For the uninitiated, watching a Jeffrey Epstein truther such as Laura Loomer have such influence over the White House’s decisions is nothing short of baffling. ABC News attributes “the ouster of at least 15 individuals from Trump’s second administration” to Loomer’s influence — partially, at least. For Washington veterans who grew up in quote-unquote normal times, it’s unprecedented. If this 32-year-old online personality with no government experience tweets her displeasure at a random official, they soon find themselves clearing out their desks. If she manages to call Donald Trump’s cellphone — an insane proposition, because he’s the president of the United States, and no one should be able to call him directly — that firing happens even sooner.
But after following her career for over a decade, I’m not surprised at all. MAGA influencers are loud, provocative, and instinctively pro-Trump by nature, and Loomer certainly meets those standards, though I wouldn’t call her the apex extremist. What made Loomer stand out for years, and what I believe makes her stand out now, is her shamelessness. She’s built her career on IRL stunts, taking her trolling offline for the sake of humiliating her target — or, as she’s branded it, getting them “Loomered” — even if it results in arrests and lawsuits. Her new influence is just a higher-stakes version of Loomering: barging into the White House, making her presence known to Trump, and eventually getting her target humiliated.
Recapping the entire canon of her political beliefs would be a tedious and lengthy endeavor, though it’s safe to call them firmly MAGA: anti-elite, anti-immigrant, anti-left, conspiratorial, and perhaps a touch more Islamophobic than her peers in the year 2025. (Just last week, she claimed that stories about starving children in Gaza were “Palestinian propaganda [and] a lie” and expressed her apathy thusly: “Every time I see someone cry about Gaza, a brain cell dies.”) But with her newfound hold on the levels of power, here is a primer on not just who Laura Loomer is, but what she is.
She’s the descendant of the early troll years
The MAGA influencers are not a new phenomenon. Long before the rise of TikTok and the establishment of the influencer economy as we know it today, the MAGA influencers were already building their followings by tweeting pro-Trump content in 2017, eventually turning it into their full-time jobs.
Anthropologically speaking, they were the descendants of the conservative online internet trolls that rose to prominence during Gamergate and the early Breitbart years — Katie Pavlich and Milo Yiannopoulos among them. But once Trump came into power, provocative right-wing shitposters suddenly had greater influence: their content was being endorsed by the president of the United States — and perhaps could be interpreted as his official position — and one retweet from him could result in hundreds of new followers, if not thousands, in the span of hours.
Loomer was the beneficiary of the Trump retweet, though her influence via follower count was severely curtailed after she was kicked off the major platforms at the time — Twitter in 2018, Instagram and Facebook in 2019 — primarily for tweeting explicitly anti-Muslim statements and openly calling for their deaths. But by then, she had found a way around deplatforming.
She was better at stunts than everyone else
The practice of conservative college activists trolling the libs dates back decades, from affirmative action bake sales to running provocative columns in student papers. But its impact soon expanded off campuses starting in 2010, once Project Veritas began uploading hidden camera footage of so-called liberal elite figures stating controversial opinions. Loomer was an early college troll herself: in 2015, Project Veritas published a sting video she recorded at Barry University in which she asked faculty members if she could start a student group to support ISIS, and deceptively edited it to make it appear as if they agreed.
But while most young conservative activists would end such stunts after graduation, Loomer kept going, escalating the scale of those public disruptions — often as the employee of right-wing media groups that were eager to post content of libs getting “Loomered.” She’d film herself yelling at members of Congress during hearings on Capitol Hill, disrupting a Shakespeare in the Park performance of Julius Caesar in New York City, accosting James Comey at his book events, even jumping the fence of Gavin Newsom’s mansion with several men dressed in serapes to protest immigration laws. Oftentimes, they would end in her humiliation: in 2018, she chained herself to the doors of Twitter’s New York City headquarters to demand the return of her account, but inadvertently handcuffed herself to the door incorrectly, allowing Twitter employees to freely enter and exit the building without issue. But attention was attention, and headlines are headlines.
COVID lockdowns, and the subsequent cancellation of all public gatherings, derailed Loomer’s trajectory for a few years, though she did attempt to make the news again by running for Congress twice. In 2020, she won the Republican nomination in Florida’s 21st District — where Mar-a-Lago is based — but lost to the Democrat incumbent, Lois Frankel, by nearly 20 points. She lost her second attempt in 2022, in Florida’s heavily red 11th District in Tampa, during the Republican primary.
Somehow, she got on Trump’s good side
In April 2023, as Trump was gearing up for the primaries, The New York Times published a shocking report: he had asked his campaign to hire Loomer as a staffer. At the time, his team quickly shot down the idea, citing her history of “bigoted remarks” that threatened to derail Trump’s message. But Trump has a long history of circumventing his ostensible White House gatekeepers, from four-star generals and chiefs of staff to his own children, to take calls or meet with anyone — and Loomer had already proven her disregard of boundaries, no matter who was enforcing them.
As of today, Loomer has taken responsibility for ‘Loomering’ no less than a dozen Trump administration officials
As of today, Loomer has taken responsibility for “Loomering” no less than a dozen Trump administration officials, taking one of two approaches, and sometimes both: a public attack launched on social media, sometimes with insider information, and/or a private entreaty to Trump whenever she calls him directly or visits the Oval Office.
These days, Loomer frames her influence as a matter of allegiance to Trump, helping the president to purge potentially disloyal members from his cabinet. But as her stock rises, so do her haters: in recent weeks, members of the right-wing influencer complex have begun publicly raising questions, as they put it, about the purity of her own motivations. Most recently, several MAGA and MAHA influencers accused Loomer of taking money from Big Pharma to get Trump to oust Dr. Vinay Prasad, an official running a treatment-approval division of the Food and Drug Administration. (She had found a clip of Prasad on a podcast stating that he frequently stabbed a voodoo doll of Trump; it later emerged that he was imitating an aggrieved liberal.) Backstabbing, undermining, public feuds and smear campaigns are a common practice in the MAGA influencer economy — and it is almost inevitable that some unknown personality finds some way to sabotage her.
