Everybody Around Trump Hates the Unhinged Laura Loomer. Except Trump. [View all]

[Celerity]

She has zero qualifications, zero experience, zero talent except self-promotion. So how’d she get the national security adviser fired?

https://newrepublic.com/article/201650/laura-loomer-profile-everybody-hates-except-trump

https://archive.ph/DmNWO


Laura Loomer at The Villages in Florida last year. Adam Gray/Abaca/Sipa USA

In mid-August, Laura Loomer—a woman who has posted lewd and evidence-free tweets about Kamala Harris’s sexual history, who calls people she disagrees with “cunt,” and who has called for Gaza to be flattened and glassed, picked up the phone and got Marco Rubio on the line, the evening after he attended negotiations in Alaska with Vladimir Putin. The Loomer emergency that the American secretary of state needed to attend to? A U.S.-based charitable organization had obtained visas for about 60 severely ill Gazan children to come to the United States for treatment. After talking to Loomer, Rubio turned from negotiations with the world’s other nuclear-armed superpower to shut down that visa program.

In her power and profanity, in her smashing of walls between “influencer” and “journalist” and “presidential adviser,” Loomer is a mile-marker in the descent of the American political discourse into depravity, and of our government into chaos and farce. One of the most outré political actors ever to appear on the American scene, eclipsing even Alex Jones in bug-eyed malice and paranoia, she is also one of the most powerful women in Trumpland. She has taken credit for over a dozen “scalps”—her word for people let go within hours or days of her public assaults. Among them are a surgeon-general nominee; national security apparatchiks, some with decades of experience in China-U.S. relations and cybersecurity issues related to Russia; the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (who later returned to his job); and random Biden holdovers who seem to have been targeted by MAGA co-workers.

As self-appointed truffle pig for rooting out Trump’s enemies, Loomer has a signature methodology: She doxes and slanders her targets, often with references to cannibalism, oral sex, and other eating-related images that suggest some sort of Hannibal Lecter–ish pathology. She eschews sleep and social life, scouring social media and other public histories of government officials and politicos, looking for hints of disloyalty and then hounding these enemies publicly, on Rumble, Twitter, and Telegram. She solicits tips, some of which she claims, in tweets, come from intelligence sources, others clearly from MAGA appointees and maybe others with obscure special interests.

The White House itself tries—and fails—to keep Loomer away from Trump. But “the president likes her tenacity and loyalty,” Steve Bannon told me. “He sees her as a killer. And the fact that people are blocking her makes him pay attention more.” Clearly, he wants her around. “She is his Omarosa,” said another source who has worked with Trump, referring to now long-forgotten Trump ex-amanuensis Omarosa Manigault Newman. “He understands people and ratings. He understands how to get coverage.” But increasingly, Trump supporters—including several of the former mentors who helped build Loomer’s career—are cowering themselves. The right-wing Christian producer Lauren Witzke, who launched Loomer’s podcast Loomer Unleashed, put it this way: “Trump needed a pit bull, and we went all in to create his pit bull.… And we created a monster.”

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