Laura Loomer and Jewish MAGA’s Dance With the Devil

 

Laura Loomer and Jewish MAGA’s Dance With the Devil

 

The conspiracy theorist and political celebrity is pushing an uneasy alliance with white nationalists and antisemites

 

Shane Burley

Shane Burley is the author of “Fascism Today: What It Is and How To End It” (2017) and co-author of “Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism” (2024)

July 23, 2025

https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/laura-loomer-and-jewish-magas-dance-with-the-devil/

 

The Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory is emblematic of the kind of politics that returned Donald Trump to the White House. It is a defining issue for the president’s base, and many of Trump’s hardcore loyalists, including conspiracists, now hold positions of power within his administration. The conspiracy theory alleges that Epstein, who was found guilty of numerous sex-trafficking crimes involving minors, was at the center of a child sex ring that reached the highest levels of government. It echoes the sensationalism of popular conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate, and was primarily weaponized against Democrats and liberal donors.

 

But once Trump took office, and was expected to deliver results by exposing the powerful people allegedly involved in Epstein’s activities, many within his circle of conspiracy-minded allies — including now-FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino — began to walk back their long-standing indulgence in such narratives. “What the hell are the House Republicans doing? They have the majority. You can’t get the list? Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are,” Patel had thundered on a livestream before Trump picked him to head the FBI. Patel is awkwardly silent on the issue now, and the MAGA base is furious about the U-turn.

 

Yet not everyone in the movement followed suit. Some who hold no official position in the Trump administration have retained their influence, operating in the background as figures the president remains drawn to, despite the occasional ire of staff. As the MAGA coalition started to split over Trump’s declaration that there was no Epstein client list, Laura Loomer remained one of the loudest voices demanding that Trump, and his acolytes, stay loyal to the vision they pioneered.

 

Within the Trump-era phenomenon of far-right internet celebrities who have maintained political influence while also lending credence to outlandish conspiracy theories, Loomer, whom we made several attempts to contact, is something of an enigmatic figure. She has kept her profile despite tensions with the pro-Trump far right in a couple of key areas: She is Jewish, staunchly pro-Israel and often supports aggressive military action against Muslim-majority countries as part of her vision of an “America First” agenda. This has helped to create a new model of far-right politics, one that aims to overcome the wariness and skepticism of many American Jews about the MAGA movement’s conspiratorial and white nationalist tendencies.

 

Despite her relationship with the white nationalist movement, Loomer made nearly successful runs for the U.S. House of Representatives in both 2020 and 2022, and has been a presence in story after story about Trump’s efforts to rid the government of opponents and secure a loyalist cadre. And while she maintains a firmly pro-Trump attitude, her ideological position has meant that she also remains a loud and influential voice to Trump’s right, pushing him to live up to even the most extreme promises that he made on his way back into power.

 

With her unique positioning, Loomer has located a sweet spot in which she can maintain influence despite having no formal role in the administration, the Republican Party or any major media institution, all while maintaining the frenetic energy of the conspiratorial online personality she has cultivated for a decade. The question is whether her brand of conspiracist politics will now become the standard for the Jewish right, which has long been nervous about the kinds of conspiracy theories she brandishes wildly and which has generally dissented from the “America First” political model over its perceived isolationism and insufficient support for Israel.

 

The American “alt-right,” or “alternative right,” arguably goes back to 2008, when the emerging right-wing personality Richard Spencer and the paleoconservative academic Paul Gottfried met up at a gathering of the H.L. Mencken Club, a conference created by the fringes of the American right to discuss ideas like nationalism, “sociobiology,” immigration and major historical conflicts from a far-right vantage point. But it didn’t hit its stride until 2015. #Cuckservative, a white nationalist hashtag used to mock pro-immigration Republicans for supposedly undermining their own interests, had just trended on social media, and there was a growing, largely online movement activated by Trump’s primary run. That’s when the alt-right came into its own, melding its pseudo-academic white nationalism with a brash, openly offensive vibe cultivated on online image boards like 4chan and in the world of men’s rights activism and the (then-recent) “Gamergate” controversy, a misogynistic online campaign of harassment against women in the gaming industry aiming to counter the supposedly corrosive influence of feminism in video games.

