother in a private boarding school to keep them away from what could be a violent home environment. The school, on a ranch in the Arizona desert, was selective and remote. (Ronald Reagan and James Stewart sent their children there.) It had an internet curfew and almost no cell service. “Fear of being cut off from the world has stayed with me my whole life,” Loomer wrote. She moved across the country to attend Mount Holyoke College, a women’s liberal-arts school in Massachusetts. It was not a good fit. “Militant Marxist lesbians who, as soon as they got wind of my politics, wanted my head on a pike,” she wrote. She transferred to Barry University, a Catholic college in Miami. It wasn’t much better: “An impossible nightmare of woke from which I barely escaped without having my life ruined and almost going to jail.” In her senior year, she vehemently protested an interfaith 9/11 memorial service that included Muslim prayers, which she found deeply offensive. “The administration feared that I was either mentally ill or that I was in need of an urgent spiritual intervention,” she wrote. Loomer’s outburst garnered enough attention that, in 2014, she was invited to a yearly retreat hosted by the late conservative writer David Horowitz, whose organization centers on opposing “efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country.” Candace Owens was among the other aspirational activists who got their start there. Horowitz also mentored Stephen Miller, now a deputy chief of staff in the White House, whom he met when Miller was a teen-ager in Santa Monica. (Later, under Horowitz’s supervision, Miller set up an “Islamo-fascism awareness week” at Duke.) At the conference, which was held at the Breakers hotel, in Palm Beach, Loomer saw a presentation by James O’Keefe, the founder of the undercover-sting outfit Project Veritas. “I loved his videos, especially the video where he dressed up like Osama bin Laden and crossed America’s southern border with Mexico to emphasize our lack of border security,” Loomer wrote. After the talk, she approached O’Keefe and told him that she would do anything to work at Project Veritas. She was so persistent that he was initially a little disturbed, thinking she was a mole who’d infiltrated the conference. “She appears to be functionally immune to fear, to shame, and to embarrassment,” O’Keefe later wrote. A month later, he summoned her to New York for a trial run. It was winter, and Loomer had bronchitis and no warm clothes. O’Keefe’s team gave her a script and a long-sleeved shirt fitted with a hidden camera. The target was Black Lives Matter activists—that summer, a Black man named Eric Garner had died after being put in a chokehold by an N.Y.P.D. officer, leading to protests around the city. Loomer managed to share a cab with Erica Garner, one of Eric’s daughters, and secretly recorded her talking about Al Sharpton, who was organizing demonstrations on behalf of the family. “So, what, you think Al Sharpton is kind of, like, a crook, in a sense?” Loomer asks. “He’s about this,” Erica replies, rubbing her fingers together. “He’s about his money with you?” The cover of the New York Post read “ALL ABOUT THE MONEY.” Loomer was hired. Soon she was baiting her own university by trying to start an “ISIS club”—Sympathetic Students in Support of the Islamic State—and recording her interactions with school administrators using her hidden camera. (The school was open to the idea, but tried to steer her away from putting Isis in the name.) After her “exposé” was published, she was expelled and banned from campus. But Project Veritas implemented versions of her “ISIS club” script at colleges around the country. Trump, who was a few months away from announcing his run for President, heard about the videos on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and faxed a message to O’Keefe, asking him to come to Trump Tower. Loomer was in Florida dealing with her expulsion and had to miss the meeting. “I certainly couldn’t have predicted how intertwined Donald J. Trump would later become in my life,” she wrote. Her father, meanwhile, was crestfallen that there would be no college graduation for him to attend. (He could not be reached for comment.) “This won’t matter,” she told him. “You’ll see. By the time I am twenty-eight, I will be in the Oval Office some way or another. I’m doing things my way.” In the run-up to the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton became a favored target. Loomer started sneaking into her fund-raisers. “People think political royalty like the Clintons and the Trumps are untouchable and impossible to reach,” she wrote. “That’s where most people are wrong.” Her advice: act confident, use hair dye and