Why is the former President hanging with a 9/11 conspiracist?
By The Editorial Board
Sept. 13, 2024
Donald Trump likes to call his political opponents nuts, as in “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” so then why is he hanging with the 9/11 conspiracist Laura Loomer? Is he trying to lose the election?
We can’t believe we have to write this about a presidential candidate, but then Mr. Trump seems to like the company of Ms. Loomer, the 31-year-old online provocateur. She was backstage with the Trump team during this week’s debate with Kamala Harris and was in the spin room with the former President afterward.
She then flew on Mr. Trump’s plane to the anniversary memorials of 9/11 in New York City and the site of the Flight 93 crash in Pennsylvania. Her attendance at these events was especially insulting since Ms. Loomer has claimed that 9/11 was “an inside job.” Does she think Osama bin Laden was a CIA front man?
Ms. Loomer is usually described in the press as “far right,” but that’s unfair to the fever swamps. On Sunday she posted on X that if Ms. Harris wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry,” a gibe against Ms. Harris’s Indian heritage.
She added that Ms. Harris’s speeches “will be facilitated via a call center.” U.S. companies often farm out their information lines to Indian firms, get it? We wonder if JD Vance’s Indian-American wife thinks that’s funny.
In 2018 Ms. Loomer chained herself to Twitter’s New York headquarters after the platform banned her. She suggested that Casey DeSantis, the wife of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, might have lied about having breast cancer: “I’ve never seen the medical records.” This week she smeared Sen. Lindsey Graham after he criticized her association with Mr. Trump.
All of this would be ignorable, except that others close to Mr. Trump say he is listening to Ms. Loomer’s advice. People in the Trump campaign are trying to get her out of the former President’s entourage, to no avail. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Ms. Loomer is damaging the former President’s election chances. As North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis put it on Friday: “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans. A DNC plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning re-election. Enough.”
The press is naturally having fun with all this and asked Mr. Trump about it on Friday. “Laura’s a supporter,” he said. “I have a lot of supporters.” He added that “she’s a strong person; she’s got strong opinions,” and he wondered why people are asking about her.
They’re asking because they know Mr. Trump’s association with Ms. Loomer feeds the concern among voters that Mr. Trump listens to crazy courtiers who flatter him and play to his vanity. Is this who the next four years are going to feature?
The problem here is deeper than Mr. Trump’s electoral prospects. A growing segment of the American right is populated by, and susceptible to, cranks and conspiracists. A movement that used to admire William F. Buckley Jr. and Thomas Sowell now elevates a pseudo-historian who blames Winston Churchill for World War II and media personalities who sell falsehoods as a triumph for free speech.
This isn’t an intellectual or political movement that is going to win converts, nor will it deserve them.