 

A new class of influencer-activists appointed themselves leaders of the movement, though it was always debatable how sincere their ideological commitments were. The term “alt-light” was popularized for these spokespeople, who still had one foot in mainstream American conservatism and parroted all the style and policy arguments of the alt-right but fell short of open white nationalism. Milo Yiannopoulos, then at Breitbart, fitted this bill, as did Lauren Southern from Rebel Media and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. Some of them filtered further right, others leaned back into their still-viable careers as conservative influencers and the class that was once the alt-light became the MAGA base at places like Project Veritas, Gateway Pundit, Human Events and the One America News network.

 

This was the community that gave rise to Loomer. She stuck to outlandish conspiracy theories rather than race and IQ charts and remained more obsessed with Trump’s electoral victories than ideological uniformity. Loomer has alleged that a number of mass shootings, including the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, were staged in some way, and that crisis actors were used at the Santa Fe High School shooting in Texas in 2018. She frequently sounds the alarm that Islamist jihadists are about to stage various attacks or are heading into the United States. She has spread various 9/11 conspiracy theories and boosted claims that Haitian migrants were eating Ohio pets. Loomer frequently ascribes various tragedies or infrastructural failures, such as the bridge explosion at the U.S.-Canada border in 2023, to terrorism, or sometimes calls them false flag attacks.

 

While Loomer is far to the right of the average American voter, it can be hard to know by how much, since so much of her political analysis is based on conspiracy theories rather than identifiable ideology. Yet there was one other issue that kept her away from the alt-right crowd: She is Jewish. Indeed, she describes herself as “a feisty Jewess” on her X bio.

 

One of the defining features of the alt-right was its virulent antisemitism, a long-standing lynchpin of insurrectionary white supremacy, which is now often attached to pseudo-scholarship by people like the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald, “the neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic,” in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center. MacDonald had once been a respected professor at California State University, Long Beach, before writing a trilogy of books claiming that Judaism was a “group evolutionary strategy” for Ashkenazi Jews to outcompete non-Jews for resources by manipulating gentile weaknesses and eugenically developing superior intellect.

 

Because gentiles were so good-natured and trusting, in MacDonald’s view, their natural modes of self-preservation were distorted by “Jewish” ideologies like Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis and Boasian anthropology — which rejected racial theories of cultural difference — not to mention mass immigration, feminism and queer theory, all components of the reign of so-called “Cultural Marxism,” an antisemitic conspiracy theory that suggests that Jewish Marxists embedded progressive values in the West to destroy white Christian civilization. In MacDonald’s worldview, Jews can’t really be trusted, even Jews allegedly friendly to the cause.

 

As the alt-right began to break apart during Trump’s first term and the far-right adapted new branding, Loomer’s obsessive conspiracism (and her Jewishness) made her persona non grata among hard-line white nationalists like Richard Spencer, who think she represents Trumpism’s intellectual bankruptcy and lack of seriousness, which they believe the movement’s political vanguard should uphold. They also oppose her pro-Israel stance.

 

Loomer became known for outlandish public (and livestreamed) performances, such as when she screamed “stop normalizing political violence against the right” during a 2017 performance of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in Central Park in New York, in which the Roman dictator was costumed as Trump. After being banned from Twitter in 2018, she handcuffed herself to the entrance of the company’s New York office, while leaving the door next to it free for use. During another stunt, in 2019, she jumped the fence at the home of Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, alongside alleged undocumented immigrants, in an effort to force the Democratic leader to confront what Loomer considered the grave threat presented by nonwhite migrants.

 

These spectacles were amplified not just by Loomer’s followers but in the liberal media, which covered her stunts with a palpable disdain for their gaudiness. In 2021, when Loomer rushed the stage at an event to scream at Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey for allegedly interfering in the 2020 election by banning Trump from the platform, major news stations covered the escapade, mostly without commentary. Outrage gets good ratings, even when it’s not your outrage. The term she uses to describe her targets is “Loomered,” which seems to be a gesture toward her power over the fate of an institution or the career of a political figure — the trail of destruction she gleefully leaves in her wake.