glasses if you need to disguise your appearance, and go for the “ninja aesthetic.” Don’t worry about the Secret Service. At one event, Loomer, with her hidden camera, filmed Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide, talking about Clinton’s commitment to admitting refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war. Two weeks before the election, Trump tweeted, “Wow, just came out on secret tape that Crooked Hillary wants to take in as many Syrians as possible. We cannot let this happen.” (Loomer has maintained that it was her video that “undeniably shaped the outcome of the Presidential election.”) In 2017, Loomer confronted Clinton at a launch event for her book “What Happened,” Clinton’s election postmortem. Loomer was recovering from a nose job and was still meant to be wearing a cast on her face; she asked her plastic surgeon to take it off early, covered her bruises in layers of concealer, and headed to the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. At the book-signing table, she grilled Clinton on Benghazi, the “missing e-mails,” and a former staff member whose death has been the subject of various conspiracy theories. “You know what, I’m so sorry you believe things that are untrue,” Clinton responded, before Loomer was removed by security. The next year, during the midterms, Loomer, who identifies as a “proud Islamophobe,” travelled the country “investigating jihadi candidates.” After the election, she was banned from Twitter for posting that Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, was “anti Jewish” and “pro Sharia,” which the site labelled as hate speech. Loomer was twenty-five. “I will never truly recover,” she wrote. Her life’s work had been “incinerated by gleeful vandals.” She went to dinner in Fort Lauderdale with Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone, who had become one of her mentors. He told her that she had to carry on. A few days after the dinner, while live-streaming, she handcuffed herself to the front door of Twitter’s New York headquarters, wearing a Star of David to convey, as she put it, “the fact that Jack Dorsey and Big Tech were behaving like Nazis with the same type of censorship tactics Hitler and the Gestapo utilized in 1930s Germany.” She threw the key to the handcuffs down a storm drain and yelled into a megaphone. (After several hours, police used a bolt cutter to free her.) Other bans followed: Facebook, Instagram, PayPal, Venmo, GoFundMe. (She’d already been kicked off Lyft, Uber, and Uber Eats.) Loomer entered what she described as a “deep dark pit of depression and anxiety.” She asked a prominent maga lawyer to help her sue various tech platforms. “This was right after a woman had gone to YouTube and shot it up,” the lawyer told me. “Laura was, like, ‘I’m going to be like that woman!’ She was threatening to murder everyone, and then commit suicide. She was insane.” (Loomer told me that she would never “incite violence” and that she brought up the YouTube shooting to illustrate how deplatforming could cause someone to “snap.”) She felt like she was enduring a form of drug withdrawal. “Sometimes I worry that I will be alone forever as a result of being digitally erased in a world where all aspects of life seem to take place online,” she wrote. Loomer soon figured out a way to get herself back into the conversation. One night in 2019, furious that she couldn’t post about “selfish open-borders Democrats,” she decided to pull another stunt. The next morning, she drove from Tucson to Napa Valley, hired several day laborers, and instructed them to set up a tent in the front yard of Nancy Pelosi’s vacation home. She used zip ties to hang up pictures of Americans who had allegedly been murdered by immigrants. (The presentation looked quite a lot like the mug shots of “illegals” that Trump subsequently displayed at his rallies, and then, earlier this year, on the White House lawn.) Infowars broadcast her stunt, which went viral. “There is no feeling more exhilarating than seeing your name trend as the number one topic in the world on a site you’re banned from,” Loomer wrote. “It makes you feel supernatural, like you’re coming back from the dead.” She claims that Trump saw and “loved” the video, and that he was inspired to replicate it on a larger scale by having ice deposit immigrant detainees in sanctuary cities. (This plan never came to fruition, though Republican governors later picked it up during the Biden Administration.) “That’s when I realized, Donald J. Trump wasn’t just my president, he was also a fan!” Loomer wrote. Stone had identified Loomer as a “young person who would say and do these wild things,” a Trump official told me. “When Trump needed to build