Laura Loomer Is the Symptom, Not the Disease
If you’re worried about Trump being surrounded by conspiracy theorists right now . . . it’s a little late!
OVER THE PAST WEEK, a small number of elected Republicans (along with a few venerable conservative voices) have aired concerns about Donald Trump allowing right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer to accompany him on the campaign trail.
It’s not so much that Loomer says offensive things, they argue. It’s that they fear the influence that her conspiracy-addled mind might have on the former president.
“All of this would be ignorable,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote of Loomer amplifying a suggestion that 9/11 was an inside job and her racist tweet about Kamala Harris making the White House smell of curry, “except that others close to Mr. Trump say he is listening to Ms. Loomer’s advice.”
One can understand the fear. But if the presence of Laura Loomer by Trump’s side is what makes you worry that Trump will get dragged into the dark depths of conspiracy land, well, you’re way too late.
The former president has been a prolific conspiracy theorist for decades. Let’s take a tour through what Trump was thinking even before Loomer joined his entourage:
Trump was the de facto leader of the Obama birther movement, even casually suggesting that the director of the Hawaii Department of Health, who died in a plane crash, was murdered as part of a coverup.
He openly mused that former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s memoir and that Obama never actually went to Columbia University.
He floated the idea that Ted Cruz’s father had ties to Lee Harvey Oswald. He raised doubts about Vince Foster’s suicide.
He wondered aloud if Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was suffocated to death.
He pushed the story that Muslims in New Jersey were cheering after 9/11.
He raised the idea that Marco Rubio was ineligible to be president because his parents weren’t yet U.S. citizens at the time of his birth. He did the same about Ted Cruz. And Nikki Haley. And Kamala Harris, too.
He questioned the authenticity of the Access Hollywood tape (this was after he apologized for it).
He claimed Obama had him wiretapped at Trump Tower.
He claimed the death toll from Hurricane Maria was inflated to make him look bad.
He said the noise from windmills causes cancer.
He pushed a video saying that the Clintons killed Jeffrey Epstein.
He said Ukraine could be hiding Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.
He said that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
He said that fears about asbestos were a conspiracy designed to line the pockets of asbestos-cleanup companies run by the mob.
He retweeted several conspiracy theories around the death of Osama bin Laden (that it could have been a body double).
He has said jobs numbers are manipulated, the unemployment figure was made up, the COVID death numbers were inflated, the Obamacare enrollment numbers were exaggerated, and the border crossing numbers “manipulated” to make the Obama administration look better.
And, of course, he’s spread a steady stream of lies about election numbers. The 2012 one: dead people voted for Obama. The 2016 one: cheating in blue states like California and New York deprived him of a popular vote win. The 2020 one . . . where do we even start? Sharpies did not invalidate Trump votes; Dominion did not either. People weren’t throwing away bags filled with Trump ballots or randomly finding suitcases filled with Biden ones. Thousands of dead people didn’t vote multiple times. And, no, Italians did not use military technology to tamper with U.S. voting machines.
And it’s not just that Trump has long spread conspiracy theories. He has surrounded himself with conspiracy theorists, too. Before Loomer was riding on his plane, Trump was on the phone with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., expressing unfounded fears about vaccines. Kennedy, a leading vaccine skeptic, has not only endorsed Trump but seems poised to get a job in his administration. At the tail end of his time in the White House, Trump was surrounding himself with a veritable murderers’ row of conspiracy-minded operatives. Sidney Powell was promising to “Release the Kraken” to help him turn around his 2020 election loss. Trump wanted to offer her a White House job. Mike Lindell, whose expertise as a pillow salesman was also his main qualification on the subject of election law, was photographed heading to the White House with notes suggesting that Trump use “martial law if necessary” to turn around the vote. Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock CEO who had alleged that the FBI had pushed him to have an intimate relationship with Russian agent Maria Butina, was given an audience with Trump as well. Trump has told Michael Flynn, his QAnon-loving, exiled former national security advisor: “We’re going to bring you back.”
NINE YEARS BEFORE Trump was pushing fears about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, he was leveling more pernicious theories about Syrian refugees in the United States.
“They could be ISIS—I don’t know,” Trump said on the campaign trail in 2015. He went on to say that the resettlement of Syrian refugees in America could be “one of the great tactical ploys of all time.” That an army of 200,000 may have been unwittingly let into the country in Trojan horse fashion. As with the Haitians he has pledged to deport from Springfield, he said he would send those Syrian refugees back.
The difference is that in 2015 a few Republicans spoke out against Trump. Among them was Jeb Bush, who was struggling to figure out how to combat Trumpism at the time. He sharply criticized Trump’s remark. “Send them all back? To a hellhole?” Bush told reporters.
GOP voters, it turned out, were more persuaded by Trump’s conspiracy theories than by Jeb’s policy arguments.
And it’s been that way ever since. Loomer isn’t the disease, she’s the product of a MAGA movement that both attracts and produces attention-hungry fantasists—a movement that routinely whips up threats against minority communities and—not so long ago—attempted an insurrection.
If anything, maybe people ought to be concerned about the influence Donald Trump has had on Laura Loomer.
Loomer was only 17 or 18 years old when Trump began pushing his birther conspiracy theories. She moved into adulthood as his mode of politics dominated the GOP; her entire persona has developed in response to the extremism of the Republican party, which has subjugated itself to the conspiracy-theorist-in-chief, Donald Trump.
The newfound concern by “respectable” conservatives and Republicans over Loomer’s supposedly bad influence on Donald Trump is an act of self-delusion. The reason they’re raising these “concerns” now is not because they’re worried that Loomer will turn Trump into a raving lunatic.
They’re simply worried that Trump might lose.