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Before Donald J. Trump traveled to Philadelphia for this week’s debate, he invited one of the internet’s most polarizing figures along for the ride.
Laura Loomer was backstage with the Trump entourage while Mr. Trump squared off against Vice President Kamala Harris. She was in the spin room with the former president immediately afterward. And the next day, she flew with him to New York City and Shanksville, Pa., to commemorate the anniversary of Sept. 11.
A far-right activist known for her endless stream of sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Muslim and occasionally antisemitic social media posts and public stunts, Ms. Loomer has made a name for herself over the past decade by unabashedly claiming 9/11 was “an inside job,” calling Islam “a cancer,” accusing Ron DeSantis’s wife of exaggerating breast cancer and claiming that President Biden was behind the attempt to assassinate Mr. Trump in July.
Just two days before the debate, Ms. Loomer, 31, posted a racist joke about the vice president, whose mother was Indian American. Ms. Loomer wrote on X that if Ms. Harris won the election, the White House would “smell like curry.”
For many observers, including some of Mr. Trump’s most important allies, the Republican presidential nominee’s choice at a critical moment of the campaign to platform a social-media instigator, albeit one with nearly 1.3 million followers on X, was stunning.
“The history of this person is just really toxic,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump ally, told a reporter for HuffPost on Thursday. “I don’t think it’s helpful at all.”
His comments were echoed by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia and a devoted supporter of Mr. Trump. “I don’t think that she has the experience or the right mentality to advise a very important presidential election,” Ms. Greene told reporters Thursday morning.
Ms. Loomer declined to comment, saying in a text message that she was “not interested in speaking to the media so they can further their conspiracies about me.” But she took to X, her favorite medium, to attack both Ms. Greene and Mr. Graham, calling them disloyal to Mr. Trump while making a string of accusations about their personal lives.
The critiques have not diminished the candidate’s enthusiasm for her. On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump shared on Truth Social a post of hers attempting to debunk a story by Axios that said Ms. Harris was outperforming Mr. Trump on social media.
Asked to comment about her association with the former president, the Trump campaign responded with a statement it had released on Wednesday about the Sept. 11 terror attacks that did not address questions about her ties to Mr. Trump. “The day wasn’t about anyone other than the souls who are no longer with us, their families, and the heroes who courageously stepped up to save their fellow Americans on that fateful day,” the campaign statement read.
This was far from Mr. Trump’s first association with her.
Ms. Loomer lives in Florida and frequently attends events at Mar-a-Lago, and the former president has amplified many of her social media posts on his own accounts. In January, she flew with him to Iowa during the buildup to the state’s caucuses. In April, The New York Times reported that Mr. Trump was considering hiring her for his campaign — a plan he abandoned only after some of his supporters pushed back on the idea.
But with seven weeks left in the presidential race, a time when conventional wisdom dictates that candidates broaden their message to appeal to moderate undecided voters, Mr. Trump’s embrace of Ms. Loomer is a clear signal that he is instead doubling down on propping up some of the most caustic elements of the far right.
Another signal came on Tuesday, when the Trump campaign assembled a “social media war room” in Philadelphia to respond in real time to the debate. Roughly 18 conservative influencers gathered in a conference room in the Warwick Rittenhouse Square — the same hotel where Ms. Harris was staying — and pounded out ripostes to Ms. Harris’s every utterance during the debate while vigorously defending Mr. Trump.
The group included Chaya Raichik, who is behind the conservative social-media account known as Libs of TikTok and who is known for her transphobic content and smear campaigns against schools, hospitals and libraries. It also included Jack Posobiec, a right-wing podcaster who helped spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that Democratic politicians secretly ran a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria. Also there was Rogan O’Handley, who is best known as DC Draino, an election denialist and vaccine skeptic.
In advance of the event, Mr. Trump sent each person a signed letter thanking him or her “for being a social media warrior in the fight to save our country,” adding that he looked “forward to making viral content with you at the White House in just a few short months.”
The group, according to Alex Bruesewitz, a political consultant who was hired by the campaign last month, collectively had about 50 million social media followers. Several of them, including Mr. Posobiec and Mr. O’Handley, have also been deployed by the Republican National Committee to help host election integrity webinars in recent weeks.
Shortly before the debate began, Mr. Bruesewitz fielded a video call from Mr. Trump, who delivered a pep talk.
“You guys are more important than I am, actually, because you’ll get the word out, the way you want to get it out,” Mr. Trump was recorded saying in a video of the call later posted to social media.
It’s hard to measure the impact such voices might have on Mr. Trump, and little if anything is known about what conversations he has had about his campaign with Ms. Loomer or other influencers. But few, if any, candidates have had a closer relationship with their online base of support, one that doesn’t always focus on the same issues as the broader electorate.
In the days leading up to the debate, Ms. Loomer and most of the people making up Mr. Trump’s social media war room were posting allegations that Haitian migrants had been killing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Most shared images, generated with A.I., of dogs, cats and ducks being protected by Mr. Trump, along with other content underscoring the unfounded claim that the pets were being eaten. On Monday, for example, Mr. O’Handley uploaded an image of Mr. Trump astride a giant cat as he held an AR-15-style rifle.
Ms. Loomer, for her part, posted advertisements for dog collars inscribed with the phrase “not your lunch #MAGA” on them that were available for $23.28 plus shipping. Another version bore the phrase “don’t eat me” in Haitian Creole.
The last two posts by Mr. Trump on Truth Social before the debate were A.I. images of cats and ducks; one depicted cats in military fatigues carrying assault rifles and wearing MAGA hats; the other showed the candidate himself sitting on a plane amid a crowd of ducks and cats.
Then, roughly 26 minutes into the debate, Mr. Trump responded to a question about immigration by claiming that migrants were “eating the pets of the people that live” in Springfield.
For many of the 67 million people watching the debate, who aren’t as terminally online as the former president or his social media supporters, the comment may have been confusing. But for some who hope to see him defeated at the polls in November, the entire episode provoked a measure of glee.
On Thursday, Claire McCaskill, the former Democratic senator from Missouri, took to social media to sarcastically encourage Mr. Trump to spend more time with Ms. Loomer, calling her a “perfect adviser.”
“I hope he keeps her very close to him between now and the election,” she wrote. “They belong together.”
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