Laura Loomer and The Trump campaign

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No one can keep former President Donald Trump away from Laura Loomer.

Throughout his third presidential campaign, aides and advisers have done their best to shield him from Loomer, a far-right social media influencer, and similar figures who stroke his ego and stoke his basest political instincts.

They lost that battle this week, as Loomer traveled on Trump’s jet to his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday and to Sept. 11 memorial services Wednesday. Her presence at the latter infuriated some Democrats and Republicans because one of the many conspiracy theories she has promoted is the false notion that the terrorist assault on the U.S. was an “inside job.” It wasn’t.

Loomer’s return to Trump’s side is pitting key figures in his coalition against one another, testing the strength of a campaign already reeling from his subpar debate performance Tuesday and Democrats’ resurgence in the wake of their July candidate switch. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., major Trump allies in Congress who represent opposite ends of the Republican ideological spectrum, are publicly pressing him to ditch her. Loomer fired back Thursday with a string of invective about Graham.

Moreover, her presence reflects Trump’s loss of faith in his campaign aides and their concomitant fear of upsetting him in a time of crisis, according to people familiar with the situation. Last month, he tapped his 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to be an adviser to his top advisers — a move widely viewed as a rebuke of the existing leadership crew.

A senior official from Trump’s 2020 campaign team said that helps explain why Loomer is no longer being kept at arm’s length.

“The people that have the authority to stop it are hanging on to their jobs,” the former official said. “So are you going to pick that fight with him?”

Loomer didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday, but fighting is a big part of her allure for Trump. She advocates as fiercely for him as she does for theories on the political fringe, like the baseless claim that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Trump promoted that during Tuesday’s debate, creating an unwelcome distraction from his substantive differences with Harris, according to many Republicans. Graham and Greene portray her as a counterproductive influence on Trump when he is locked in a tight battle with Harris for the presidency.

Graham said Thursday that Loomer is “really toxic” and shouldn’t be in Trump’s circle. Loomer clapped back on X with a schoolyard taunt.

A Republican senator who is also a Trump ally said Trump is “often drawn to people who like and promote him.”

“It’s really dumb,” the senator added.

Loomer’s willingness to hit below the belt and her influence within the Make America Great Again movement’s most aggressive elements are reasons enough for many of her critics to keep their mouths shut publicly. Few elected Republicans want to stick their necks out. But many lawmakers and donors back Greene’s posture toward Loomer, according to a source familiar with the situation, and some of them are reminding people in Trump’s orbit that Loomer lost two campaigns for Congress.

Greene’s beef with Loomer, which dates back a long time, was rekindled this week when Loomer wrote on X that a win by Harris, who is Indian American and Black, would mean “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”

The remark yielded rare agreement from Greene and President Joe Biden’s White House about what constitutes racism: Loomer’s words.

Trump advisers are trying to distance themselves from her without drawing his ire, making it clear that she doesn’t speak for his operation. Loomer is “not a member of our staff,” said a Trump campaign aide, who asked to remain anonymous.

When NBC News asked for comment this week, Loomer similarly said by text: “Why do you want to speak to me? I don’t work for President Trump.”

Last year, she said she would "gladly" serve as press secretary in a Trump White House.

Democrats hammered Trump on Thursday for inviting Loomer to join him at the 9/11 memorial service.

“It was shocking and irresponsible and offensive to the thousands of people who lost their lives on Sept. 11, including hundreds of brave first responders, members of the NYPD, FDNY and others who raced toward the danger in order to help people escape the danger and lost their lives as a result of it,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., told reporters.

“Donald Trump is a conspiracy theory-peddling racial arsonist and pathological liar,” he added. “And the fact that on Sept. 11, this sacred day, he would bring a 9/11 conspiracy theorist to participate in events during this solemn commemoration should shock the conscience of all decent Americans, and I believe that it does just that.”

A Trump campaign official said Wednesday that the memorial service wasn’t about politics.

A Republican senator, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering his party’s nominee, said Trump is endangering his chances of winning — and so are the staff members who aren’t playing gatekeeper.

“Everybody’s stunned that he would bring her down on his plane to the debate but even more stunned that she would be riding with him on the 9/11 anniversary. That kind of stuff will create a distraction you can’t overcome,” the senator said.

Well, we know Trump's record with attractive women. Where there's smoke, there's fire.