 

Loomer has also leaned into openly racist discourse, speaking in 2022 at the largest white nationalist conference in the U.S., American Renaissance (or AmRen, as it’s known), held in Montgomery Bell State Park in Tennessee. “Most Americans, and conservative Americans, actually share our views, but it’s the cancel culture and the fear of being silenced that prevents … them from speaking boldly the way that most of us do,” Loomer said to the applauding crowd, in a speech in which she referred to herself as a “white advocate.”

 

“I got banned because I was, and I still am, an unapologetic right-wing nationalist activist and because I tell uncomfortable truths,” she said, referring to her banishment from Twitter. “And because the left, and the right, are afraid of how many I might convert to our side if I was allowed to grow my influence.”

 

AmRen may be one of the few places in American white nationalism where white Jews have been occasionally welcomed. Jared Taylor, the organization’s founder, is famous for this point of dissension from the rest of the white supremacist world. He is often quoted as saying Jews “look white to me.” In the 1990s and early 2000s, AmRen featured people like Michael Levin, author of the “race science” book “Why Race Matters,” and Mayer Schiller, an Orthodox rabbi and educator previously associated with various Yeshiva University projects.

 

The presence of these figures at AmRen conferences created major conflicts with people like David Duke, the onetime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, and Matthew Heimbach, the former head of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party, who demanded that AmRen address the “Jewish question.” But with the softer edge of the alt-light, far-right politics could filter into the mainstream without the hard-line antisemitism of the traditional American far right, and this opened the way for American Jewish conservatives to push into a political sphere where they had previously been scared to tread.

 

Taylor has remained a Loomer advocate, and Loomer bragged to him on his podcast, Radio Renaissance, about how white her Florida district (located in the central part of the state, west of Orlando) was. This was in 2022, when she was making her second run for Congress, in which she attained an astounding 44% of the vote in the Republican primary before losing to the incumbent, Daniel Webster. GOP insiders opposed her, but the race was close. When Loomer eventually lost, she was interviewed for the AmRen website by the white nationalist Kevin DeAnna, a member of the Wolves of Vinland, a fascist Nordic pagan cult that organizes itself along the lines of a motorcycle club. Loomer told DeAnna that Christians were under attack, that she favored an immigration moratorium and that the antisemitic “great replacement” conspiracy theory was a “fact.” She also thanked the white nationalist Nick Fuentes for his support.

 

As the historian David Austin Walsh showed in his 2024 book “Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right,” antisemitism has been a part of modern conservatism since William F. Buckley helped birth the movement with the launch of his magazine National Review in 1955. The official story is that Buckley purged the antisemites and far-right cranks from the Republican Party when he marginalized the conspiratorial John Birch Society (which itself pretended to purge the antisemites within its own ranks). But as Walsh demonstrated, this was largely untrue, as antisemitism helped shape the modern right-wing worldview by normalizing conspiracy theories as its foundation. The far right has always sat at the ideological foundations of American conservatism — it’s just more out in the open in the age of Trump.

 

Yet the common perception was that in postwar America, the new Judeo-Christian synthesis — an idea that suggested that people of Jewish and Christian faith would unite in a war against the greater communist threat — had rendered antisemitism obsolete. This happened at a time when American Jews, who had always leaned to the left, were moving to the suburbs, assimilating into the American mainstream and becoming more conservative.

 

This set the stage for an even larger shift that occurred just before business hours on Sept. 11, 2001. Out of the dust of the World Trade Center came a dramatic reorientation of U.S. foreign policy and international relations. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and subsequent conflicts in Syria, Libya and beyond, led to a mass influx of refugees and migrants into Europe. The far right responded by cultivating anti-Muslim bigotry and building up national populist parties whose popularity began to skyrocket after the 2008 financial collapse.

 

These parties looked to build a mass coalition, united along Islamophobic lines. In many cases, they turned to Jewish communities that were conservative on issues related to Israel and Arab and Muslim immigration.

 

In the U.S., this dynamic helped launch the “counter-jihad” movement, typified by the late right-wing writer and crusader David Horowitz and his Freedom Center. Horowitz framed Islam as an existential threat to the West, and to Jews in particular. Another figure who helped to synthesize these ideas into a semicoherent conspiracy theory, and whose fingerprints can be found across the right-wing world, is the Egyptian-born, British-Swiss author Bat Ye’or (born Gisèle Littman). Ye’or came to prominence after 2000 for popularizing the notion of “dhimmitude.” According to Ye’or, there is an innate antisemitism in Islam, seen in Jews’ historical “dhimmi” status — an unequal but protected status for Jews and other non-Muslims that existed in Muslim countries. In this view, what drives Muslim anti-Zionism is Islam’s alleged inherent rage over Jewish success.

