Donald Trump’s floundering presidential campaign is still reeling from his nightmare debate performance last week. And so from the depths of his insecurity, Trump has once again reactivated his sizable corps of yes-men and yes-women, to re-inflate his fragile ego.
And from there comes the newest scandal. One of Trump’s chief toadies, the racist social media influencer Laura Loomer, has worsened Team Trump’s political migraine. After a string of posts last week in which Loomer dragged long-time Trump ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and appeared to out South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) as gay, even Loomer’s fellow right-wing influencers began to turn against her in droves.
Milo Yiannopoulos, known for his own hate–speech–peddling shtick, lobbed a flurry of accusations at Loomer in a web series he titled “Moronica Lewinsky.” His posts not only alleged that Loomer had been subject to multiple involuntary psychiatric holds, but he also questioned Loomer’s Judaism.
This is hardly the portrait of the GOP that Republican Party officials hoped to project in the closing weeks of a massively consequential campaign.
Loomer now occupies a unique place in the MAGA power map. She’s on the outs with many in the party base and disavowed by many of her influencer colleagues. Senior MAGA leaders have also tossed Loomer overboard, led by Greene’s declaration that Loomer “doesn’t represent MAGA.” For most of Trump’s past ill-fated political allies, those public excommunications would be enough to end one’s political career.
Yet Trump has once again overruled all counsel and loudly defended Loomer against her growing army of Republican critics. He can’t or won’t explain why Loomer now accompanies him almost everywhere. “I can’t tell Laura what to do,” Trump said at a news conference in Los Angeles on Friday. “She’s a free spirit.”
Where Trump sees a “free spirit,” a growing number of his Republican colleagues see a chaos agent jeopardizing their hopes of winning back the White House while holding the House of Representatives. The result is a late-campaign rift that few GOP lawmakers saw coming — one they fear could cost the party dearly in November.
Republicans who are smart enough to recognize Loomer as a radioactive threat to Trump’s campaign are largely powerless to remove her. With no official campaign role, Loomer exists in the Trump extended universe as a kind of emotional support pundit. None of this is new. In his worst moments, Trump has retreated into the familiar pattern of casting aside senior Republicans’ concerns while relying almost exclusively on far-right confidants like Tucker Carlson, Loomer and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
The writhing mess of scandal and controversy currently engulfing Mar-a-Lago is the MAGA movement in full bloom. Voters have seen this weirdness before: in 2020, when they rejected a Trump campaign that had devolved into the same erratic behavior and conspiracy theories on offer from the nominee this week. Trump’s questionable relationship with Loomer is reminding voters why they benched the former president four years ago.
The party’s looming Loomer crisis is driven by another one of Trump’s increasingly common political misfires. Just like his cringe-inducing rant about migrants eating Ohioans’ pets at last week’s debate, the mainstream American public is paying attention to Loomergate at a level Republicans didn’t anticipate. They expected it, like so many other Trump scandals, to wash over exhausted voters. In fact, the opposite happened.
Despite being a niche figure in the world of right-wing influencers, Loomer’s appearance at Trump’s side aligns with Vice President Harris’s plea last week for voters to evaluate Trump’s judgment. Palling around with a bigot who recently called for Democrats to be executed in a second Trump administration doesn’t exactly reassure the swing voters Trump has been shedding in recent weeks.
It’s also why Trump has proven so skilled at losing elections — not just his 2020 re-election bid, but also presiding over a string of brutal midterm elections in 2018 and 2022. Trump’s political allies now worry that his addiction to Loomer’s praise could cost him Georgia and North Carolina. Those losses would bite deep into the meat of Republicans’ red wall, likely costing them both the White House and the House in November.
Republicans’ hope that they could mask the MAGA movement’s true toxicity until after Election Day didn’t quite pan out. Instead, voters are getting a prime-time dose of pure, uncut Trumpian chaos. Donald Trump’s latest circus of scandal might light up the phone lines on Charlie Kirk’s web show, but it’s a pretty lousy way to win an election. Just ask Republicans.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.