When Donald Trump flew to Pennsylvania for a 9/11 anniversary event this week, he brought an unusual companion: a 9/11 conspiracist named Laura Loomer.

Loomer has been a quasi-journalist on the fringe right for about a decade, with a penchant for saying things that make even hardened MAGA types recoil. She is a self-described “proud Islamophobe” who has cheered the deaths of migrants and called for Muslims to be banned from driving for ride-hail apps. She ran for Congress twice, in 2020 and 2022, and failed both times. More recently, Loomer has called Kamala Harris a “drug-using prostitute” and warned that, if she wins, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”

Despite all of this, Trump has long displayed a soft spot for Loomer. He endorsed her House bid in 2020 and, in 2023, tried to offer her a spot on his campaign — only to back down after aides revolted. Undeterred, he hosted her at Mar-a-Lago afterward, repeatedly boosted her content on Truth Social, and traveled with her on the 2024 campaign trail.

It’s not clear what Trump gets out of this relationship. But his ties to Loomer have become a major controversy since the 9/11 event, with some of the former president’s closest allies speaking publicly against Loomer.

“The history of this person is just really toxic,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told the HuffPost. Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) — who claimed a Jewish family was using space lasers to start wildfires! — thinks Loomer is a bridge too far, calling Loomer’s tweet about Harris and curry “appalling and extremely racist.” (Loomer responded by accusing Greene of sleeping with a “Zangief cosplayer.”)

It’s hard to take these condemnations all that seriously. Trump and his vice presidential pick have spent this week pushing a nasty conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating people’s pets that appears to have inspired real-world hate crimes. If you’re worried about racism and conspiracy theorizing, maybe take a look at the top of the ticket.

But what makes Loomer different from Trump is that she has literally no filter. She says the quiet part out loud, every single time. The more time Trump spends with her, the harder it is to deny that his thinly veiled bigotry is anything but the genuine article. And that, for the Republican Party, is a very big problem indeed.

Loomer isn’t a household name for most Americans, but she’s been a presence in the conservative media ecosystem for quite some time.

She first attracted attention in 2015 when, as a college senior at Barry University in South Florida, she secretly filmed a meeting with administrators in which she attempted to form a campus club supporting ISIS. The video was released by Project Veritas, the conservative group that specializes in (questionably edited) sting videos.

Loomer worked for Project Veritas during the 2016 presidential campaign and learned to build a career out of political stunts. She grabbed the national spotlight in June 2017 when she stormed the stage at a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in New York that dressed the Roman general like Donald Trump. The disruption earned Loomer a booking on Sean Hannity’s show.

“You were making a very strong point. I applaud you for what you’ve done,” Hannity told her.

Loomer parlayed the notoriety from the Julius Caesar incident into a kind of internet celebrity on the pro-Trump right. The problem with celebrity, though, is that it can give you too many opportunities to show yourself. And Loomer proved to be someone with truly out-there opinions.

After an ISIS supporter killed eight people with a truck in November 2017, she went on an Islamophobic rant on Twitter, blaming popular ride-hailing apps for employing Muslim drivers. “Someone needs to create a non Islamic form of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver,” she wrote. The two services subsequently banned her, the first of many bans from high-profile tech platforms.

In 2018, Loomer teamed up with the conspiracy theory site Infowars to cover the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. She had suggested in a tweet that the students there speaking out against gun violence were plants: “it’s obvious these kids are reading a screen or notes someone else wrote for them.” In May 2018, after a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, Loomer went even further, suggesting in a tweet that the entire thing was staged.

“The doctor speaking to media outside the hospital in Santa Fe, TX where victims of a school shooting were taken today said they just had a ‘mass casualty drill’ at the hospital around the same time of the school drill,” she wrote. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help but notice these ‘coincidences.’”

This particular cocktail of hate speech and conspiracy theory misinformation became the hallmark of Loomer’s political style, prompting bans from major social media platforms.

The straw that broke the camel’s back on Twitter, for example, came in November 2018 when Loomer tweeted that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) supported female genital mutilation because she is Muslim.

