Laura Loomer, the real first lady

The footage is grainy; it was shot at a distance, because the meeting wasn’t announced in advance. It had a clandestine air. But quickly, reporters identified the woman who arrived at the west portico entrance of the White House around midday on April 2. Partially obscured by flags in the foreground, the cameras still captured enough to see president Donald Trump emerge personally to greet the scarlet-coated figure as she climbed from the back of a black town car. The president hustled her inside.

Figures around Trump had managed, up until then, to keep Laura Loomer at arm’s length from the administration, but they couldn’t keep it up forever. She reached the president by phone and on his instruction was invited to the Oval Office.

Loomer’s immense influence over Trump was soon made apparent. Almost immediately after this meeting, at what quickly became clear was her direct instruction, the president purged America’s two most senior spies – general Timothy Haugh, director of the National Security Agency, and deputy director Wendy Noble – as well as a half-dozen senior National Security Council staffers.

Loomer, it emerged, had brought a list of people that she thought should be fired for being “insufficient in their support of Trump,” two sources who were at the meeting told CNN – a list with Haugh and Noble directly at the top.

Just after midnight that night, Loomer confirmed the speculation on social media. “NSA Director Tim Haugh and his deputy Wendy Noble have been disloyal to President Trump. That is why they have been fired,” she wrote. “Their firings are a blessing for the American people. Thank you President Trump for being receptive to the vetting materials provided to you and thank you for firing these Biden holdovers.”

Asked about the meeting by reporters following her post, Trump said it had been “constructive” and went on to describe Loomer as “a very good patriot” and “a very strong person”, repeating phrases he has used multiple times in the past to describe her.

The fact that Mike Walz, Trump’s national security adviser, who was also present for the meeting, tried to oppose their firing but was overruled by the president at Loomer’s urging led many commentators to go as far as to compare her with Rasputin, the sinister mystic who held Russian Czar Nicholas II under his spell.

In fact, their relationship is so close that many have long speculated that Trump and Loomer, who is 31, are having an affair, rumours that persisted throughout the run-up to the 2024 election. During the campaign, Loomer had almost unfettered access to Trump, spending weeks accompanying him on his plane, even going with him to the presidential debate with Harris in Philadelphia. The day after he was targeted by a gunman at a rally in Pennsylvania, Loomer was with him once again.

“Loomer Maga Love! Has He Found His Soulmate?” read one headline on the Drudge Report in September 2024, under a photo of the pair standing, it’s fair to say, pretty intimately at a campaign rally. That weekend, on a livestream that Loomer broadcasts on Sundays, she addressed the rumours directly. “I know that Kamala Harris sucked dick to get where she is today; I ain’t like her, OK?” she said. “I don’t suck dick to get to the top.”

Even for Trumpworld, Loomer cuts one of the madder figures in the president’s orbit. Born in Tucson, Arizona in 1993, she is a two-time failed congressional candidate and self-described “proud Islamophobe” and “pro-white nationalist”. She has associated herself with and often proudly endorsed a bewildering range of conspiracy theories from Qanon to 9/11 trutherism. She has said that Muslims are “savages fucking everything up for everyone.”

In the run-up to the Iowa caucuses early in the 2024 primary cycle, she posted on social media, claiming that “the Deep State” was manipulating the weather to cause a snowstorm that would hurt Trump’s turnout. When Republican senator Lindsey Graham described her posts as “disturbing”, Loomer responded: “When is Lindsay [sic] coming out of the closet? we all know you’re Gay”.

During the campaign, she tweeted that if Kamala Harris won the election “the White House will smell like curry and White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center” – a post so breathtakingly offensive that even congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a figure of the furthest-right wing who once suggested Nancy Pelosi should be executed for treason and is herself no stranger to conspiracy theories, was moved to publicly condemn it as “appalling and extremely racist”.

“It’s a testament to persistence, these people who can worm their way into circles of power by being the right kind of crazy,” a source within the Republican party told The New European. “But being the right kind of crazy, you’re still fucking crazy.”

