Last edited Fri Apr 4, 2025, 09:11 AM - Edit history (1)
Thursday, April 3, 2025
"Tom Nichols
Staff writer
(Snip)
A fringe figure from the MAGA right was in the Oval Office yesterday and apparently got at least six National Security Council staffers fired.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Trump’s tariffs are designed to backfire.
Trump’s day of reckoning
Why Quaker parents were ahead of their time
A National-Security Fiasco
Mike Waltz and Laura Loomer
(Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty; Mark Peterson / Redux)
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For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.
The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday. If you don’t spend a lot of time online, you probably don’t know who Loomer is, and that’s healthy. To say that she is a “conspiracy theorist” is not quite enough: She has referred to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and has claimed that 9/11 was an “inside job”; she has charged that some school shootings were staged, accused Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis of “exaggerating” her struggle with breast cancer, and questioned whether the “deep state” might have used an atmospheric-research facility in Alaska to create a snowstorm over Des Moines. (Why? So that foul weather would suppress the turnout in the 2024 Iowa GOP caucuses and hurt Trump’s campaign.)
Loomer has even alienated her ostensible allies in the MAGA movement, to say nothing of the hostility she has engendered among various other Republicans. (Peter Schorsch, a former Republican operative who now runs the website Florida Politics, described her to The Washington Post as “what happens when you take a gadfly and inject it with that radioactive waste from Godzilla.”) Indeed, Trump’s own aides found Loomer so toxic that they tried to keep her away from the 2024 campaign, as my colleague Tim Alberta reported last year. A source close to the Trump campaign told Semafor last fall that Trump’s people were “‘100%’ concerned about her exacerbating Trump’s weaknesses,” but that attempts to put “guardrails” around her weren’t working. Trump clearly likes the 31-year-old provocateur, and in Trumpworld, there’s apparently very little anyone can do once the boss takes a shine to someone."
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/04/the-conspiracy-theorist-advising-trump/682289/?lctg=67c262c0a6a72a302a0356ea
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