kind of an untraditional cadre outside of the establishment Party, we leaned on people like her.” In 2020, Karen Giorno, a former Trump adviser who ran his Florida operation through the 2016 primary, was tapped to put together a congressional campaign for Loomer. Giorno imposed some conditions: don’t lie about other candidates, and prioritize your mental health. (Loomer had been in therapy for what she described as “PTSD I have developed as a result of being silenced.”) Giorno bought her an English bulldog, which Loomer named Loomer. Doug Dechert, a conservative writer and consultant, met Loomer at a restaurant in Palm Beach at the start of her campaign. “We agreed intensely on the issue of the Muslim invasion,” he told me. “I opened my Rolodex to her.” Loomer courted wealthy patrons, including Julie Fancelli, the heir to the Publix grocery-store fortune, who was a main financial backer of the Stop the Steal rally that preceded the January 6th Capitol riot. Caroline Wren, Trump’s former campaign-finance director, said, of Loomer, “The MAGA donors love her.” Loomer lost the election. Two years later, she ran again. Trump declined to endorse her; he told Giorno that she was too controversial. Loomer picked fights with Trump-backed candidates in Florida and alienated several political operatives, some of whom went on to work in the White House. “Her ability to shoot at her own team gets tiresome,” the Trump official told me. She started to say that she planned to lead a hostile takeover of the G.O.P. When she lost the second race, she declared victory anyway, claiming voter fraud and election interference. (“YOU DO NOT CONCEDE WHEN THERE IS THEFT INVOLVED!”) This was one of several issues on which she aligned with Trump. Loomer had felt a kinship with him since high school, when she watched him on Fox News. Back then, she relished that “he was one of the first people that had the courage to speak the truth about Barack Hussein Obama being a Muslim with a fake birth certificate.” Now she was convinced that their desires and struggles—the stolen elections, the deplatforming—were intertwined. “I see my fight as his fight,” she told me. “They did to Trump what they did to me. And they did it to me first.” In March, 2023, Trump invited Loomer to Mar-a-Lago. (She had just Loomered a book event for Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who was emerging as a challenger to Trump in the upcoming Republican Presidential primary.) Trump had occasionally reposted her content on Truth Social, and she had screamed at him from rope lines to get his attention, but this was the first time that they met formally. “He’s my favorite person in the world,” Loomer told me. That fall, she accompanied Trump to Philadelphia for his debate with Kamala Harris, in which he claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. In the previous weeks, Loomer had already been, as she put it to me, “holding people accountable” for the alleged pet-eating on her show, “Loomer Unleashed!,” which streams twice weekly on Rumble. When I talked to her after the debate, she was cagey about confirming whether she and Trump had spoken about the matter. “Whether or not we did, didn’t it work?” she asked. The Trump official told me, “There were moments where you could see ‘Laura could help with this.’ ” Still, in the final months of Trump’s campaign, seemingly everyone in maga world, even those on the furthest fringes, acknowledged that Loomer felt like a liability. Reporters started to ask Trump whether he was going to distance himself from her. That autumn, when I saw him at a campaign event on one of his golf courses, outside Los Angeles, he said, “Laura has to say what she wants. She’s a free spirit.” This June, I ran into her in Washington, D.C., at the Waldorf Astoria, the former Trump Hotel. Though she comes to D.C. on occasion, she mostly stays home, in Pensacola, Florida, with her live-in boyfriend and her four dogs. (Loomer, the gift from Giorno, is now six years old. When we spoke on the phone, I often heard Loomer saying “Loomer, stop that” or “Loomer, come here.”) As we said hello to each other on the hotel’s stairs, Jacob Helberg, an Under-Secretary of State, walked by. “Your stuff has been great,” he said. Since Trump took office, her “scalps” had been steadily accumulating. “I think that President Trump knows who’s been for him and who has been against him,” she told me. “I mean, I would hope, right? I think there’s some cases where maybe he isn’t as aware as one would think.” Loomer is deeply aware. On the phone with me one afternoon, she offhandedly listed a number of people she was keeping on her radar. An Arizona politician whom Trump “half endorsed” had at one point donated