Welcome to Power Players, The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take an in-depth look at the key figures in American politics as the US reshapes itself and the world.
• The Bronx real-estate hustler who proves Trump is the boss from hell
• The most powerful woman in the world you’ve never heard of
• The ‘swamp creature’ eclipsing JD Vance in the race to succeed Trump
• The white nationalist at the heart of the Trump machine
• The greatest hope of the Trump resistance is a 34-year-old immigrant
• The 28-year-old Trump attack dog ripping up the Washington playbook
Laura Loomer began an event at the annual conference of one of India’s largest news groups earlier this year by saying she had an “announcement” to make.
“I spoke to President Trump on the phone about an hour ago or so, actually. And I wanted to read you exactly what he said to me,” she said at the India Today Conclave in March, before reading a short message from the President in which he expressed his affection for India and its Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
Loomer, 32, holds no official position within the Trump White House or its administration and thus may seem to be a strange unofficial ambassador for the President’s movement in India. The self-styled “investigative reporter” and former congressional candidate has been accused by critics on the left and the right of spreading conspiracy theories and hate. (Loomer once described herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and has said she’s “pro-white nationalism”.)
Yet within the past few years, she has ascended the ranks to emerge as one of Donald Trump’s most powerful loyalty enforcers. During his second term, she has claimed credit for multiple scalps, including that of his former national security adviser, Mike Waltz, who was removed from his job last March. Through her X account with nearly two million followers and her podcast, Loomer Unleashed, she chastises and smears Trump’s critics on the right for perceived disloyalty.
More than anyone in the President’s orbit, Loomer’s influence over Trump shows how the guard-rails against conspiracy theorists and cranks haven’t just crumbled. They’ve disappeared.
Loomer, for her part, has been building herself up for this moment. For over a decade, she has been a persistent and aggressive presence within the Maga movement. She’s run for Congress twice in Florida. In 2020, Trump’s endorsement carried her to victory in GOP primaries, but she lost the general election. She lost a subsequent primary race against a GOP incumbent in 2022.
And yet her reputation within the right is mixed. A former Trump spokesperson described her as “clown-like”. Others, including Trump, have praised her. “You work hard, and you are a very opinionated lady. I have to tell you that, and in my opinion, I like that,” Trump told Loomer during a visit to one of his golf clubs in New Jersey in 2023.
“You’re the best. I love you,” Loomer responded. A little less than three years later, it seems to still be the attitude that Trump most wants to hear.
Born in Tucson, Arizona, to a family of Jewish heritage, Loomer’s first foray into the right-wing media ecosystem came in 2015, while she was an undergraduate in college. At Barry University, a private Catholic school in Florida, she conducted her first “sting” for Project Veritas — a right-wing group founded by James O’Keefe that uses undercover operatives to produce sting videos targeting their political opponents. The university suspended Loomer in April 2015 after a stunt in which she filmed herself attempting to convince university officials to allow her to create a student group in support of Isis.
Through her involvement with Project Veritas, Loomer worked her way up through the right-wing media ecosystem. Islamophobia and depictions of Trump supporters as under attack were a persistent theme throughout her work. Ahead of the 2016 election, Loomer traveled to a series of polling places in New York City wearing a burqa and tried to procure a ballot under the name “Huma Abedin” (at the time, Abedin was vice chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign) to try and prove alleged voter fraud.
Then, in the summer of 2017, she joined Maga operative Jack Posobiec in storming the stage of a production of Julius Caesar in New York City. The production depicted Caesar, who is stabbed to death in the third act, as a Trump-esque figure. To the producers, this was a modern adaptation of a Shakespeare play; to Loomer, or so she said, it amounted to the “normalisation of political violence against the right”.
These sorts of recorded, high-profile stunts would come to define Loomer’s career for the next several years. She even concocted a term for them: “Loomered”. She registered the word as a trademark with the US Patent and Trademark Office in 2018.
“To be Loomered is to undergo an interrogation by Laura’s cell phone,” The Spectator wrote in 2019. “Loomerings” frequently devolved into accusations or bordered on harassment. In one case, The Spectator described Loomer as having trailed Abedin and her five-year-old daughter in a New York City Starbucks.
But “Loomering” required one thing besides, of course, a mobile phone: social media. In November 2018, Twitter banned Loomer on the grounds that a series of Islamophobic tweets about Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somalian refugee and Muslim woman, violated their terms of service. In response, Loomer chained herself to Twitter’s office in Lower Manhattan, donning a yellow Jewish star like the ones Nazi concentration camp guards forced Jews to wear. After several hours of standing in 40°C weather as journalists swarmed the site to ogle at the pro-Trump activist, police cut her handcuffs off. It wasn’t until 2022, when Elon Musk restored the accounts of previously suspended users, that Loomer made her way back to the platform.
The arc of Loomer’s career in far-right activism closely heeds to that of Maga’s own. Supposed “big tech” censorship of conservatives has been a core rhetorical and policy concern for Maga, especially after social media platforms’ efforts to quash misinformation about the 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic. Loomer’s suspension from Twitter and other platforms figured heavily into how she presents herself as an influencer — and, later, a congressional candidate in 2020 and 2022.
But while Loomer’s borderline comical obsession with her accounts on social media may not have made for a compelling congressional campaign, it has helped her build bridges with a white nationalist fringe that seemed to find common cause in her plight. When mainstream Republicans criticised their political allies who attended a 2021 conference that pro-Hitler livestreamer Nick Fuentes hosted, Loomer defended the attendees on the grounds of being “pro-free speech”. She did so again at one of the longest running white nationalist gatherings in the United States the following year.
At a 2022 conference that American Renaissance, a white nationalist organisation, Loomer attributed her lack of access to social media platforms to the same “cancel culture” that afflicted the white nationalists in the audience. Jared Taylor, who has said “civilisation … disappears” when black people are “left to their own devices”, founded American Renaissance in 1990. Since then, at the group’s annual conference that takes place outside of Nashville, Tennessee, he has hosted a variety of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and other extremists as speakers.
In her remarks, which took place after she lost a primary election in 2022, Loomer described herself as a “white advocate.” She said her congressional campaign was running “to the right of the GOP” and cited “election integrity, combating big tech social media censorship and election interference, and a 10-year minimum immigration moratorium” as her three main priorities.
Years later, Loomer’s three-part campaign programme became official government policy. In early 2025, Meta — which operates Facebook and Instagram — vowed to revisit their trust and safety policies in a move that appeared explicitly differential to conservatives. When Trump returned to office in January 2025, he signed an executive order “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship”. Those who researched the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories online interpreted it as a veiled threat to their work. Their fears, of course, were well-founded. In December 2025, for instance, NPR and other outlets reported that the State Department was telling their staff to reject visa applicants whose work involved content moderation on social media.
For the President, whose decision to join Israel in waging war on Iran in early 2026 has fractured his own coalition of supporters, figures like Loomer are more important than ever. With midterms on the horizon and Trump’s approval rating hovering at around 38 per cent, Loomer has stepped up her attacks on Trump’s critics from the right.
“They want our country to be governed by the radical left, so that [they] can pack the courts, and they can give citizenship to the 100,000 illegals and foreigners on visas in our country so that we’re forever replaced,” Loomer said in a podcast in March, naming several commentators and politicians who have criticised Trump over the war in Iran. “And Republicans will never get re-elected or have any power in our country ever again.”