No. of Recommendations: 5
An interesting podcast from the New York Times regarding Laura Loomer and her influence on Trump:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/podcasts/the-da...The Right-Wing Provocateur Who Has Trump's EarThe reporter spent a lot of time interviewing Loomer and traveling with her.
She comes across as a desperately ambitious social influencer who found her magic sauce for success in getting Trump's attention as perhaps his most devoted sycophant and has parlayed that into a career.
She has taken on as her mission in life to root out anyone in Trump's administration who she deems as not loyal enough. She then finds whatever means she can to discredit them and get them fired. And Trump listens to her and has fired a number of people that she disapproved of.
Bensinger:
So the thing that Loomer starts to think about is that the enemies are everywhere. And that the campaign and the incoming administration and the entire Republican Party is riddled with people who are not sufficiently loyal to Trump. And so her project develops as, what she calls, vetting or sometimes she calls it extreme vetting, which is finding people who don’t love Trump the way she does, who don’t love MAGA the way she does, and to publicly out them. And, hopefully, she frequently says, to end their careers.
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It’s her first ever Oval Office visit, first ever White House visit. And she walks in with a sheaf of papers about 12 different people that she thinks should be fired, including Alex Wong.
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Trump ends the meeting by saying, we have to get rid of these people. We have to fire these people. And indeed, within hours, Trump has fired 6 of the 12 people that she put on a list in front of him.
So basically, Trump sides with Loomer over Waltz, his own National Security advisor.
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She gets Hunter Biden’s Secret Service detail taken away from him.
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She gets people who are going to be nominated to be important jobs like the surgeon general, gets their nomination pulled. She gets an assistant US attorney in Los Angeles fired.
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She is his perfect, blunt instrument that can do the jobs that no one else will get done. In exchange, what she gets out of this is the approval and acceptance of Donald J Trump. 