to Chris Christie. Dusty Johnson, a Republican congressman from South Dakota, was only proposing legislation about the U.S. taking control of the Panama Canal, she said, because he wanted to paper over the fact that “he’s a strong ally of Liz Cheney.” They were all compromised, guilty by association. “Kevin McCarthy’s son worked with a venture capitalist who was holding fund-raisers for Ron DeSantis,” she went on. “From what I’ve seen, there really isn’t much vetting going on.” Around D.C., analogies abound—she was everything from Trump’s Rasputin to the “MAGA Grand Inquisitor.” A prominent D.C. lobbyist called her a “one-person Washington Times”; no, said a nominee for a senior Administration post, she was a “one-person wrecking crew.” The nominee went on, “She’s part loyal bagman, part Roy Cohn figure,” referring to Trump’s ruthless New York lawyer. (“I’m just a professional woman who supports President Trump,” she told me. “And he’s a very hospitable person.”) Tucker Carlson told me that Loomer was “so poisonous, I don’t like to speak her name.” A former N.S.C. official compared her to Jiang Qing, a wife of Mao Zedong and his partner in enforcing the Cultural Revolution. “This histrionic, conspiratorial, and aggressive woman was the keeper of a list of those to be purged,” he said. “She used her power to rain hell on her enemies, while also carrying out her fair share of personal vendettas.” He went on, “She described herself as Mao’s dog—absolute subservient loyalty, and of course she bit when he wanted her to.” Loomer thinks the most apt comparison is to Joseph McCarthy, a parallel she finds flattering. “I think people now realize he wasn’t as crazy as they thought he was,” she told me. “He’s one of the most underrated and underappreciated political figures in history. He was trying to warn us about the rot and the infestation in our government and within our educational institutions. People acted like he was un-American for simply trying to protect America. Everything he said turned out to be true.” In September, at the Kirk memorial, Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, said that she had forgiven the man who killed her husband. The crowd stood to applaud her, many in tears. “I could never feel that,” Loomer told me. Kirk’s assassin, she added, “deserves a bullet to the head.” She preferred Trump’s line: “I hate my opponent.” Loomer told me that she had already been saying those words to herself before Trump took the stage. “I don’t believe in kumbaya,” she said. After Kirk was killed, Trump spoke with more frequency about “the enemy from within”; Loomer appreciated the renewed focus. “I have to say, I do want President Trump to be the ‘dictator’ the Left thinks he is, and I want the right to be as devoted to locking up and silencing our violent political enemies as they pretend we are,” she wrote. She was offering cash donations to anyone who gave her the names of pro-Palestine protesters, and began encouraging her followers to start Loomering people who’d made disparaging comments about Kirk, with the aim of getting them fired. Whenever I pressed Loomer on how exactly she conducts her work, and what she can take credit for, the conversation veered into the woo-woo zone. “I’m manifesting my role,” she told me. “You have to manifest what you want. My hope is to continue using my large platform to develop policy, but I don’t want to say I’m actually developing policy.” It was late at night, and we were walking around outside the Turning Point headquarters after the memorial. Loomer kept looking back to make sure nobody was following us. Flowers and crosses had been laid on the ground in the parking lot. “I’m not saying that I’m an adviser, but I can manifest it,” she said. “Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m manifesting it.” I was reminded of an early conversation I had with the strategist who is close to the Trump Administration. “Influence is perceived power,” he told me. “That’s what it is with Laura. If people think you have power, then you do.” The strategist close to the Administration described Loomer as a “tool of people who have factional intentions.” At the State Department, for example, there is a “very zealous maga crowd who don’t like Rubio’s people. So they use Laura Loomer to say, ‘Those guys aren’t maga, these guys aren’t America First. They’re coming from Swampland.’ ” The consultant who works with the Administration told me that, whenever Loomer launches a new campaign against someone, there’s an “immediate witch hunt” at the White House “to see who told her to post.” Loomer told me that her targets sometimes call her to defend themselves, or go to Trump to ask if he can get her to stop. She is largely despised by people who work in the West Wing, aside from the President. “She has this itchy trigger finger,” the strategist said. “Sometimes she pulls the trigger and you’re, like, Oh, look, So-and-So is dead now. Isn’t that nice?” He went on, “But sometimes it’s, like, That is friendly fire, Laura, that is friendly fire. What are you doing?” Loyalty enforcement can also provide cover to obscure something else. One afternoon in March, Loomer posted about Adam Schleifer, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles. “Fire him,” she wrote. “He supported the impeachment of President Trump and said he wanted to repeal Trump’s tax plan. We need to purge the US Attorney’s office of all leftist Trump haters.” About an hour after Loomer’s post, the Presidential Personnel Office e-mailed Schleifer to say that he had been terminated. It’s very unusual for the White House to directly fire a career prosecutor. Schleifer happened to be at work on a case against a Trump donor, Andrew Wiederhorn, a food-industry executive who was indicted for fraud last spring. (Wiederhorn pleaded not guilty.) Wiederhorn’s lawyers had been urging the Justice Department to remove Schleifer from the case; a new attorney handpicked by Trump soon dropped it entirely. David Feith, one of the N.S.C. officials Loomer was credited with removing, was on her target list because his father, Douglas Feith, had served in the George W. Bush Administration. Feith’s removal, however, appeared to be about more than familial association. The N.S.C. had been split over whether to end a Biden-era restriction on the sale of A.I. chips to the United Arab Emirates. Feith wanted to keep export controls in place, on national-security grounds. A faction within the Administration wanted to remove them, as did the U.A.E. and Nvidia. “Loomer did hit jobs on people who were inconvenient to very powerful interests, inside and outside the Administration,” the former N.S.C. official told me. The strategist said, “Laura isn’t just this wild attack dog. Those who know how to spot it can see where she’s being influenced.” The consultant who works with the Administration, however, told me that some of his clients have hired Loomer to post. He took out his phone to show me a screenshot of a message exchange on Signal. “We’re already ginning up a Loomer tweet,” read one. (He covered the contact’s name with his hand.) “I honestly tell my clients not to,” the consultant said, of partnering with Loomer. “It works, like, one in a hundred times.” Still, he added, they see her “get a couple people fired, so they’re, like, If someone is doing something in the Administration that’s harmful to my interests, this will do it.” At minimum, he went on, “you scare them into changing their policies. They don’t want to be on the wrong side of Loomer.” This summer, Vinay Prasad, a top scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, was working to place a regulatory hold on a muscular-dystrophy drug, owing to safety concerns. Soon after the hold went into effect, Loomer started criticizing him in a series of posts, writing that he had “infiltrated” the Administration as a “Marxist Trojan Horse.” Prasad resigned, under pressure, the following week. Sarepta Therapeutics, the drug’s manufacturer, stood to lose millions of dollars; to Loomer’s critics, the timing and intensity of her campaign against Prasad seemed like a form of lobbying. Ned Ryun, a conservative activist, summed up the sentiment on X: “The fact of the matter is you got funded by Sarepta Therapeutics to take Vinay out; probably thru a middle man for deniability but still pharma money funding it all.” (Loomer maintains that the timing of her tirade was a coincidence.) The current Administration official told me that “the consensus among political leadership was that this was a directed assault by corporate forces.” Prasad was reinstated less than two weeks later. One night at Ned’s Club, a members-only lounge with views of the White House, Nigel Farage, the British politician who heads the populist Reform Party, was hosting a bash for the right-wing television channel GB News, which was opening a bureau in D.C. Several members of Trump’s Cabinet were there; Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, gave a toast. Loomer was at home in Florida, but longtime lobbyists and consultants were discussing her activities on two separate floors of the club. “It’s like this pay-to-play Tasmanian devil,” one veteran political operative told me. “You just feed her any sort of D.E.I. comment that some executive made over the last twelve years—then you just expect total anarchy and a wide blast zone.” On a lower floor, a prominent lobbyist said, “She doesn’t want to be seen as a hired gun because that would undermine her credibility with her base. She’s saying, ‘I just believe in the President and maga!’ But in certain instances, when she starts opining about public-policy issues, it raises questions.” He drew a comparison to his own work on the Hill: “I would call the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and then Larry Kudlow, who had a CNBC show, and tell them a few things to say. Laura’s doing her own version of Larry.” The next morning, I met a popular Trump-connected lobbyist at his office downtown. He put chewing tobacco in his mouth, and some of it scattered down the front of his shirt as he described the stance on Venezuela he was pushing—that the U.S. should buy Venezuelan oil, which was currently sanctioned, because otherwise China would. Loomer had been posting about Venezuela, advocating for lifting sanctions on its oil sector and allowing American companies to operate there. “Hell, yeah, she’s getting paid!” the lobbyist said. “It’s just not a thing someone’s really passionate about—oil licenses in Venezuela. That’s not anyone’s natural position. It’s my position, and it’s the right position, but not because I just woke up one morning and was, like, ‘I’m going to get really involved in Venezuela.’ No, it was, like, ‘I have clients.’ ” Loomer sometimes corresponds with Harry Sargeant, a Florida oil magnate and a Trump ally who had several licenses to operate in Venezuela. When I asked her about the origins of a long and very technically detailed post she wrote just after the Administration revoked Sargeant’s licenses, among others, she told me, “I am actually very qualified, and I’m highly accomplished. These people constantly disparage me like I’m some kind of no-name floozy.” The person with close ties to the White House said, “Do you really think Laura Loomer has an organic interest in the intricacies of Venezuelan oil leases? Give me a fucking break. Someone’s paying her to put out those tweets. Ditto with her interest in the Puerto Rican issue.” This summer, Loomer started weighing in on Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy crisis, calling on Trump to fire the island’s financial-oversight management board, which, among other things, oversees public-utility contracts. Trump dismissed the majority of the board members. Various companies and financial institutions promoted new ones who were friendlier to their interests. “She tweets about the most obscure things that only a lobbyist would care about,” the person with close ties to the White House said. “She’s a P.R. firm that the press likes to write about as if she’s the maga vanguard, like she’s there to police the movement. It’s horseshit.” The Trump-connected lobbyist told me, “Her whole shtick is purity, and so she believes getting paid is a dirty word—that it takes away her purity.” I’d heard from several people that various middlemen were used to set up payments to Loomer, in some cases using a maneuver called the “Loomer two-step.” I called a D.C. operative to ask him about it. “What is that, a dance move?” he said, before speaking energetically about the practice for fifteen minutes. “I mean, I would assume, like, whatever major investment firm isn’t going to pay DC Draino directly,” he said, referencing a popular MAGA social-media account. “In the past, you would do a Fox banner, but now it’s moved toward this ecosystem of paying people who tweet about Trump all the time.” Of course, plenty of people are compensated for posts in Washington’s influence ecosystem. One afternoon not long ago, I met up with a source who had just taken out cash to pay a right-wing outlet to write an article. “DC Draino and Libs of TikTok take thousands of bucks per post for this stuff,” the strategist who works with the Administration told me. (Neither account responded to a request for comment.) The Trump-connected lobbyist said, “I literally just ran two campaigns with MAGA influencers—by paying them to tweet.” It is an ascendant model. Although lobbyists are required to register with the government and disclose their funding, influencers operate in a gray zone. “If Laura is taking meetings on the Hill with members of Congress and asking them to change a policy position, that’s lobbying,” another Trump-connected lobbyist said. “But if Laura is posting something on her Twitter to her almost two million followers—just because the U.S. government sees it and then decides to change their position, it doesn’t mean that’s lobbying.” This gray zone extends beyond Loomer, and beyond domestic politics. In September, as Israel’s increasingly unpopular war in Gaza ground on, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with a cohort of