This New Yorker writer got an inside look at how Laura Loomer influences Trump and MAGA

Laura Loomer is difficult to define. She describes herself as an “investigative journalist.” Critics say she’s a far-right provocateur who uses her massive social media presence to give a bullhorn to racism, misinformation and conspiracy theories. Others see her as a kind of shadow arm of the Trump administration, where she has no official role, but uses the power of her following to shape its policies — and its personnel.

Earlier this year, Mike Waltz was ousted from his role as National Security Advisor after Loomer met personally with President Donald Trump. Last month, Trump pulled his nominee for a top role at the IRS following an online pressure campaign by Loomer.

Around Washington, there’s a name for situations like these, where Loomer targets someone she feels is disloyal to the president, leading to their firing or demotion: it’s known as “getting Loomered.”

So who is Laura Loomer — and what is she up to, really?

New Yorker writer Antonia Hitchens recently tried to figure that out — she published a profile of Loomer last month. In the piece, Hitchens uncovered intriguing details about Loomer’s youth here in Arizona, and how her influence is evolving.

Loomer, Hitchens told The Show, is more complex than a typical MAGA influencer.

Full conversation

ANTONIA HITCHENS: It’s not so much, why are you a Trump sycophant? Like, why do you like Trump so much? I think a lot of people kind of trip up on that question for a long time.

I think I began to see the question more as like, what is the benefit or motivation for being a Trump sycophant? And I think in Laura Loomer’s case, a lot of the time, calling somebody out for disloyalty can be a really efficient reason to have them removed from a position for a whole completely different reason.

And so I think what I began to notice in my reporting was that there are a number of kind of targeted interest groups, almost like a lobbyist would work with who can use Loomer when they want to remove somebody or push a policy and find a way of couching it in, “Well, this person or this institution has been disloyal and thus they should be taken out of our movement.”

And it’s often not really about loyalty to Trump whatsoever.

DINGMAN: Yes. Well, I want to get to that. But the origins of Loomer’s media style — whatever media we happen to be talking about, whether it’s her Twitter feed or her podcast — seem to be born out of this sense, at least as she expresses to you, that she sees President Trump almost like an extension of herself, or maybe herself as an extension of him?

HITCHENS: Definitely. I think if you hear Loomer describe their rapport and their relationship, it transcends the normal way that someone would describe enjoying a politician’s policies or enjoying their style. It’s much more a sense of having their lives completely bound up together and of being in a struggle together against a country that’s tried to marginalize them. And I think both of those characters, Trump and Loomer, for years felt that they weren’t being seen by the country the way they saw themselves, which is these kind of incredibly important main characters who deserve to have a prominent place in politics.

And Loomer, from the time she was a teenager watching Trump on Fox News, began to describe herself as kind of living in almost a dialogue with Donald Trump and with his life and seeing her rise as tied completely to his rise. And so seeing herself as working with him, even if, as I mentioned in the piece, there for years he didn’t know who this person was. They had no relationship.

DINGMAN: Obviously it’s impossible to know what prompts somebody to come to these types of beliefs. But there was a very intriguing detail that you included in your story that I hadn’t seen previously when it comes to Laura Loomer, and that’s that she has a, I believe it’s a brother who struggles with schizophrenia. And that there was kind of an atmosphere of violence in her home.

And for that reason, perhaps among others, she was sent by her parents to attend a boarding school here in Arizona in a very remote part of the desert. What was notable to you about those things? 

HITCHENS: To me, a lot of what was interesting about the kind of arc of her life was a child in which she describes these kinds of profound feelings of loneliness, of being cut off from the world, of not really having allies or friends or family she felt she could talk to.

And I think it made sense to me that Loomer’s life was something that was able to be conducted online because she’d felt for so long this intense desire to be brought into the conversation, to be able to share her thoughts. And a lot of that felt like it traced back to whether it was her home life or at boarding school, just feeling deeply cut off from from life.

DINGMAN: So let’s come back now, Antonia, to something you alluded to earlier, which is this interesting development more recently in Loomer’s online activity, where she has moved beyond just targeting people associated with the administration that she perceives as disloyal, and has now started posting these long rants about things like oil policy in Venezuela.

And that has led to some suspicion that there’s, shall we say, more going on than meets the eye. 

HITCHENS: You know, the public perception of Laura Loomer is that she’s a slightly wacky Trump supporter who’s developed a large social media following that’s given her a lot of influence, including in the White House. But the story is more complicated than that.

And in many cases, Loomer is, or at least appears to be a hired gun who’s tweeting for influence on legislation or decisions that can affect all sorts of national and foreign policy. The interesting thing to me was that she represents a new kind of player in national politics in the sense that she wields all this influence.

But because she’s not a full-blown paid lobbyist, she can actually skirt many of these legal requirements that former lobbyists would face. So you can’t go and see, you know, who are your clients? How much do you get paid?

DINGMAN: And is it correct to say, Antonia, that Loomer says that everything she’s saying publicly springs organically from her deeply held convictions?

But there is a very fascinating moment at the end of your story where you get to visit her home podcast studio and you see a very intriguing piece of paper. 

HITCHENS: Yes. And I think reporting on Laura Loomer, I felt like I was at some point as a reporter, you become almost as embroiled in the conspiratorial thinking that you’re trying to call out. I would follow all these leads I would be given about, X person working with Loomer, Y person compensating her.

And of course, if you can’t really chase down the information enough that you can know that it’s reportable, there’s a whole web of kind of half-truths that I was living in for a long time until really the fact-checking of my piece where we realized: Here’s what we can lay out that we feel really confident in and that we can also put to Loomer, and here’s what will have to exist kind of for the next go around.

And I won’t repeat them on the air, but a lot of them I think are really quite shocking allegations of who is paying her. And so when I happened to be at Loomer’s house and we were kind of sitting together drinking tea on the couch, I noticed on her desk, just kind of in a quick glance, a number of different receipts that confirmed a lot of what I thought to be true — which, of course, I didn’t use as actual reporting in the story, but that it seems like these connections are not completely coincidental.

What was unique to me about the way in which Loomer would deny things was that normally, I think, if you have this level of influence, you can actually kind of sell yourself to clients as, “Look what I can do for you.”

I think in Laura’s case, there was almost a resistance to admitting that any of this went beyond pure loyalty. I think the idea of questioning something as being not just a labor of love was very offensive to her. And she would often say to me, I’m not a lobbyist. I’m just, you know, I’m a clairvoyant.