Laura Loomer Is a Warning

White House staffers, it seems, had better hope that they stay in Laura Loomer’s good graces. This week, Loomer—a far-right provocateur who has described herself as “pro–white nationalism” and Islam as a “cancer on humanity”—met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. After she reportedly railed against National Security Council officials she believed were disloyal to the president, the White House fired six NSC staff members the next day. More firings could be on their way: Yesterday, a person close to the administration told my colleague Michael Scherer that “Loomer has been asked to put together a list of people at State who are not MAGA loyalists.”

Loomer doesn’t have an official job in the Trump administration, and the president has denied that she had anything to do with the NSC firings. But she is one of the president’s confidantes, and she has come to exercise a significant amount of influence over the White House. Lots of people in Trump’s inner circle have unlikely backgrounds (defense secretaries are not usually hired straight from Fox News), but Loomer’s is probably the least likely of them all. Over the past decade, she has earned a reputation as an unapologetically racist troll. In 2018, after she was banned from Twitter for criticizing then-incoming Representative Ilhan Omar and her Muslim faith, she famously handcuffed herself to the door of Twitter’s New York City headquarters. She was reinstated after Elon Musk bought the platform, and has continued to post racist things on X: In September, she suggested that a Kamala Harris election win would mean that “the White House will smell like curry.” (Loomer did not respond to a request for comment.)

Loomer’s power marks how little Trump now seems to care about being around people who have expressed racist and extremist ideas and kept racist and extremist company. She is a bit like the Forrest Gump of Trumpworld—an unlikely but persistent character who just keeps popping up during some of the right’s biggest moments. When Trump got off his private plane on his way to the presidential debate in September, Loomer appeared with him. The next day, when Trump traveled to New York for a 9/11-anniversary memorial, Loomer was again there with him. (She has called 9/11 an “inside job.”) As I wrote at the time, prominent Republicans did not like that their presidential candidate was associating himself with Loomer, and publicly challenged Trump over it. He seemingly has not listened.

[Read: Laura Loomer is where Republicans draw the line]

Loomer has also played a role in directing discourse on the right. She was integral to drumming up the hoax that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets, which became one of the most prominent right-wing causes du jour during the presidential campaign. In December, she instigated a war on the right over high-skilled immigration after she criticized the administration’s hiring of Sriram Krishnan as an AI-policy adviser and called attention to his past comments advocating for expanding H-1B visas. Most workers on H-1B visas are from India, and Loomer posted that Indian immigrants are “third world invaders.”

There is perhaps no one with direct access to the president who has been as outwardly and vociferously racist and bigoted. For all of the arguments that critics of Musk make about how he has boosted white supremacy on X, he has maintained a level of plausible deniability by never disparaging minority groups in a manner as direct as Loomer has. Someone like Loomer likely would not have had access to Trump in his first term. Richard Spencer never made it into Trump’s administration, and the president went out of his way to disavow the white nationalist. In 2018, when CNN reported that Darren Beattie, then a White House speechwriter, had spoken at an event that also featured a white nationalist, he was fired. But now Beattie has been hired to a senior role in this administration.

The president has already clearly established that his second term will be more extreme. Instead of the limited Muslim travel ban, he is pushing for mass deportations and has effectively shut down USAID, an agency largely devoted to helping poorer countries. But by welcoming Loomer into his inner circle, Trump is offering an even starker glimpse into how this administration is different. She is a testament to how much further to the right Trump has moved since his first term, and how much further he may be open to going.