policy
Before Donald Trump traveled to Philadelphia for this week's debate, he invited one among the web's most polarizing figures to hitch him on the trip.
Laura Loomer was backstage with Trump's entourage when Trump took on Vice President Kamala Harris. Immediately afterward, she was within the spin room with the previous president. And the following day, she flew with him to New York City and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Loomer is a far-right activist known for her never-ending stream of sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Islamic and infrequently anti-Semitic social media posts and public stunts. Over the past decade, she has made a reputation for herself by blatantly claiming that 9/11 was “an inside job,” calling Islam a “cancer,” accusing the wife of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis of exaggerating breast cancer syndrome and alleging that President Joe Biden was behind the assassination attempt on Trump in July.
Just two days before the talk, 31-year-old Loomer posted a racist joke concerning the vice chairman, whose mother was an Indian-American. Loomer wrote on X that if Harris won the election, the White House would “smell like curry.”
Many observers, including a few of Trump's key allies, found the Republican presidential candidate's decision to provide a platform to a social media instigator – albeit one with 1.3 million followers on X – at a vital moment within the campaign baffling.
“This person's past is just really toxic,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, told a HuffPost reporter on Thursday. “I don't think it's helpful at all.”
His comments were echoed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a staunch Trump supporter. “I don't think she has the experience or the right mindset to advise on a very important presidential election,” Greene told reporters Thursday morning.
Loomer declined to comment, writing in a text message that she was “not interested in talking to the media so they can spread their conspiracies about me.” But on her favorite media outlet, X, she attacked each Greene and Graham, calling them disloyal to Trump and making a series of allegations about their personal lives.
The criticism has not dampened the candidate's enthusiasm for her. On Thursday afternoon, Trump shared a post of hers on Truth Social wherein she attempted to refute an Axios story that said Harris was outranking Trump on social media.
When asked for comment on their association with the previous president, the Trump campaign responded with a press release released Wednesday on the anniversary of 9/11 that didn’t reply to questions on their ties to Trump. “That day was about none other than the souls who are no longer with us, their families, and the heroes who bravely stepped in to save their fellow Americans on that fateful day,” the campaign statement said.
This was in no way Trump's first connection together with her.
Loomer lives in Florida and steadily attends events at Mar-a-Lago. The former president has reposted a lot of her social media posts on his own accounts. In January, she flew with him to Iowa for the state's primary. In April, The New York Times reported that Trump was considering hiring her for his campaign – a plan he only abandoned after a few of his supporters objected.
But with seven weeks left within the presidential campaign—a time when the traditional wisdom is that candidates are broadening their messaging to appeal to moderate, undecided voters—Trump's endorsement of Loomer is a transparent signal that he’s as an alternative doubling down on his efforts to support a number of the most hawkish elements of the far right.
Another signal got here on Tuesday when the Trump team arrange a “social media war room” in Philadelphia to react to the talk in real time. About 18 conservative influencers gathered in a conference room at Warwick Rittenhouse Square – the identical hotel where Harris was staying – and hammered away at Harris' every remark throughout the debate while vigorously defending Trump.
The group included Chaya Raichik, who’s behind the conservative social media account Libs of TikTok and is understood for her transphobic content and smear campaigns against schools, hospitals and libraries; Jack Posobiec, a right-wing podcaster who helped spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that Democratic politicians secretly ran a baby sex trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria; and Rogan O'Handley, best often called DC Draino, who’s a voter refusenik and vaccine skeptic.
Ahead of the event, Trump had sent each attendee a signed letter thanking them for “being a social media warrior in the fight to save our country” and adding that he looked forward to “creating viral content with you in the White House in just a few months.”
The group had a complete of about 50 million social media followers, in keeping with Alex Bruesewitz, a political consultant hired by the campaign last month. Some of them, including Posobiec and O'Handley, have also been tapped by the Republican National Committee in recent weeks to host webinars on election integrity.
Shortly before the talk began, Bruesewitz took a video call from Trump, who gave him a pep talk.
“Actually, you are more important than me because you spread it the way you want to spread it,” Trump said in a video of the decision that was later posted on social media.
It's hard to measure what influence such voices might need on Trump, and little to nothing is understood about what conversations he had with Loomer or other influencers about his campaign. But few, if any, candidates have a better relationship with their online electorate, which doesn't all the time deal with the identical issues because the broader electorate.
In the times leading as much as the talk, Loomer and most other members of Trump's social media war center posted allegations that Haitian migrants had killed and eaten pets in Springfield, Ohio.
The most shared images, created using artificial intelligence, show dogs, cats and geese being protected by Trump, in addition to other content that supports the unsubstantiated claim that the pets are being eaten. On Monday, for instance, O'Handley uploaded a picture of Trump straddling an enormous cat and holding an AR-15 rifle.
Loomer, in turn, published ads for dog collars that read “not your lunch #MAGA,” which were available for $23.28 plus shipping. Another version had the phrase “don't eat me” in Haitian Creole.
Trump's last two posts on Truth Social before the talk were AI-generated images of cats and geese; one showed cats in military uniforms carrying assault rifles and wearing MAGA hats; the opposite showed the candidate himself sitting on a plane amid a flock of geese and cats.
About 26 minutes into the talk, Trump responded to a matter about immigration by claiming that migrants were “eating the pets of people” living in Springfield.
For most of the 67 million viewers who tuned in to the talk and who didn't have as much online activity as the previous president or his supporters on social media, the comment can have been confusing. But for some who hope he shall be defeated within the election in November, the entire episode sparked a certain quantity of glee.
On Thursday, former Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) took to social media to sarcastically urge Trump to spend more time with Loomer, calling her a “perfect adviser.”
“I hope he keeps her close until the election,” she wrote. “They belong together.”
image credit : www.boston.com