How are attractive women relevant? We're talking about Laura Loomer here.

Well, I thought she was a looker.

Loomer is like Stormy Daniels was crossed with Steve Bannon.

Laura Loomer, a self-described Islamophobe, conspiracy-theory promoter and “feisty Jewess,” got a little too feisty this week even for some of her conservative Republican allies. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who shares much of Loomer’s far-right ideology, advised Trump to cut ties with Loomer after she posted a tweet mocking Vice President Kamala Harris’ Indian heritage.

Loomer, in turn, called Greene an antisemite, reminding the Twitterverse of Greene’s 2018 suggestion that space lasers developed by the Rothschilds started the California wildfires.

It’s not the first time Loomer, 31, has leaned into her Jewishness to attack critics, though that usually means Democrats, the media and the many schools, social media platforms and other companies that have suspended her. She’s also been called out by the Anti-Defamation League, for associating with white supremacists and exploiting the Holocaust for political gain.

Loomer, 31, was raised in Tucson, Arizona and ran unsuccessfully for a Florida House seat in 2020 and 2022. She has worked for far-right groups including Project Veritas and InfoWars, and famously marched on stage during a production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” to protest its criticism of Trump.

Here are some ways that Loomer has previously leveraged her heritage to lash out at others, including other Jews.

Attacking Muslims
Loomer has called herself a “proud Islamophobe” and justified it by saying that she, as a Jew, has a right to be fearful of Muslims, who she stereotypes as murderously anti-Jewish.

“When you look at the word phobia as an irrational fear, is it irrational for a Jewish woman to be skeptical or critical or fearful of a political ideology that calls for me to be you know, to be to be killed?” she said to a Florida reporter during her run for Congress in 2020.

She has described Islam as a “cancer on humanity” and said Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to hold political office. Such statements have gotten her banned from social media platforms as well as Uber and Lyft. (She said she does not want to support Muslim drivers.)

Using Holocaust imagery and weaponizing Yiddish
As the GOP nominee for a Congressional district in Palm Beach County — the district with the highest percentage of Jewish voters in the nation — Loomer ran an ad in 2020 with photos of concentration camp victims to attack her opponent, veteran Rep. Lois Frankel, who is also Jewish. Loomer suggested that Frankel’s sympathy with the Black Lives Matter movement would lead to disaster for Jews.

The Anti-Defamation League called the ad “disgusting.”

The ad also used Yiddish terms: meshugus, which means craziness, and “gornisht Lois,” or “nothing Lois.” It ended with a voiceover plea to “Vote for a real mensch. Vote Laura Loomer.”

Two years earlier, in 2018, when Loomer protested Twitter’s ban on her account by chaining herself to its New York headquarters, she wore a yellow star resembling the ones Nazis forced Jews to wear during the Holocaust. (Elon Musk restored Loomer’s account after he bought the platform in 2022 and renamed it X.)

Denigrating Jewish Democrats
Loomer, like Trump, has questioned the mental health of Jews who vote for Democrats. (Which most Jews do — 77% supported President Joe Biden in 2020, for example.)

“It’s either a genetic malfunction or a mental illness,” she said on The John Frederick’s Show, a popular right-wing radio broadcast, in April. “I’m not trying to sound derogatory when I say this. I’m Jewish myself.

“The Jewish people have a record of making poor decisions for themselves,” she continued. “They act in ways that are suicidal and detrimental to the survival of their own people.”

She also compared “modern Democrat Jews” to “kapo Jews,” which she defined as “Jews during the times of the Holocaust who assisted the Nazis because they thought that they were gonna be the last to go.”

She added: “You might as well just go put yourself in a gas chamber yourself if this is how you’re gonna behave.”

  I wonder if Melania is blind or if she has just been bought off to ignore it.

Last year, she shared a video on X that said “9/11 was an Inside Job!” and claimed it was somehow related to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s announcing $2.3 trillion in “lost” government funds on Sept. 10, 2001.

Loomer first grabbed headlines a decade ago as a college student at Barry University in Miami, when she told far-right website Gateway Pundit that an imam was coming to a memorial on campus for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Loomer has called the 9/11 attacks an ''inside job'', a false claim about that suggests the American government was behind the attacked that killed 2,996 people. That history with baseless 9/11 conspiracy theories raised eyebrows when Loomer traveled with Trump this week to the 9/11 memorial ceremony at Ground Zero.

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