 

Ye’or also helped to popularize the “Eurabia” conspiracy theory — the idea that, starting in 1973, when the European Economic Community created the Euro-Arab Dialogue, European elites began coordinating with Muslim clerics to facilitate the takeover of European countries by incoming Muslim hordes. For Ye’or, and the growing number of Jewish and Islamophobic activists who have echoed her rhetoric, Europe is now, as she writes in her 2005 book “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis,” a “post-Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it.” The West, she wrote, has become “increasingly compliant to accommodate the religious and political norms of Muslim immigrants out of a fear of social unrest and terrorism.”

 

These ideas themselves owe a great deal to earlier conspiracy theories, which were explicitly antisemitic and portrayed Jews as the elites coordinating the downfall of white Christian Europe. Such ideas helped to motivate figures like the English Defense League’s Tommy Robinson and the mobs that attacked refugee housing centers across the United Kingdom in the summer of 2024.

 

Loomer has made confronting Islam a key part of her brand, referring to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and citing the violent acts of Hamas and other Palestinian factions as the reason. This is what aligned her with the Jewish right in particular, as she fashioned a MAGA politics that might appeal more fully to Jewish conservatives. While American Jews remain overwhelmingly progressive, especially on domestic issues, politics around Israel have traditionally pulled the community to the right.

 

One example is the Jewish MAGA politician Randy Fine, who rode a staunchly pro-Israel, anti-Muslim message into the Florida House of Representatives and breaks with American Jews on most issues.

 

Fine, a terminally online figure, has made Islamophobic comment after Islamophobic comment, such as calling a keffiyeh a “terrorist rag” and taunting U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, tweeting that it must have been “difficult to see us welcome the killer of so many of your fellow Muslim terrorists” when she objected to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s invitation to Washington, D.C. When Rep. Hakeem Jeffries responded to that insult, Fine posted that the “Hamas caucus is upset.”

 

Fine’s politics are less a matter of substance than an online persona, the content of which is defined by who he can enrage and which angry response wins him wealthy friends. But his performance was strong enough locally that, by 2025, he made it into the U.S. House, representing Florida’s 19th district. Fine was not far from Florida’s 11th District, where Loomer came close to victory with 44% of the vote in her 2022 congressional race, mere months after appearing at AmRen.

 

If we look at the trajectory of organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) or magazines like Tablet as a barometer of mainline Jewish opinion, we see an increased normalization not only of Islamophobia but also of conspiracy theories. Around half of Republicans now believe the “great replacement” theory — the idea that “elites” are bringing in nonwhite immigrants to destabilize native-born whites. Despite its unmistakable antisemitism — the philanthropist George Soros is typically the boogeyman in this narrative, often represented with exaggerated Jewish facial features — right-wing Jewish politicians like Fine help normalize the myth. They apparently no longer deem these conspiracy theories to pose any inherent threat to Jews.

 

The Eurabia conspiracy theory is directly related to the “great replacement,” but its focus on Arabs and Muslims provides plausible deniability. “[Muslims] want to dominate the United States of America, which involves … subverting our government, infiltrating our government and ultimately taking over our government and installing an Islamic caliphate,” Loomer said on her Rumble show in 2024. Because Loomer thinks, as she said on X, that immigrants are heading to “the western world illegally and spreading Islam like AIDS,” she creates the rhetorical infrastructure to bring along a new class of potential ideological converts who are increasingly attracted to Islamophobia because of the alleged threat Muslims present to the “liberal” values of the “enlightened” West.

 

Oct. 7 accelerated this shift, as anger over the way many young progressives responded to Hamas’ attacks pushed many Jews toward an “Israel First” approach. Inside Israel, both the right and the left accept ethnic nationalism, but Netanyahu’s Likud party emerged from a radical right-wing “Revisionist” strand of Zionism that saw the future of the Jewish people built entirely on their ability to mobilize militant violence in the name of their ethnic community. Far-right Israelis do not even recognize Palestinians’ deep historical connection to the land. They argue for expanding settlements into the West Bank (and now Gaza), the dispossession of Palestinian citizens of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of non-Jews from the biblical “Eretz Yisrael” (“Land of Israel”).

