The famous Italian-American crime boss Frank Costello once said, “I’m a man who believes in the law. But I also believe in a little intimidation.” It’s a sentiment that Laura Loomer, MAGA’s most notorious activist-journalist, embraces with gusto. “It’s good to be feared because you have to keep people on their toes,” she says. “You’re not going to command respect otherwise.”
No one is feared more in MAGA world than Laura Loomer. She is Donald Trump’s unofficial muckraker-in-chief, a human-sized security wand who scans for political impurities in the government workforce. As she describes it, her job as an “investigative journalist” is to root out anyone disloyal to the President, be they bureaucrats, judges, or even cabinet secretaries.
Loomer does this by spending 16 hours a day, seven days a week, researching targets on the Internet. When she finds an incriminating piece of information — BLM support, vaccine promotion, or, worst of all, neoconservatism — she will push out the news to her 1.8 million X followers. She then presents it to the President, either in person or through his staff, and days later, that person is out of a job. They have been, as she modestly puts it, “Loomered”.
Once a Right-wing internet provocateur confined to the dark corners of the internet, Loomer now wields extraordinary influence in the White House. With near-unfettered access to the President — an informal adviser whose online crusades can make or break staff careers — she proudly declares that she has claimed over “four dozen” federal employee “scalps”, and expects “hundreds” more. These might be a “good metric” for success, but there is a more important measure in her eyes: validation from Trump, her peers, and the public.
Loomer’s life, though, has been characterised by disappointment: missing out on a spot at Dartmouth University (her father’s alma mater), narrowly losing a Congressional seat twice, and most recently being passed over for a White House job. Each loss has fuelled an enduring sense of injustice — that somehow the world owes her for her misfortune.
When I speak to her, she is seething with indignation. “I am the most underappreciated and undervalued journalist in America today,” Loomer tells me. “I don’t get the respect I deserve.” It is an interesting assumption from someone who has spent the better part of a decade stretching the bounds of what can be called “journalism”. Back in her college days, Loomer worked for Project Veritas, an activist group that uses sting recordings, stunts and entrapment to create bad publicity for its targets. On the day of the 2016 presidential election, Loomer arrived at a polling station dressed in a burqa and demanded a ballot under the name Huma Abedin. Her ballot was rejected, but the lesson stuck: outrage got attention.
Nine years on, her taste for controversy is undiluted. She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong. In September this year, shortly after a gunman killed four churchgoers in Michigan, Loomer claimed, “hate against Christians is widespread in places like Michigan because the entire state is being taken over by Muslims who refuse to assimilate”. The shooter later turned out to be a Trump-supporting Republican, yet Loomer stayed silent. And weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, she labelled him a “charlatan” — a charge she stands by to this day.
Trump remains a fan, describing her as “a free spirit” and a “patriot”. She boasts that the pair of them chatted just a couple of weeks ago, but when I ask for details, she affects coyness, claiming she “doesn’t want to get into specifics”. This is the President after all. “I never ask him for anything,” says Loomer, “which is probably why he likes me so much.”
“She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong.”
Loomer’s devotion to the President is total. Her work, her weight (she lost 25 pounds to look “presentable” for him), and even her Mar-a-Lago face is shaped for Trump-appeal. But it took years of relentless campaigning, cheerleading, and provocative stunts for him to even notice her. In one memorable — and eerily prescient — example, Loomer disrupted a New York City production of Julius Caesar in 2017, in which Trump was reimagined as the titular character during his first term. Onstage, she screamed: “This is violence against Donald Trump! Stop the normalisation of political violence against the Right! This is unacceptable!” While Trump never publicly acknowledged the incident, it would be hard to imagine that he did not notice the subsequent widespread Fox News coverage.
Loomer revelled in the controversy that these stunts generated, and as her profile grew, so too did her notoriety. In 2017, she was banned by Uber and Lyft for complaining about a lack of “non-Muslim” drivers. Then, in 2018, Twitter banned her for attacking Ilhan Omar as “anti Jewish”, claiming that she was a member of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed” and “women are abused”. The bans kept coming, but she only grew louder and more provocative. By 2021, she had been barred from at least eight platforms — Uber, Lyft, Twitter, PayPal, GoFundMe, Venmo, Facebook, and Clubhouse — for hate speech and disinformation.
“I don’t know anybody else, aside from President Trump, who has been subjected to the level of deplatforming that I’ve been subjected to,” Loomer tells me with something akin to pride. She says this is why she failed to win her two Florida Congressional races in 2020 and 2022, despite Trump’s endorsement in the latter. “I was the first candidate in federal history that was completely denied all access to social media… I would have been the youngest woman ever elected to the United States Congress in US history had I not been silenced by Big Tech.” And the outrage-generation business clearly has benefits. On her website, where you can buy “Donald Trump did nothing wrong!” and “Forever Trump” T-shirts, a $30 book is on sale called Loomered: How I became the most banned woman in the world. Free speech martyrdom seems to have a few financial perks.
Her irritation has only deepened after the Supreme Court threw out her appeal this week against Big Tech over her bans — a case so weak that both X and Meta waived their right to respond (Elon Musk reinstated her in 2022). And she is indignant about her “stolen potential”. While she languished in Palo Alto purgatory, other Right-wing podcasters made their riches. “As a woman, you’re in your prime time in your twenties and thirties, so I wasn’t able to amass a fortune and build a media empire,” she says. “What’s so special about Ben Shapiro? He’s not breaking stories. He’s just commenting on the news. He’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. He’s conservative, I’m conservative. And yet, he has a company that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
But nor was Ben Shapiro going around calling himself a “proud Islamophobe” and stating that Islam is a “cancer on humanity”. He wasn’t dressing up in Burqas to vote in presidential elections either. But Loomer breezes past these awkward facts. “I carry this resentment against Big Tech with me on a daily basis,” she says. “’I’ve had professional opportunities stolen from me, I’ve also had social opportunities stolen from me.”
