The Joseph McCarthy of the Trump Era

The first thing Laura Loomer wanted to know when I called her earlier this month was whether this was going to be a “hit piece.” The self-described investigative journalist and unofficial adviser to President Donald Trump is familiar with the genre. She had just attacked the United States Army for praising a recipient of the Medal of the Honor. She would soon claim without evidence that Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—another person comfortable trafficking in unsubstantiated allegations—“gave blow jobs in the back rooms of CrossFit gyms.” Soon after that, she said that Palestinian children receiving medical care in the United States posed a “dangerous” threat to American national security.

You never know just how far she will go, but that’s the game she plays. I suggested at one point that her effort to get federal employees fired for supposed disloyalty to Trump recalled the Red Scare of the early 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin exploited the private musings and personal associations of alleged communist sympathizers to end their careers. She loved that.

“Joseph McCarthy was right,” Loomer responded without missing a beat. “We need to make McCarthy great again.”

She had toiled for a decade on the dark edges of relevance, pulling public pranks and getting chased off financial and social-media platforms for hate-speech violations. She was arrested after storming the stage at New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park to protest a Trump-inspired Julius Caesar and kicked off Uber and Lyft for saying that she did not want Muslim drivers. She also lost two bids for GOP congressional nominations in Florida, symbolically refusing to concede the second because of the “voter fraud” she says was caused by her inability to communicate on social media. She found out at the end of last year that she would not get the White House job she thought she was promised, and lost her ability to make money on X after violating the platform’s doxxing policies.

Yet, here we are. Loomer, the proud, defiant, extremist troll, is one of the most influential public figures in what is still the most important country on the planet—“back from the dead and rose from the ashes,” she told me. How did this come to pass? “I am a genuine person, and I speak my mind. I am not fake,” she offered. “It’s a story of persistence. As I like to say, persistence will beat the resistance.”

Another explanation has to do with her champion and enabler, the most powerful person in the country, who has stuck with her despite the warnings, sneers, and eye rolls of his own senior advisers. “I know she’s known as a radical right, but I think Laura Loomer is a very nice person,” Trump told reporters this month. His early mentor Roy Cohn had previously been an unapologetic adviser to McCarthy during his red-baiting Congressional hearings. Trump’s subsequent political adviser, Roger Stone, a friend and admirer of Cohn, has been a mentor to Loomer.

Whatever the reason, her private research and public X posts have destroyed careers, shaped news cycles, and moved financial markets. Quite often, Trump doesn’t just listen to Loomer—he does what she wants.

In just the first seven months of Trump’s second presidency, she successfully lobbied Trump to end Secret Service protection for Joe Biden’s children. She has pushed the president to fire six members of his National Security Council, remove three leaders at the National Security Agency, end an academic appointment at West Point, fire the director of the National Vetting Center at the Department of Homeland Security, dispatch an assistant U.S. attorney in California, and remove a federal prosecutor in Manhattan. After Trump’s intel chief stripped 37 current and former national-security officials of their security clearance Wednesday, she claimed credit for first labeling 29 of them as threats to Trump.

Every day was another opportunity to grab headlines, to protect the president, to expose another potential saboteur. This phone call, included.

“Why do we want to have a woman who is pregnant, who is going to have to take maternity leave as soon as she is confirmed?” Loomer asked me. “You should make a decision: Do you want to have a career, or do you want a family?”

She was referring to Casey Means, a Stanford-trained doctor turned wellness influencer Trump nominated to be surgeon general. Loomer believes that Means is part of an extortionist, Marxist vanguard—led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—that will ultimately sabotage the Trump administration and the Republican Party. In her rapid-fire staccato—always urgent, indignant, agrieved—Loomer rattled off facts that she had uncovered about Means’s metabolic-health company and her husband’s past sympathies for Black Lives Matter. (Means did not respond to a request for comment.)

I stopped Loomer and asked her to go back: Did she really believe that pregnant women should not have careers? “You can have a family, and you can have a career,” Loomer responded, beginning what sounded like a pivot toward acknowledging that Congress outlawed employment discrimination based on motherhood back in 1978.

But that was not her point. “If you are going to be working in the federal government, don’t you think it is a little abusive if you have a job where you can’t bring your baby every day?” she asked me. “Are my tax dollars supposed to go to her because she doesn’t use a condom? Is there not a man who is qualified?”

Casey Means and the MAHA takeover

Not so long ago, people who spoke like Loomer were ostracized from political parties and mainstream conversations, cast as the fringe. Provocateurs once needed to find publishers to produce their pamphlets. Activists begged access from White House staff to get on the president’s schedule. Opposition researchers depended on journalists to launder their work. And those who called themselves journalists operated by codes: no undisclosed financial arrangements with political actors, no explicit political advocacy, and extensive editing and legal vetting to assure accuracy. The system minimized a certain type of toxicity, while giving those who already had power—the owners of media outlets, the leaders of government and industry—a gatekeeping role.