 

This dynamic reveals part of the political rift between American Jews and Israelis, whose entire senses of politics are built on different sets of values. But these two communities begin to merge as Israel is represented as both the primary vessel of Jewish safety and evidence of perennial Jewish vulnerability, thus allowing an Israeli brand of right-wing politics to globalize and influence the foreign-policy opinions of American Jews. In response to the growing student-led “ceasefire” protests starting in late 2023, we saw groups like Betar, a new incarnation of the historical Revisionist Zionist youth movement, which is now offering to support the Trump administration in deporting Arab activists and to turn over lists of diaspora Jewish anti-Zionists to authorities.

 

Loomer reflects this perspective, showing up at Palestine protests with a shirt that says “Donald Trump did nothing wrong” to antagonize protesters with a ready camera. And while she is presenting herself as an advocate for “America First” ideas — a phrase which, in her telling, includes American Jews — she has a financial model dependent on selling supplements and “alternative” medical cures in a way piloted by people like the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. She is critical of vaccines and COVID-19 mandates, not unlike Orthodox Jews (nearly three-quarters of whom voted for Trump). And she has synthesized a potentially Jewish-friendly populist language to bridge the gentile and Jewish right wings. She has even tried to outflank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his “Make America Healthy Again” crew, accusing them of being “grifters,” the kind of point that can appeal to antiestablishment types on both sides of the spectrum.

 

This is partly why, despite sounding all the notes of an anti-interventionist, nationalist, “America First” message, Loomer was enthusiastic as U.S. bombs rained down on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a position that was decried by most of her side of the GOP split. In Loomer’s apparent worldview, Islam is one of the greatest threats to U.S. national identity, which has a shared foreign-policy destiny with Israel. Any war against one of the key threats to the alleged stability of Western values and U.S. sovereignty is cause for celebration, from this perspective.

 

As MAGA figures further entrench themselves in the leadership of the GOP, and their brand of paleocon-inflected “America First” isolationism becomes standardized, Loomer may offer a version of nationalist populism with which Jewish voters can get on board. As the movement’s most popular figures grow increasingly critical of Israel — with Tucker Carlson openly calling for Americans who have served in the Israeli army to be stripped of their citizenship — Loomer’s brand of far-right nationalism will always have a place for them by defining its Americanism around a pro-Israel, anti-Islam message.

 

Joshua Shanes, the director of the Center for Israel Studies at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, says that while the rightward shift among American Jews (Orthodox Jews in particular) began in the 1980s, it has been supercharged under Trump. Yet he notes that there is a voluntary blindness within the community to the obvious antisemitism of the conspiratorial right.

 

“American Jews don’t understand what actually threatens their lives,” Shanes told New Lines, adding that many Jews are focused on whether a political figure is “pro-Israel,” rather than looking for the kinds of antisemitism most connected to anti-Jewish violence.

 

Part of this shift has occurred within major Jewish organizations like the ADL, which has been “pushing a line that leans Trumpist” under the leadership of CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, Shanes said. This fosters a dismissive attitude toward Jewish fears of far-right antisemitism and shifts the metric to one entirely centered on Israel, which can lead to a common defense of antisemites as long as they support Israel — which they do for their own Christian and/or Islamophobic reasons.

 

While some elements of the white nationalist right are open to embracing a Jewish anti-immigrant ally, this remains anathema to hardcore racists and antisemites like Richard Spencer. The anti-immigrant outlet VDare supported Loomer’s 2020 and 2022 congressional runs, as did AmRen’s leader Taylor and contributor DeAnna, who see Loomer as the kind of figure who links Middle America together with the issues that matter most to them: ending all nonwhite immigration.

 

Just as importantly, they deploy Loomer’s Jewishness primarily as a totem against Islam, drawing on the myth of eternal enmity between Israel and Ishmael. For Loomer and her supporters, Jewishness has less value in and of itself than as a weapon against the enemies of the West — with Israel as the West’s putative outpost in the Middle East.

