“I’d love to talk to you sometime,” Curran said. “I’ll give you my contact.” He pressed a Secret Service commemorative coin into her palm.
Loomer has described her work by quoting Plato: “No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” At the memorial, at least in some corners, she was being received with reverence. “People who are entrusted with the life of the President value the work that I’m doing,” she told me. She radiated a sense of weariness that this grand task, of being Trump’s protector and soothsayer, fell to her. “Why is it that I’m the one that has to identify people who are actively working against him?”
One afternoon in September, Mark Warner, the Democratic senator from Virginia, was scheduled to visit the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for a classified oversight briefing and a meeting with Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, the agency’s head. “Why are the Pentagon and IC”—intelligence community—“allowing for the Director of an Intel agency to host a rabid ANTI-TRUMP DEMOCRAT SENATOR,” Loomer posted in advance of the visit. “Clearly, a lot of Deep State actors are being given a pass in the Intel community to continue their efforts to sabotage Trump.” Warner’s meeting was abruptly cancelled. “I was in disbelief,” Warner, who is the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me. “You’ve got an individual that the Trump Administration was reluctant to hire because she was so far out, yet seems to have unbelievable access to call the shots and then brag about it on her social-media feed.” (Loomer told Warner to “cry more, bitch!”)
Loomer had started to attack Warner the previous week, after he visited an ICE detention center. (Members of Congress are allowed to conduct such visits for oversight purposes, but many have been turned away or arrested.) “I don’t follow Ms. Loomer’s tweeting,” Warner told me. “But I was told that she’d gone on a screech for some time, calling me out.” He wasn’t sure whether to categorize her as a “trolling blogger” or a shadow member of the Administration. “When Laura Loomer tweets, Trump’s Cabinet jumps,” he said. Some of Warner’s Republican friends on the Hill had been attacked by her, too. Warner went on, “She’s an equal-opportunity offender.”
By then, Loomer’s interference in government matters had become a regular occurrence. In early April, Mike Waltz, then the national-security adviser, walked into the Oval Office to find Loomer sitting across from the President, in the midst of a presentation that questioned the allegiances of a number of members of his National Security Council. After the meeting, Trump hugged Loomer, then promptly fired six members of the N.S.C. He also fired General Timothy Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and of U.S. Cyber Command. According to Loomer, Haugh, a thirty-three-year veteran of the Air Force, was close with General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Trump had appointed and then clashed with during his first term. Wendy Noble, Haugh’s deputy, was also fired; she was apparently connected to another Trump critic, James Clapper, Barack Obama’s director of National Intelligence.
Loomer wanted Waltz gone, too—he had been tagged as a neocon who, in her estimation, was contravening Trump’s desires. She was also concerned about his judgment: his deputy, Alex Wong, was married to a career prosecutor who had worked at the Department of Justice during the Biden Administration. A few weeks later, they both departed. Loomer posted, “SCALP.”
According to three people with direct knowledge of Waltz’s ouster, Loomer had nothing to do with it. “It wasn’t working out with him,” someone with close ties to the White House told me. “She ends up getting the credit for it because she’s the one out there talking.” (Weeks before, Waltz had inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, to a Signal chat in which members of the Administration were discussing plans to bomb Yemen.) Still, White House officials—and operatives across Washington—have no choice but to deal with her. “I was on an hour-long Zoom call, which probably cost, when you think of how much everyone was getting paid, at least fifty thousand dollars, to talk about what to do about Loomer,” a consultant who works with the Administration told me. Her screeds are routinely cited in major newspapers and footnoted in lawsuits; her targets range from low-level government employees to the Pope. Recently, Loomer posted that an official at Customs and Border Protection was “Anti-Trump, pro-Open Borders, and Pro-DEI.” Three days later: “Now he’s FIRED.” She described Lisa Monaco, Microsoft’s new head of global affairs—and Joe Biden’s Deputy Attorney General—as a “rabid Trump hater,” and demanded that the company’s government contracts, which total billions of dollars, be revoked. “Wait till President Trump sees this,” she wrote. Not long afterward, Trump called for Monaco to be fired. Loomer picked up the baton, tagging Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s C.E.O. “Are you going to comply? Or continue to be two-faced?” she wrote. “How dare you.”