The 32-year-old Loomer belongs to a new era, when any thought can be instantly published everywhere and the president is easy to reach on his cellphone. Despite the loss of her accounts on Facebook and Instagram, she has a growing audience of 1.7 million followers on her fully reinstated X account (up by about 30 percent since last year), a sponsored podcast on Rumble, and—she claims—an expanding roster of private clients, including major political donors, whose names she declines to disclose.

Top Trump advisers, unable to cast her away, regularly work with her behind the scenes. In addition to having calls and meetings with the president, Loomer speaks regularly with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel Sergio Gor, according to people familiar with the relationships. Loomer praises Wiles for being open to her work and has called Gor a friend. But she speaks of the White House overall as a self-dealing den of duplicity, where staff regularly conspire against the president she adores.

“Everyone is positioning themselves for a post-Trump GOP,” she told me, adding that Trump is often surprised by what she tells him about his own administration. “Every time I have these briefings, he looks at his staff and says, ‘How come you didn’t tell me this?’”

It is a high-stakes game that threatens to broaden distrust within Trump’s senior ranks. If isolated, once-anodyne facts from the past can sink careers; nearly anyone is suddenly vulnerable to exposure, setting Loomer up as a tip line for administration officials to inform on their office rivals, while potentially providing other powerful interests a lever to disappear their adversaries. “There are people who message me all the time,” Loomer boasted to me. “In every agency, I have sources.”

Read: “I run the country and the world.”

Last week, she got ahold of a video showing happy Palestinian refugees arriving in the San Francisco airport, owing to efforts by Heal Palestine, a group that provides treatment in the United States to children wounded in Gaza. The group says that the children and their families arrived on temporary visas and will return to the Middle East after treatment. She called the spectacle an “Islamic invasion” and asked the Trump administration to shut it down. A day later, the State Department announced a stop to “all visitor visas for individuals from Gaza” to review the situation. “It’s amazing how fast we can get results from the Trump administration,” Loomer posted on X.

Not all of her efforts succeed. I asked her about her unsuccessful attempt to stop Trump’s appointment of Colonel Earl G. Matthews as general counsel of the Department of Defense, making him one of the highest-ranking African Americans in the building. She had attacked Matthews for his past praise of former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a Biden appointee, and his work with former Trump advisers turned foes such as former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and National Security Adviser John Bolton. But she did not bring up those points with me. “He sounds like he is speaking Ebonics anytime he speaks,” she said. “I don’t take anything he says seriously.” (Matthews, in fact, sounds like a U.S. Army colonel when he speaks. He did not respond to a request for comment.)

“I would rather be feared than loved,” Loomer added. “I don’t need to be loved by people who work in Washington, D.C.”

Earlier this summer, Loomer told The New York Times that she had five paying clients for her research-consulting firm, an unusual side business for someone who describes themselves as a journalist. Now she says she has more, but she will not give a number. “It is not policy matters,” she told me, adding that some are corporate clients who want her to do “executive-level vetting.” “There are several billionaires I work with, and they have retained me to do their political vetting.”

The foggy boundaries between her activism, so-called journalism, and client work have created widespread concern that she is surreptitiously passing on information to promote the agendas of powerful interests.

After she began posting about the Puerto Rican bankruptcy authority, Trump fired its whole board, immediately improving the stock value of a major natural-gas company that was seeking a contract with the island. After she began attacking Republicans who wanted a clean break between Chevron and the Venezuelan government, Trump’s team granted the company new sanctions carve-outs. After she resurfaced old political comments by Vinay Prasad, a top official at the Food and Drug Administration, he resigned his post, saying through a spokesperson that he “did not want to be a distraction to the great work of the FDA.”

Like many of Loomer’s crusades, her attacks on Prasad focused on facts that would not have been disqualifying in the previous age when technocrats were hired for their abilities, not their ideological purity. She called Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist at the University of San Francisco, who had long been a critic of the FDA, a “trojan horse” and “saboteur” because he called himself a “Bernie Sanders liberal” in 2022 and wrote on Twitter in 2020 that he wanted Joe Biden to win—facts that did not trouble Kennedy, who was himself a Democrat until 2023. (Loomer accused Kennedy last week of preparing for a 2028 presidential bid, prompting him to announce that he was not running.)

Loomer’s crusade against Prasad came soon after he decided to limit access to a Sarepta Therapeutics drug, following evidence that it causes severe liver damage; this led MAGA influencers to allege that Loomer was secretly working for the pharmaceutical company. Sarepta, through a spokesperson, said that it has not “engaged with nor associated with Laura Loomer.” She told me the same, even offering “to sign an affidavit” saying so. But the wholly unsubstantiated claims still played a role in undermining Loomer’s case against Prasad; two senior Trump advisers told me that, although they had seen no proof of a connection, they believed the rumors. After he resigned, the White House invited Prasad to rejoin the administration, which he did about two weeks after leaving.

Loomer also denies taking money from Chevron or those with interests before the bankruptcy board of Puerto Rico. Although the obscurity of her targets raises suspicions, she said she has always taken on niche issues. She told me that she has been discussing legal action with her attorney against her public critics who accuse her of engaging in pay-to-play, a path that some of her critics have welcomed because of the prospect of uncovering her financial arrangements during discovery.