In response to the ban, which came a year after Twitter stripped her blue check mark (then something given to notable people rather than a badge to be purchased) as punishment for similar false and offensive claims, Loomer physically chained herself to Twitter’s headquarters in New York while wearing a Nazi-style yellow star. It’s worth noting here that Loomer is Jewish but has long had tight links to the white nationalist movement. She is, for example, close with the avowed anti-Semite Nick Fuentes who dined with Trump in 2022, and once broadly boasted that “I’m going to fight for white people.”

Presenting herself as a victim of Big Tech censorship, she found allies in popular far-right publications like Breitbart as well as in Washington. In December 2019, then-President Trump retweeted a Loomer supporter calling for donations to her campaign. In May 2020, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) sent a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr calling on him to open an investigation into Loomer’s Facebook ban. She was reinstated on Twitter after Elon Musk’s purchase of the site.

Gosar, along with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), endorsed Loomer during her 2020 House bid in Florida. Positioning her as a victim of Big Tech censorship — a major concern on the right today — worked to help normalize her and bring her into the mainstream of political debate.

In 2020, she actually won the Republican primary, only to get trounced by a Democrat in the general election. In 2022, she ran in a different Florida district but lost narrowly in the Republican primary.

In theory, Donald Trump hates losers. But for some reason, he keeps coming back to Loomer — hosting her at Mar-a-Lago, posting praise of her on social media, and trying to bring her into his campaign. Why she began traveling with him recently is also a mystery; a report in Axios ascribes it to an angry Trump becoming increasingly dismissive of his advisers’ advice as his poll numbers fade and more inclined to trust sycophants like Loomer.

But this is just a theory. Trump hasn’t spoken up during this week’s Loomer firestorm, and the Trump campaign isn’t talking.

“Anyone who thinks they know what is going on — whether people on the outside or reporters — is full of shit,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told Axios.

There is a reason that Laura Loomer has even Marjorie Taylor Greene panicking, and it’s not just that the two reportedly have personal beef. It’s that Laura Loomer makes the rest of the Republican Party look terrible.

For decades, right-wing flirtation with racism has taken place through dog whistles and coded messages. Ronald Reagan’s attacks on “welfare queens” didn’t involve actual racist slurs but conjured up a mental image for some white voters of a poor lazy Black woman exploiting taxpayer dollars to live comfortably. Liberals would call this rhetoric racism, conservatives would say liberals are just trying to shut down legitimate debate, and round-and-round we went.

In theory, Donald Trump should have changed the game. By calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and proposing a ban on Muslim immigration, he did very little to hide the racial resentment at the core of his political appeal.

But after capitulating to Trump, the GOP fell back into its old habits. No matter how outrageous Trump’s rhetoric and even his actions became — from the Muslim ban to family separation — liberal critiques were met with the same kinds of dismissals. Trump’s rhetoric about immigration and crime can’t be racist, they would say; he’s just speaking the language of forgotten Americans left behind by globalization. Liberals, they’d say, are making everything about race when it’s not.

Trump, and his top allies like Tucker Carlson, were typically careful to do just enough to keep these defenses plausible. They would insist, over and over again, that they weren’t racists — no matter how much their language resembled what you heard from out-and-out bigots.

Bigots like, for example, Laura Loomer.

By bringing her into his inner circle, Trump explodes the entire game. No one can say a woman who talks about the first Indian-American president making the White House smell like curry is merely a race-neutral populist. No one can say that a woman who calls herself a “proud Islamophobe” isn’t a bigot.

If Trump endorses Loomer, as he has repeatedly, he’s implicitly saying that these kinds of views are part of his world. He is validating the liberal critique that his movement is animated by plain old bigotry and removes whatever thin veneer of plausible deniability his professed opposition to racism might have had. Every post he sends endorsing her, every second she travels with Trump, weakens his reputational shield.

That’s why this week’s firestorm matters. In bringing an open bigot who suggests 9/11 was an “inside job” to a 9/11 memorial, Trump showed that the lines separating him from the people who represented his unbridled id were evaporating. And that, Republicans know, is a recipe for political disaster.

This is an updated version of a piece on Loomer that originally appeared in 2020.