The former president knows by now the kind of people he wants surrounding him.
The former president knows by now the kind of people he wants surrounding him.
A s a general rule, I prefer to ignore repulsive internet cranks and lunatics until forced by events to take notice; Greta Thunberg barely interests me anymore, and Tucker Carlson morally and intellectually wrote himself off with his Russia trip — until his transparent “Nazi-curious” antics got entangled with a presidential race and forced us to pay attention to him for a minute longer. But now I guess I have to talk about another despicable internet nutjob, because Laura Loomer is making real news now, not merely “extremely online” news. It is incredibly difficult to do proper justice to how full-tilt insane and repulsively cheap Loomer’s entire public adult life has been, and to recount it would be to list one shockingly vile or comically stupid act after another.
So let’s do it! Loomer is but one representative of an entire toxic ecosystem of online fanatics known for their alt-right associations, contempt for the truth, and undying loyalty to the person of Donald Trump. Loomer herself is completely a product of the Trump era: In mid 2017, she invaded the stage to protest a performance of Julius Caesar in New York City where Trump was portrayed as Caesar, and she became a viral news story for it.
She has been on a nonstop quest for online relevance ever since, and has dived happily into the filthiest toilets of right-wing politics. The spread of pure misinformation and paranoid conspiracy theories has historically been her bread and butter. The idea of 9/11 being “an inside job,” which Loomer has endorsed (of course), is only the beginning of it; in 2018 she repeatedly claimed, Alex Jones–style, that the victims of both the Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Tex., mass school shootings were in fact “crisis actors” staging an assault on gun rights. (She also averred that the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooter was in fact an ISIS plant and the truth was being covered up — a conspiracy theory she fought with fellow lunatic Jack Posobiec over for proper “credit.”)
The bans she accumulated from nearly every social-media network during the Trump administration are what she uses to portray herself as a truth-telling martyr, but martyrs tend to suffer for worthy causes, not get banned by Uber and Lyft for going on 24-hour social-media rants about “not being able to find a non-Muslim cab, Uber or Lyft driver.” And she didn’t really believe in her own martyrdom, either — she instead used her various bans to stage attention-seeking publicity stunts. Hilariously, in September 2018, she interrupted a House hearing to complain about Twitter “and Jack Dorsey influencing the election,” complete with a selfie-stick to tape herself, and was instantly auctioned off to Capitol police in real time by Missouri Republican Billy Long.
You can gauge the seriousness of her protest by noting that after her Twitter account was banned in November 2018 she wore a yellow Star of David — subtle imagery, that — and handcuffed herself to a front door of Twitter’s NYC headquarters in protest — not doors, mind you, but a single door, so she could hold a bullhorn. (Instead of actually blocking the ability of people to enter or exit the front door of the building, she allowed them all to walk by her as she stood there shrieking at them like a moron and taping it all.) In other words, she represents everything most loathsome about the fringe Right: their contempt for the truth, their comical self-promotion, and their continued assault on simple decency.
And the reason everybody is now writing, alas, about Laura Loomer — the New York Times, CNN, Axios, NBC News, etc. — is that she has found her way into Donald Trump’s direct orbit. She is now routinely attending campaign events, traveling as closely with him as his actual managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, and making people question who is really in charge of this race. (The answer remains Donald Trump, whether to the White House or wrack and ruin.)
It’s not just uptight bluenoses or elitist scolds who are infuriated about Loomer’s visibility in the Trump campaign. Her rhetoric — always foul and shot through with bigoted overtones — has amped itself up to blowout levels in recent years, culminating in a tweet just last week that shocked even people accustomed to her foul rants:
If Kamala Harris wins, the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.
And now — with perfect timing! — Loomer is out on the trail with him, appearing at all his public events in his private entourage.
Are people in MAGA world concerned? Look, when Marjorie Taylor Greene — a woman not exactly known for her timidity or fealty to good taste — has to come out and denounce your rhetoric as a “huge problem” that “doesn’t represent MAGA,” you know that a severe public-perception problem exists, not one simply ginned up by a partisan media. Every reader can see the photographs of Loomer attending (and attending to) Trump at every event recently, and it’s impossible not to wonder what sort of poison she’s spouting behind the scenes, given what she has so willingly said publicly. Yes, we all know why the media are “flooding the zone” with coverage on this, but “Trump associates closely with infamous internet psychopath” is a story worth covering.
But not even necessarily because of Laura Loomer — forever the least important part of any news story she is involved in — rather because she is a symptom of Trump’s disease, not the source of it. It is folly to blame Loomer for Trump’s poor debate performance, for example, or for his inability to keep his eye on the ball in any major situation. (Trump blew his own convention speech without help from anyone else.) The person to blame for that is Donald Trump, who remains exactly the same candidate he has been throughout all nine years of his official Republican political life: emotionally and intellectually incontinent, and forever uninterested in the difference between loyal employees trying to save him from himself and attaboying toadies.
I doubt that the presence of people like Laura Loomer within his closest circle is an accident. Trump knows by now the kind of people he wants surrounding him (see: Roy Cohn). And the reason Trump prefers mindless flatterers and psychopathic attack dogs to sober and loyal employees is because Donald Trump does not want to be — and cannot be — saved from himself.