Those who have known her for years speak of her zeal and commitment as the purest form of MAGA. “It may shock a lot of folks in politics, but some of us are actually involved for reasons other than power, money, and fame,” Ted Goodman, a MAGA-aligned political operative who works for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, told me. “She can’t be bought and isn’t swayed by monetary gain.”

Brian Ballard, one of the most influential Trump-aligned lobbyists in Washington, told me that he has not worked with Loomer, but he had nothing but praise. “I think she is incredibly effective, and I understand why people would want to hire her,” he said.

Trump and Loomer agree that a failure to sift through appointees’ pasts in the first term undermined the president’s ambitions. “If there would have actually been proper vetting systems set up in the first Trump administration, the Russian-collusion hoax never would have happened, the first impeachment never would have happened, the second impeachment never would have happened,” she explained on a recent episode of her podcast. Trump seems to have taken this advice to heart. In his second go-round as president, his administration has taken several steps that appear designed to eliminate dissent or checks on his power.

The problem is that no one is clear on what constitutes a fireable offense. Trump’s top advisers, including Wiles, have been working intentionally, with Trump’s support, to expand the tent of Republican politics by embracing leaders such as Kennedy, a scion of the most famous Democratic family, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman who previously ran as a Democrat. Past liberal leanings, in this effort, are a benefit, not a liability. Trump has stocked his inner circle with people such as Vice President J. D. Vance, who once compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who once speculated mockingly about the size of Trump’s manhood.

Like Trump, Loomer says that Vance and Rubio earned forgiveness because they have made amends. But at other times, Loomer has found herself on the wrong side of Trump. Loomer defended Trump’s initial pick to lead NASA, Jared Isaacman, a friend of Elon Musk, even though Isaacman has given money to Democrats in the past. Others in the White House, including Gor, supported removing Isaacman amid Trump’s high-profile fallout with Musk, leading Trump to withdraw Isaacman’s name.

The decline and fall of Elon Musk

Trump has ignored other Loomer recommendations, such as her demand to fire Attorney General Pam Bondi over her handling of Justice Department records on the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. (Loomer says Trump is not implicated in any of Epstein’s crimes, and she encouraged him to sue The Wall Street Journal after it wrote about a bawdy letter reportedly from Trump that was found among Epstein’s possessions.) The president remains a strong supporter of Kennedy, who endorsed Trump last year after the president agreed to adopt much of his health agenda. (Their agreement was the result of “extortion” on the part of Kennedy, Loomer argues.) The White House leadership is counting on the Make America Healthy Again coalition to help Republicans in the midterm elections. Trump also called Loomer and dressed her down after she criticized his decision to allow the Air Force to accept a commercial plane from the Qatari government. “I want to apologize to President Trump more than anyone because I am a loyal person,” she later posted.

The most jarring Loomer crusades challenge the central assumptions of the national project. On August 8, the U.S. Army retold the heroic story of Captain Florent Groberg, a Medal of Honor winnner who had tackled a suicide bomber 12 years earlier in Aghanistan, saving the lives of other Americans while sustaining serious injuries to his brain, leg, and, ear. Loomer pounced, denouncing the Army secretary for praising someone like Groberg, who was born in France and had given a speech supporting the presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

“Are we supposed to believe the Army couldn’t find a Republican and US born soldier?” she wrote on X. “They had to find an immigrant who voted for Hillary Clinton and spoke at the DNC as Obama’s guest?” The claim that foreign-born patriots are less worthy of praise than those who are native-born won Loomer articles in The Washington Post, the Daily Mail, and other publications, but no comment from the White House.

Among those who objected was Greene, the Trump-aligned representative from Georgia who has tangled with Loomer—and has directed her own opposition research. “Many people need to wake up about her reporting. Researching facts and then spinning them into lies to serve her agenda doesn’t make her good or trustworthy. It makes her a liar and it makes her dangerous,” Greene concluded in her own social-media post.

This, for Loomer, was an opportunity. She has no problem going after Republican targets. She has publicly accused Senator Lindsey Graham of being gay, which he denies, and called the podcaster Tucker Carlson a “fraud” and a “terrible person.” Loomer let loose on Greene, claiming without evidence that she committed obscene acts in CrossFit gyms. (She did link to a Daily Mail article that had suggested, based on anonymous sources, that the congresswoman had extramarital affairs with people she knew through her gym.)

“Can you call yourself a Christian when your mouth is full of other men’s cock?” read one Loomer zinger, a modern version of the archetypical prompt “When did you stop beating your wife?”

All of it generated headlines, attention, and reposts of her social-media accounts. In a world without gatekeepers, where the most powerful man in the country rewards such behavior, Loomer sees little downside. Out-of-bounds provocation drives attention. Attention increases influence. And the person who matters the most is almost certainly entertained.

“At the end of the day, it is called the Trump administration,” she told me on our phone call. “So the way I look at it, I play for an audience of one.”

Vivian Salama contributed to this story.