Despite these bans, she still records a twice-weekly Rumble show that brings in around $15,000 a month. It is filmed in the spare bedroom of her Florida Panhandle rental apartment that she shares with her boyfriend and four rescue dogs. Each show runs for around three hours and features extensive, unscripted monologues on the “EXPLOSION” of Islamic terror in Britain, along with interviews with RFK’s so-called “Tylenol whisperer” and Camp Lejeune widows. They are part crusade, part carnival and part confessional; the only breaks come in the form of MAGA’s holy trinity of ads: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold.
Her broadcasts are filled with a litany of familiar gripes. She is angry that she’s not a millionaire; angry that her work is overlooked; and angry that other journalists are deemed more respectable. “I know a lot of people who don’t even have anywhere near the following that I have — people who are kind of a joke — who have been given access to Air Force One,” she says. “It makes no sense.”
All the while, Loomer swims in a river of bitterness and entitlement. Her home is the command centre for what she describes as “opposition research”, where tips pour in about Biden holdovers, closet Leftists, and anyone she considers disloyal to the President. It is a craft she learnt from Roger Stone, her mentor and a longtime GOP operative who was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison during the Russiagate investigation in 2020. The 73-year-old made his name as the “original political hitman” by unearthing damaging (and sometimes fake) information about his political opponents. It turned him into an invaluable resource for not only Trump, but his Republican predecessors too.
Loomer’s approach to politics bears all the hallmarks of Stone’s skullduggery. She has weaponised opposition research and public pressure into tools which topple officials. During one particularly productive week over the summer, she claimed three “scalps”: the Trump administration ousted FDA vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad, dismissed NSA General Counsel April Falcon Doss, and revoked Jen Easterly’s appointment as chair of West Point’s social sciences department — each decision coming shortly after her public attacks.
Loomer has also shown no hesitation in taking on even the most prominent figures in Trump’s cabinet. After attacking Pam “Blondi” for her handling of the Epstein files in July, a month later, she turned her sights on RFK Jr., claiming that he was plotting a 2028 presidential run. He denied the allegations, but what happened next was classic Loomerism: the pair made amends, with RFK meeting Loomer and announcing a plan to phase out animal testing — a cause close to her heart.
“Cabinet secretaries all try to have cordial relations with me because they’re scared of getting blown up,” she says when I ask whether she maintains contact with the administration. “So there’ve been a couple of times that I’ve had them call me and say, ‘Hey, I just want to explain what happened here’ because they’re worried about the backlash.” Are they frightened of her? “Well, my receipts are bulletproof,” she says. Was it the same with RKF? “We had a few conversations,” Loomer cryptically replies.
She will even criticise the President on rare occasions. Earlier this year, Loomer attacked Trump’s decision to accept a $400 million Qatari jet for Air Force One, calling it a “stain” on the presidency. And more recently, she threatened to pull her 2026 midterm vote when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the US had approved the establishment of a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in Idaho. “I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis,” she posted. “This is where I draw the line.” “America could have been so great,” she followed up. “Now we will be a Muslim country. This must be what hell feels like.”
Given this power, why then, I ask, has she not been given a White House role, let alone a press pass? She claims that Trump has offered her a job four times, but White House staff have quietly blocked it on each occasion. “It’s professional jealousy,” she says. “President Trump’s staff who don’t like the fact he likes me… They just get high on their own power and don’t let me in.” She is, she insists, the victim of small-minded gatekeeping — a misunderstood ally whose loyalty is undervalued by the petty bureaucrats who feel threatened by her power. In Loomer’s eyes, she is utterly blameless.
But there is a danger here. As she recklessly burns through the administration, tying herself so closely to the fate and fortune of one man, with no formal role or official recognition, what, then, happens when he goes? She is left with no allies, no job, no platforms, no car rides — just scorched earth. For the first time, Loomer sounds uncertain. She pauses; introspection doesn’t come naturally. “By the time Trump’s out of office, I’ll be 36 years old. And by then, I’m going to have to start thinking about other things in life. So who knows whether I’ll be doing this forever.” And then she adds, with a straight face, “the Right-wing ecosystem has also become very toxic”.
Loomer, arguably more than anyone else in this sphere, has helped stoke that toxicity. Haranguing politicians with bullhorns, filming people without their knowledge or consent, and attempting to cancel public figures online represent the Right at its worst. These are gutter politics — and that’s before we flick through the long charge sheet of particularly “provocative” statements, including that the 2018 Parkland and Santa Fe high school shootings involved crisis actors; that Casey DeSantis, wife of then presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, exaggerated her breast cancer to boost her husband’s campaign; and that 9/11 was an “inside job”.
Our conversation revealed a woman who is a cocktail of festering resentment and entitlement, who will use any new connection for her own ends. She is the classic Trump pawn: deployed for as long as she is useful, and then discarded. The President will throw her a morsel of camaraderie from time to time, but it’ll never be more than that. She’s driven by this toxic frustration. It came as no real surprise when, a day after our conversation, she texted me a photo of “independent journalists” at the White House from Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt’s account. “No invite for me though.”
Loomer will inevitably be cast out — though she doesn’t seem to know it. “I don’t aggregate news, I create the news,” she says proudly. “The President has said that he sees my content and I’m pretty much followed by every single main White House staffer and cabinet member on X.” Her content extends far beyond X, but the poison that she helped to inject now courses through America’s body politic.
