Donald Trump has told aides to hire the far-right anti-Muslim activist and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer for a role in his campaign to return to the White House in 2024, the New York Times has reported.
Citing four anonymous sources, the Times noted that Loomer, 29, attended Trump’s speech at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Tuesday night, an angry rant delivered hours after the former president pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges in New York over hush money payments, including to the porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump remains the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, enjoying big leads over his closest challenger, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, despite the historic indictment and multiple other forms of legal jeopardy.
DeSantis has not declared a campaign but has nonetheless presented himself as a candidate in Trump’s hard-right mould. The former governors Nikki Haley (South Carolina) and Asa Hutchinson (Arkansas), declared candidates closer to the political centre, barely register in polling.
Loomer told the Times: “I’m not going to comment on private conversations that I had with the president. The president knows I have always been a Trump loyalist and that I’m committed to helping him win re-election in 2024.”
A Trump spokesperson said: “The entire movement is united behind President Trump and his campaign, and it will take everyone rowing in the same direction in order to beat [Joe] Biden and take our country back.”
Loomer said Trump “likes me very much. And it’s a shame that he’s surrounded by some people that run to a publication [the Times] notorious for attacking him in order to try to cut me at the knees instead of being loyal.”
Loomer ran for Congress in Florida in 2020, winning Trump’s endorsement and a Republican primary but losing the general election.
She told the Times she was a “Jewish conservative woman, a Trump loyalist and a free speech absolutist”. In the current election cycle, she has agitated against DeSantis, in one instance picketing an appearance to promote his campaign memoir.
Loomer has previously described herself as “pro-white nationalism”, claiming “there’s a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy … and a lot of liberals and leftwing globalist Marxist Jews don’t understand that”.
In the same conversation with a white supremacist podcast, in 2017, Loomer said the US “really was built as the white Judeo-Christian ethnostate, essentially. Over time, immigration and all these calls for diversity, it’s starting to destroy this country.”
Another attendee at Trump’s speech on Tuesday, the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, greeted news of Trump’s courtship of Loomer with evident dismay.
“Laura Loomer is mentally unstable and a documented liar,” wrote Greene, who has risen to power in the Republican party despite spreading conspiracy theories including that wildfires are caused by space technology controlled by the Rothschild family and that the Parkland school shooting in Florida was a “false flag” operation.
Loomer, Greene said, “can not [sic] be trusted. She spent months lying about me and attacking me just because I supported Kevin McCarthy for [House] speaker and after I had refused to endorse her last election cycle.”
Greene also accused Loomer of “loving” Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic white supremacist activist who controversially dined with Trump and the rapper Ye last November.
Observers pointed out that Greene has appeared with Fuentes in public and spoken at a conference he staged.
Regarding Trump, Greene said she would “make sure he knows” why hiring Loomer would be a bad move.
