"Beyond disturbing": Trump's allies try to blame Laura Loomer for his racist debate claims

Laura Loomer is an appallingly racist, unhinged conspiracy theorist who has no business being anywhere near a major party’s presidential candidate. And that’s just what Republicans think.

Over the last week, allies of Donald Trump — from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — have reacted with alarm to images of the far-right provocateur cozying up to the GOP nominee. Loomer, who has suggested 9/11 was an “inside job” and celebrates the death of migrants, rode on Trump’s private plane to the debate in Philadelphia and then appeared alongside him at events marking the 2001 terrorist attacks, seen playing “on her phone while pacing between Mr. Trump’s two campaign managers,” The New York Times reported.

According to Greene, Loomer is a “poisonous” and “mentally unstable” figure on the right, one whose open racism (she said the White House would “smell like curry” if Vice President Kamala Harris were to win) is making Trump “look bad.”

Graham likewise took issue with Loomer’s potential impact on the campaign. “The history of statements by Ms. Loomer are beyond disturbing,” he told The Washington Post on Thursday. “I hope this problem gets resolved,” he continued, saying Trump’s informal adviser — a person he wanted to formally hire last year — “doesn’t help the cause.”

Loomer, 31, has responded as could be expected from a member of Trump’s inner circle: by leveling vicious personal attacks against her various critics. Greene, she said, is an adulterer who wrecked her marriage; Graham, she claimed, is a gay man afraid to come out of the closet (“Just be honest,” she posted on X).

It is hard to believe that, in September 2024, allies of the former president have genuinely turned against the proliferation of racist conspiracy theories. The problem, it appears, is that racist conspiracy theories alone are probably not enough to win a general election — but Loomer, a constantly-online extremist, is encouraging Trump to be the worst version of himself.

As Axios noted, “Loomer was among those making false posts on X about immigrants killing and eating dogs and cats,” a claim that Trump famously repeated before 67 million people, his disastrous debate performance followed by bomb threats targeting the very people he slandered.

Loomer is being blamed for the fact that the Republican Party’s 78-year-old candidate cannot stop himself from repeating whatever racist dreck is whispered in his ear or comes across his feed on Truth Social. When Trump sticks to generalities — immigrants are all murderers and rapists, never mind the data showing they are significantly less prone to criminality than native-born Americans, who are also committing fewer offenses these days — no elected Republican bothers to speak out. When he repeats a specific urban legend, though, he doesn’t just trigger the libs but open himself up to mockery among normal people exposed for the first time to the product of a far-right internet subculture that is, yes, weird.

Republicans like Graham may hope that Trump distancing himself from Loomer can serve as evidence of a general-election pivot to the center. But she is not responsible for who Trump is and the overtly racist campaign he chose to run long before she entered the scene.

Loomer may have promoted the conspiracy theory about immigrants eating cats, but so did that state’s junior senator and Trump hand-picked running mate, JD Vance, whose response to being debunked was instructing his followers to “keep the cat memes flowing.”

Trump team insiders insist that Loomer actually “has no role, official or unofficial,” on the former president’s campaign. The claim is that she’s just there for emotional support.

“She’s ride-or-die, and Trump rewards that loyalty,” one source told The Bulwark. “She’s part of the entourage, and Trump loves an entourage.”

If Trump is appearing too racist or too online to be president in this, his third run for the White House, it is because that is who he is — and his advanced age makes it harder to hide; it is not because some MAGA Rasputin is just feeding him bad advice. Nor is he the only one in today’s GOP openly leaning on a hatemonger: On Sept. 11, the National Republican Senate Committee posted a video on X of Loomer harassing Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., about transgender people in sports.

In 2024, the Republican Party is fully Donald Trump’s, most real dissidents having already been exiled to MSNBC. The former president may well jettison Loomer before all the ballots are cast — loyalty is not something he has been known to reciprocate — but his years-long embrace of the far-right activist (like his dinner with the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes; like his praise for neo-Nazis in Charlottesville; like his repeating neo-Nazi rhetoric about migrants) shows that the rot in today’s GOP is coming from the top.

For the party to ever claim it represents a decent, respectable and non-racist form of conservatism — whatever one thinks of tax cuts and country clubs — it can’t stop at purging a single millennial: Republicans will have to look at the top of their ticket.