Laura Loomer is MAGA’s last woman standing

The anti-Muslim activist outlasts Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kristi Noem in Trump loyalty race Published September 3, 2026 6:30AM (EDT) Right-wing activist Laura Loomer attends a road dedication ceremony at Mar-a-Lago on Jan. 16, 2026, in Palm Beach, Florida. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images) Over the years, the MAGA movement has littered its path with the political carcasses of ambitious women who believed their public self-abasement would insulate them from the inevitable backlash. Karoline Leavitt is out. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was sent running back to Arkansas. Kellyanne Conway and Kayleigh McEnany landed safely at Fox News, the traditional waiting room for Republicans who remain useful to the party but no longer belong in Trump’s orbit. Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem and Marjorie Taylor Greene have all been thrown from the MAGA train in one form or another. SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler and Education Secretary Linda McMahon remain in the Cabinet, but neither occupies the feral, conspiratorial essence that Trump has increasingly made central to his movement. Every one of these women hitched her identity to Trump’s approval and every one of them eventually discovered what that approval is actually worth. Loyalty has never been a two-way street for Trump. In his political universe, women are routinely promoted as avatars of showy devotion. No matter how badly they savage his enemies or how well they carry out his agenda, they are discarded if they show the faintest sign of becoming a rival source of authority. Laura Loomer is MAGA’s last woman standing because she has mastered Trump’s most prized political currency without crossing him. She is the ultimate manifestation of a political culture that rewards cruelty, bigotry and unhinged performance art above all else. Loomer came up through the far-right activism circuit, working with James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas and building her public persona through stunts and ambush-style provocations. She was banned from Uber and Lyft in 2017 after a stream of anti-Muslim posts following a New York terror attack, including complaints about Muslim drivers and demands for a non-Islamic alternative to the ride-share services. She was banned from CPAC. She ran for Congress in the Florida district that includes Mar-a-Lago in 2020 and bragged that she was running in what she called the whitest district in the state, so she didn’t have to hide her views. She has claimed 9/11 was an inside job and then, a few years later, stood beside Trump at a 9/11 memorial. None of it mattered. What mattered was that she never once, not for a single news cycle, wavered in her devotion to Trump. She is the ultimate manifestation of a political culture that rewards cruelty, bigotry and unhinged performance art above all else. An influencer who has made herself an unofficial opposition-research shop, blacklist compiler and ideological purger for the president’s ecosystem, Loomer has no security clearance, yet has reportedly claimed credit for the removal of more than a dozen federal officials since Trump’s return to office. Whether every claim is true is almost beside the point. The core story of Loomer’s influence is the collapse of the distance between online extremism and state power. Trump himself has joked about the threat she poses. “You don’t want to be Loomered,” he said in 2024. “If you’re Loomered, you’re in deep trouble. That’s the end of your career, in a sense.” He has called her nasty and kept her close anyway, reportedly telling a Palm Beach crowd earlier this year that she “can be a little nasty, but to me, she’s always nice, and that’s all that matters.” Consider her feud with Milo Yiannopoulos, another far-right provocateur who inhabits the same ugly ecosystem of attention-seeking bigotry. Loomer publicly claimed credit after Yiannopoulos was detained by ICE in August and ultimately deported to Britain. She said she had reported him to authorities and cast the episode as a personal triumph after their falling-out. Yiannopoulos, who worked on Loomer’s congressional campaign, claimed “Everyone in the conservative moment knows someone Laura Loomer has sexually assaulted. But no one has done anything about it.” Loomer’s influence is not simply a matter of having a large following. She can publicly accuse someone of being disloyal to Trump, attach that accusation to an employee’s name, circulate it to millions of followers and then, crucially, take the complaint directly to the president. The clearest example came in April 2025, when Loomer went to the Oval Office armed with opposition research targeting members of Trump’s National Security Council. National security adviser Mike Waltz reportedly walked into the Oval Office to find Loomer seated across from the president, presenting a list of NSC staffers she deemed insufficiently loyal. Trump hugged her afterward and fired six people, including NSA director Timothy Haugh, a three-decade Air Force veteran, reportedly because of his ties to a general Trump had feuded with years earlier. Loomer posted a single word to mark the occasion: “SCALP.” Weeks later, Waltz himself was gone, along with his deputy, whose wife had once worked at the Justice Department under Biden. When FEMA’s chief financial officer Mary Comans was fired last year after approving federal payments for migrant housing in New York, Loomer posted that she had acted illegally. A federal judge has since ruled the firing violated civil service protections, and Comans’ lawyers are now in court trying to determine whether Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski fed Loomer the smear that ended her career. When Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., tried to conduct routine oversight of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in 2025, Loomer spent a weekend attacking the agency’s director for daring to host a Democrat, and the meeting was abruptly called off. In August 2025, Loomer posted videos of children from Gaza arriving in the United States and demanded to know why they had been granted visas. “Why are any Islamic invaders coming into the US under the Trump admin?” she wrote. The following day, the State Department said it was suspending visitor visas for people from Gaza while it reviewed the process used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas. Start your day with essential news from Salon. Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course. Last week, she posted a video naming Florida Senate nominee Angie Nixon, Reps. Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, former Rep. Cori Bush and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, describing all five Black women in a single racist and misogynistic slur. When Nixon pushed back, Loomer escalated by mocking her speech patterns and telling her she needed her leash tugged like a dog. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the onetime MAGA darling who spent years as one of the most reliably inflammatory members of Congress, called Loomer’s comments hateful and racist and said the party and the president own her. “This is Trump’s new MAGA and Republican Party and I want nothing to do with it,” she added. The internal cannibalism of the MAGA movement is a sight to behold, but Greene’s break with Loomer is particularly instructive because if there was a MAGA loyalty test, Greene wrote it. She wore a mask reading “Trump Won” through the pandemic. She helped spread the lie that Georgia’s 2020 election was stolen, the very election that put her in office. She embraced QAnon. And still she resigned from Congress in January after Trump began calling her “Marjorie Traitor Greene” over her demand that the Epstein files be released, a rupture that also cost Bondi her job as attorney general and helped end Rep. Lauren Boebert’s, R-Colo., standing in Trump’s good graces. South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace remade her entire political identity around Trump loyalty and got a fifth-place primary finish for her trouble. Kellyanne Conway, the woman who ran his winning 2016 campaign, fell out of favor for acknowledging in a book that Biden had legitimately won in 2020. Kristi Noem, who as DHS secretary oversaw mass deportations and defended an ICE shooting of a Minneapolis woman she’d branded a domestic terrorist, was eventually pushed out over spending on a vanity ad campaign, and has since faded from view amid allegations about her husband’s personal life. Loomer, who has done none of the actual work any of these women did, watched all of them fall and simply kept posting. What Loomer’s survival really exposes is that Trumpworld is organized around a single variable: does this person make Trump feel good about himself in this exact moment. Related Topics ------------------------------------------ Related Articles