“It makes me doubt humanity,” the source added. “Like – holy fucking shit.”

Laura Loomer started her trolling career with Project Veritas, a right-wing site famous for undercover sting-style operations intended to entrap liberals. Her first hidden camera video, published in 2014, purported to expose an administrator at Barry University, where she was a student, by proposing a club called “Sympathetic Students in Support of the Islamic State”. The administrator gently suggested it should be renamed but didn’t react with outrage, and the video went viral. “It was a stunt, but it was to prove a point about how politically correct universities are,” Loomer said at the time.

During the 2016 election, she requested a ballot under the name of Huma Abedin (a senior Clinton adviser) while wearing a burqa. She crashed a Chelsea Clinton book-signing and requested the book be signed to Juanita Broaddrick, a woman who has accused Bill Clinton of raping her.

After Trump won in November, she left Project Veritas for a Canadian right-wing site called The Rebel, where she worked alongside Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. Her first stunt there, by far her biggest yet, was crashing a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar in New York in July 2017, where she rushed the stage shouting “stop the normalisation of political violence against the right!” and claiming that “CNN is ISIS!”

She gained wider notoriety when she responded to being banned from Twitter – in 2018, back in the pre-Elon days – by chaining herself to the door of the company offices in New York, though because she chained herself only to one door she did not, in fact, succeed in obstructing anyone. Musk reinstated her account in 2022.

The schtick Loomer was key in helping develop, along with other alt-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulous, Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovitch, was one that came to define not just her but arguably the whole Trump era. It is a kind of provocation ju-jitsu: racist statements so over-the-top, and stunts so preposterous, they go viral through sheer disbelief. This was the beginning of meme warfare, which requires the realisation that even when you’re being mocked, you’re still getting the message out there – and the sheer silliness of the whole thing provides the plausible deniability of cynicism: can’t you take a joke?

This, it’s worth saying, made her controversial in far-right circles too. By the time Trump was inaugurated in 2017 a gulf was emerging between serious far-right ideologues and this new movement, rooted in the nihilist sensibilities of internet trolling, where everything is for the lols and nothing matters.

In 2020 Loomer made the first of two congressional bids, losing handily in Florida’s 21st Congressional District. But even though she had no chance of winning, she had chosen where to make her run with care. Encompassing West Palm Beach, the district contains Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and it is where he votes. She was always going to lose the heavily Democrat-leaning seat, but she successfully courted Trump’s attention and that of some of his immediate political circle.

Many Trump allies see in her a blueprint for finally demolishing what remains of the old guard of the traditional Republican party. “If 10% of Republican Washington had the energy, grit and determination of Laura, we wouldn’t be in the position that the McConnells, Boehners, and Ryans put us in,” a senior Trump administration official told The New European.

Then there are those rumours. In 2023, in a video Loomer recorded of the two of them hanging out together at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, she tells Trump, “you’re the best … I love you.” Trump, for his part, tells her she is “very special,” adding: “You are a very opinionated lady, I have to tell you. And in my opinion, I like that.” In 2024 Loomer claimed on a livestream that, “Every time president Trump sees me, he always says, ‘You’re so smart. I love your site so much. You’re so intelligent. I love your articles. I read your website every day’.”

“Oooh,” the Republican party source says when asked by The New European about the rumours Trump and Loomer might be romantically involved. “I don’t even wanna – I did not think that until a week ago.” But after the Oval Office meeting, the source said they were “finding it harder to convince myself that’s not the case.”

“It becomes an Occam’s Razor. She’s not even necessarily popular on the right… what doesn’t compute for me is her following is not big enough for the power she’s received.”

Asked the same question, though, the senior Trump administration official responded: “lol, zero chance. Relax.”

Regardless of the more salacious rumours, the fact remains that Loomer has demonstrated considerable power over Trump, to the point where she is arguably in control of significant parts of the US national security infrastructure. Given her stated positions – on 9/11 trutherism, on Qanon, and perhaps most pertinently on Islam – there are vanishingly few ways this doesn’t end in disaster.