influencers on a visit to New York; his government has reportedly started paying accounts in the U.S. to post pro-Israel content. (A spokesperson for the Israeli government said no payments were made.) Last year, a federal indictment alleged that Russia funnelled almost ten million dollars to a number of pro-Trump influencers, including Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, to push Kremlin-backed messages. (The influencers claimed they hadn’t known the funders were linked to Russia.) Popular online activists can be useful tools. As the high-level Administration official told me, “People start out as zealots—then they realize everything is for sale, even zealotry.” In this new paradigm, there’s a term to describe the startlingly porous barrier between the internet and the government: “posters in control.” “Really a huge amount of policy is being driven from my group chats,” the nominee for a senior Administration post told me. “If we have something that’s popular in right-wing Twitter, the White House is acting on it ninety-plus per cent of the time. I mean, it’s really kind of amazing. Say someone is writing a speech, and he’s this totally online guy who puts what he sees into the mouth of a senior official. All of a sudden that’s policy, and that’s the message that people are talking about.” Her activism has never been completely independent. Early in her career, she sold her sting videos to Infowars and to the Gateway Pundit. She has been funded by Robert Shillman, the billionaire founder of Cognex Corporation, an industrial-automation company. (Shillman declined to comment for this article.) A former board member of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, Shillman supports a variety of Zionist causes. “With this pen and my checkbook, I provide ammunition,” he has said. Shillman paid for Loomer to attend Horowitz’s conference, and also underwrote the work she produced at Project Veritas. “They were ahead of the times,” Raheem Kassam, who runs the National Pulse (“Where ‘MAGA’ Goes To Know”) and also received funding for “anti-jihad” work from Shillman, told me. “It was proto-influencer culture.” Shillman has also reportedly financed the British anti-Islam influencer Tommy Robinson and the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders. (Shillman was a major donor to Turning Point USA, though he recently withdrew funding when its conferences hosted guests, such as Tucker Carlson, who weren’t seen as reliably pro-Israel.) According to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, Yaacov Apelbaum, an Israeli American cyberintelligence analyst, has provided Loomer with some of the research behind her recent attacks. “I just say what I say,” she told me when I asked about these connections. “I’m not a puppet.” In 2018, Shillman contemplated cutting Loomer off because she didn’t seem “trainable” enough. It’s true that her willingness to go scorched earth is unique, even among maga influencers. “I want to be friends with the people I influence and not have people hate me,” the consultant who works with the Administration said. “Using Loomer is vindictive—it’s seen as ‘I’m going to sic this psychotic, dishonest woman on you.’ It’s not honorable.” As the nominee for a senior Administration post put it, “She has power to the extent that she’s willing to transgress any normal boundary of human behavior.” Still, the power she has is precarious. “She has no underlying coalition there to back her up if the President were to shift in his view of her value,” the former N.S.C. official said. “She’s one of those courtiers who are essentially useful megaphones, useful foils, and useful agents, but disposable.” It’s not clear what her future with Trump would be if the appearance of pure loyalty were stripped away. Trump doesn’t like when people seem to be making money off him. “If he hears, you know, she just put down a hundred eighty thousand dollars for a new Land Rover, that would make him bananas,” the veteran political operative said. “It’d be the kiss of death for her.” She led me to a converted bedroom where she films her show. Studio lights illuminated her version of a contemporary podcasting backdrop: potted plants, signed MAGA hats arranged on a shelf, an alligator skull. On the wall hung framed photos of Loomer with Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Trump—and the Clintons, from times when she Loomered them. I joined her as she listened to a roundup of the day’s TV news clips about her, which her producer compiles each night. “Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist . . .” She petted Mecca, one of her dogs, whom she says she rescued from a meat market in China. Mecca was seated atop a desk, paws on a yellow pad. “Laura Loomer takes responsibility for the deportation . . .” Loomer keeps a panic button, which automatically dials 911, in the studio, and in every other room in the house. The police recently arrested a man who had threatened her online, accusing her, in part, of secretly working on behalf of Israel. “I’m not a foreign agent,” she repeatedly told me, unbidden, throughout the evening. “I don’t even think these other people believe what they post about—they just do it because they get paid. They’re all Larping, like, ‘We’re Hitler Youth now that it’s cool. Oh, we’re Nazis now.’ It’s just this performative circle of content and rage bait. I have actually had strong views for years.” At sunset, Loomer drove us to a seafood restaurant for dinner. As we waited for a table, she started fighting with a State Department spokesman on X. It is difficult to hold her attention. Over oysters, when my questions were met with silence as she typed on her phone, her boyfriend said, “She can’t hear you—she’s locked in.” (He and Loomer met on a plane to Belize. “I liked the abrasiveness,” he told me. Loomer occasionally shows him drafts of her posts. “She’s about to eviscerate someone, and I’m, like, Maybe leave a body part for their family?” He paused. “She doesn’t listen.”) Loomer read us a draft of a tweet thread about Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell’s wife, attending a party at the Qatari Embassy. “This one’s ready to go,” she told me. She texted Andy Ogles, a maga congressman from Tennessee, to see if he could come on her show the next day. He called her. “You can talk about why you want to denaturalize Mamdani,” she told him, referring to the next mayor of New York City, who was born in Uganda. “Are you free?” She disappeared into her phone again, until a video by Benny Johnson popped up on her feed. The right-wing media sphere is often a sensitive subject. She talked without interruption for the rest of the meal. “I hate conservative commentary,” she said. Her peers were too performative, too pliable. She went on, “They don’t want me on the plane with Trump. The President has to be diplomatic and whatnot, but I’m exposing how our country is playing footsie with the most brutal Islamic regimes. Everything I do is in support of helping his Administration, even the things that might hurt to hear. My life is like an episode of ‘Survivor.’ I’ve been crawling through the mud by myself for years, eating berries.” (Last week, Loomer, who has been repeatedly denied access to the White House press room, got credentialled to cover the Pentagon—as did Kassam and Pool—after dozens of mainstream outlets refused to sign on to farcically strict reporting restrictions imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.) Loomer suggested that we head back to her house to “start breaking stories.” She said that she could lend me comfortable pants and a sweater—“Twitter clothes.” In the car on the way home, as her boyfriend tried to tell me what he liked about her documentary on the “great replacement” theory, she scrolled through loud videos on her phone, then took a call from a Politico reporter. (“That guy always wants to call me,” she said. He asked her who her “next target” was. “Sean Duffy,” she told him, the Secretary of Transportation.) Back inside, her boyfriend let the dogs out of their crates and brought tea and Diet Cokes for us. We set up with her phone, laptop, and iPad on a couch in the den, surrounded by dog fencing. The Real Disaster Channel was playing in the background, on mute, showing videos of plane crashes, until the TV eventually kicked into a screen saver of a fish tank. Loomer had entered a seemingly meditative state, tapping away frantically. “I’m pushing out this thing about Mitch McConnell’s wife,” she said a few minutes later, as if responding to a question. Eventually, I moved to an office chair at her desk—her real one, not the one in the studio—where her boyfriend had set down my cup of tea. I glanced absentmindedly at some stacks of paperwork she had left out, pausing on a contract with a consulting firm whose name I recognized. “What are you looking at?” Loomer asked, suddenly focussed. She bustled over to clear the area, sweeping things into a drawer, handing files to her boyfriend, until only an asthma device with a mask attachment remained. “See, this is what my life is,” she said, gesturing at the couch, which was covered in a blanket for the dogs. “This is all it is. I’m going to do this until four in the morning.” She picked up the asthma mask. “Do you ever notice I’m out of breath on my show?” she asked. She put the mask over her face, paused, stared straight ahead, and inhaled the vapor. ♦
