Laura Loomer Is Where Republicans Draw the Line

In the nine years since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower, Republican politicians have become less and less likely to publicly disagree with him. But in recent days, a rift has opened up between Trump and the GOP over one of his allies. Laura Loomer, an online conspiracy theorist with a penchant for bigotry, was seen leaving Trump’s private plane with him before the presidential debate last Tuesday. The next day, Loomer, who has said that 9/11 was an “inside job,” tagged along with Trump to a 9/11 memorial event.

Republican politicians do not like her proximity to the ex-president and have said so. “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans,” and stands to “hurt President Trump's chances of winning re-election. Enough,” Republican Senator Thom Tillis tweeted on Friday. Other Republicans, including Lindsey Graham and even Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has espoused her own racist and conspiratorial ideas, made the rare move of implicitly challenging Trump in public; Greene said that Loomer does not have “the right mentality to advise” the president. Trump’s own staff has even reportedly tried to keep Loomer away from him. She has become a rare thing for the GOP these days: a red line that the party is not willing to cross.

Republicans have good reasons for disavowing Loomer. She has described Islam as a “cancer on humanity” and said that she is “pro–white nationalism.” Last week, she posted on X that the “White House will smell like curry” if Kamala Harris wins the election. Loomer’s racism is completely unabashed and unveiled, making her a unique liability even in a party that has spent the past two weeks terrorizing immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, with racist lies.

Like Trump, Loomer almost never backs down. But she doesn’t have the same media-power-broker status as Charlie Kirk or Tucker Carlson, both of whom have flirted with racism. And unlike Greene, Loomer doesn’t have a vote in Congress. She provides less value to Republicans in Congress and is thus easier to censure.

In recent days, Trump has seemed to be feeling the pressure from his allies to distance himself from her. “Loomer doesn’t work for the campaign,” Trump reminded his followers on Truth Social on Friday, noting that he does “disagree with the statements she made.” But it was hardly much of a rebuke at all. “Like the many millions of people who support me,” he closed out his mea culpa, “she is tired of watching the Radical Left Marxists and Fascists violently attack and smear me.”

Trump’s allies believe he is missing an opportunity to earn political capital by refusing to disavow her completely. Historically, figures like Loomer have actually worked to the benefit of more mainstream conservatives. With a circus character to criticize as too extreme, politicians can sanitize their own reputations as more moderate and sensible. The legendary genteel conservative thinker William F. Buckley Jr. is credited for his “crusade” against the John Birch Society, a radical right-wing group that was famous for conspiracy theorizing and rose to prominence in the 1960s. Buckley got to have the best of both worlds, as Matthew Dallek chronicled in his book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. On the outside, in writing op-eds criticizing the group, Buckley appeared to have kept the rogue fringe from tainting the American right. But he also still kept many Birchers as a core base of support for the broader conservative movement.

A similar dynamic played out with David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Louisiana state representative who mounted a primary challenge to President George H. W. Bush in 1992. Duke’s Klan baggage and overt racism was eventually deemed a headache by more mainstream members of the party. He was disavowed during the 1992 presidential campaign while another Republican primary candidate, Pat Buchanan, faced less scrutiny despite  one prominent far-right publication viewing him as “Duke without the baggage,” as the writer John Ganz puts it in his history of the 1990s political right, When the Clock Broke. (The Anti-Defamation League has called Buchanan an “unrepentant bigot” and accused him of defending an alleged Nazi war criminal.)

But even those who are publicly dismissed for blatant demonstrations of hatred are often resilient in today’s messy information ecosystem. When CNN revealed in 2020 that Blake Neff, a writer for Carlson’s Fox News show, had a history of posting racist things online, Neff resigned and was criticized by both the company’s CEO and its president in an internal staff memo. Then, in 2023, Media Matters for America noticed that Neff had been hired as a producer for Kirk, showing yet again that these kinds of people and their ideas are never truly pushed away.

Today, Loomer seems to be a version of the Birchers or David Duke—the more extreme actor who is tossed aside as a sacrificial lamb to appease moderates and the masses. Almost every member of the GOP in high-profile elected offices, from its furthest right fringe in Greene to a moderate such as Tillis, appears to understand this. Trump seemingly does not. On Friday, he told reporters that Loomer was a “big supporter” and a “free spirit.”

The former president has trampled over most norms by now, but his connection to Loomer is also evidence that his political instincts have dulled. During the debate, he parroted positions of the extremely online right that are inscrutable to most people, even those who mostly agree with him. It is not clear whether Trump’s palling around with Loomer is a product of his descent into the internet, or vice versa, but either way, the outcome is the same: As Trump has yanked the Republican Party to the far right, he has simultaneously welcomed extremists into the mainstream GOP.