 

When Ye (formerly Kanye West) began what is now his years-long series of antisemitic tirades, Loomer said that he does “have a point” and that “so many rich Jews have a fixation on trying to destroy America.” For Ye, in turn, Loomer is “one of the few” good Jews — a remark she has quoted proudly.

 

The question is where Jewishness sits in Loomer’s model of far-right politics. The answer might lie in how Loomer herself relates to Jewish identity. She emphasizes her Jewishness when she is defending herself against criticisms over her alliances with various far-right ideologues, but she seems to have little other attachment to Jewish life. The right has, for decades, seen defending Israel or highlighting the Jewishness of right-wing political figures as a way of undermining accusations of Republican bigotry, while wielding Jewish safety as a rhetorical weapon both against critics of Israel and progressives more broadly.

 

Loomer deploys Jewishness as a kind of teflon to smudge away suggestions of white nationalism, aligning herself with the sort of identity politics (white nationalism) the right defends while it attacks “identity politics” as such. “There is going to be a Holocaust and obliteration of Israel if [Trump] doesn’t get back into office, because the Democrats are the party of Jew haters,” Loomer asserted during the 2024 campaign. She also labeled Kamala Harris an antisemite, despite Harris having a Jewish spouse and stepchildren.

 

Defending Jewish safety has been one of the defining messages of Trump’s second term, and the alleged war on antisemitism has become a primary justification for his massive attack on international students, university budgets and activists of all stripes. For Loomer, and for the larger MAGA world, to be Jewish is to be a defensive proxy — less a person who may face actual violence (from the very forces they cultivate and ally with) than a decoy that can be deployed opportunistically to defend the kind of far-right violence the Trump administration promotes or dismisses. In this way, Loomer never has to experience the vulnerability of Jewishness and can instead simply wear the label when its tacit connection to Israel helps her cultivate social acceptance for her virulent Islamophobia.

 

This creates an interesting model for not just the growth of the Jewish far right in the U.S. but the U.S. right in general. By signaling to Jewishness as a strategy and tokenizing Jewish voices in the service of a larger political mission to target immigrants and build the MAGA base through populist conspiracy theories, they can simultaneously neutralize opposition and grow the coalition. Loomer then serves as the bridge, not so focused on Israel as to alienate the isolationists, foundationally conspiratorial in a way that can pull in the self-styled “revolutionaries” in Trump’s base, and enough of a rabble-rouser to maintain the claim that Trump is an enemy of “business as usual.”

 

“The contemporary Republican Party essentially is nothing but conspiracy theories,” Mike Rothschild, author of the recent books “Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories” and “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything,” told New Lines. “They’ve taken stuff that used to be very fringe … [and] people that mainline Republicans just wanted nothing to do with, and they’ve just taken over the party.”

 

Rothschild said that one of the reasons Loomer has even been allowed to maintain popularity, beyond the apparent tenacity of her grift, is that her association with Trump gives her legitimacy. For Trump, Loomer acts as evidence that he is still listening to the populist, conspiracist activists in his base, who are well acquainted with the kind of MAGA influencers on whom Loomer fashioned herself. That is likely why, despite all other advice, Trump listened to Loomer on April 3 when he fired six staffers from the National Security Council based on her private recommendation on Air Force One, where she suggested to the president that they were “disloyal” and should be disqualified for doing things like working for former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. “I play for an audience of one,” Loomer told The New York Times.

 

While Loomer’s more outrageous comments are often cited to dismiss her, she remains a force in Trump’s White House. She allegedly had a hand in Trump’s demotion of national security adviser Michael Waltz and went to war with the White House’s original choice for surgeon general, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat. Recent reporting revealed that Nesheiwat earned her degree not from the University of Arkansas, as she had always said, but the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine in St. Martin. Loomer immediately framed this as a type of foreign interference (despite Nesheiwat being an American citizen and attending a U.S. university) and pushed her own supplement company, which is often a favorite of the “vaccine skeptics.” Nesheiwat’s fame grew after appearing on Fox News as COVID-19 spread across the country, which is part of what inspired Loomer’s dissent: Nesheiwat is not a “COVID skeptic” but instead a “pro-COVID vaccine nepo appointee,” Loomer said.

 

Buckling to pressure, Trump eventually pulled Nesheiwat’s nomination and then received praise from Loomer’s acolytes. While Trump stripped out most opposition to his agenda from his first term, we have still seen conflict between Trump and more mainline Republicans and business leaders, who demand moderation and fiscal conservatism. But Loomer is the out-and-loud opposite, the voice of the MAGA rank and file, holding Trump to every position unpopular with his establishment partners. She is against H-1B visas and Medicaid cuts, voiced concerns about Trump’s receptivity to the gift of an aircraft from Qatar and would prefer to keep out any political professionals.

 

Loomer recently went on a tirade against Attorney General Pam Bondi, saying she was “always lying” about the release of the “Epstein files,” the investigation into Epstein, who has been a frequent character in right-wing conspiracy theories and had a long friendship with Trump. When many of the leading Epstein conspiracy theorists took jobs in Trump’s justice department, they had a choice to make when it turned out no list of sex clients was forthcoming: leave in protest or turn on their previous claims.

 

Loomer, on the other hand, had no such responsibility. As an unofficial influencer, she can maintain the most hard-line positions without ever having to live out the consequences of her public demands. This contradiction gave her a boost in early July, as the MAGA movement grappled with the complete U-turn on the Epstein conspiracy theories, and Loomer rode the energy back into the news by calling out Trump’s anointed class as insufficiently antiestablishment. Only she is the true incarnation of Trump’s mission, and she will carry it forward even when he fails to.

 

All of this signals that Trump has an uncommon loyalty to Loomer, whose influence outstrips that of many establishment Republicans desperate for the MAGA seal of approval. While there was speculation that Loomer would finally lose Trump’s favor (and had already seen her social media activity plummet after fights with Elon Musk in the aftermath of his exit from the White House), she was invited into a meeting with Vice President JD Vance on June 3. Both sides are looking to court Loomer rather than abandon her influence entirely.

 

The Epstein brouhaha and the implications of a potential Trump cover-up are another matter entirely, and Loomer is likely to take the conspiracy theory as far as she can without risking the president’s repudiation. While she represents perhaps the most radical consultant around Trump, her Jewishness has been leveraged as both a defense and a way of extending her ideology to those most skeptical: American Jews, too, can make America great again and categorically distrust the nefarious voices of experts, officials and deep-state plants.

 

Despite Israel’s increasingly radical political climate, there is little evidence to suggest that U.S. Jews are about to become primary spectators of Loomer’s political performance. Jews still voted disproportionately against Trump, Jewish organizations have come out en masse against the use of weaponized accusations of antisemitism in deportation cases, U.S. Jews overwhelmingly oppose Islamophobia, and a growing number of young Jews are breaking the cycle entirely by aligning themselves with movements for justice in Palestine — and doing so in explicitly Jewish terms. And yet, Jewish voting patterns are also shifting to the right, continuing the conservatism that followed Ashkenazi integration into the larger American project after World War II.

 

This reality helps to reveal what Loomer’s “Jewish” politics are: a ploy to defend a largely white, Christian nationalist movement whose relationship to Jewishness is based more on strategic opportunities than sincere attachment. Just as evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for Trump, they are pushing a version of “pro-Jewish” politics that largely stems from their Christian Zionist commitments, inspired more by their beliefs about the Jewish role in evangelical eschatology than any sincere care for Jewish lives. And despite the image of Jewish figures like Loomer or the reflection of supposedly Jewish interests in documents like Project Esther (the Heritage Foundation’s proposal for dealing with antisemitism by deporting immigrants), American Jews have not been swayed.

 

Epstein offers an even more divisive moment for Loomer’s political offering, given that the Epstein story — from his name to his alleged connection to Israeli intelligence to the mere fact that he is a Jewish banker accused of ghastly sex crimes — is so redolent of the kind of antisemitic fables that explicitly name Jews as the primary antagonists. If Loomer is able to break the seal, and if the rest of the growing far-right Jewish-American political class follow her lead, they will have overcome some of the final safeguards that have historically kept Jews away from the ranks of the GOP’s edgiest activists.

 

Loomer describes herself as a “pro-white nationalist,” acclaiming the movement that has overwhelmingly presented the largest threat to Jews. But she will not be the one who has to bear the brunt as conspiracy-minded white Christian nationalists build a political climate that, at best, excludes Jews and, at worst, targets them with rageful attacks and violence.