Laura Loomer is no Marie Kondo. The right-wing provocateur loves mess. This week, Loomer has taken umbrage with major MAHA movement personnel and their boosters: Loomer, via her very active social media presence, has come out against new surgeon general nominee Casey Means, accusing her of being unvetted and unqualified for the role, as well as Jessica Reed Kraus, wannabe White House reporter and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fan, who is also known by her social handle HouseInhabit.
Loomer’s recent bit has been promoting herself as a master vetter, the ultimate unearther of skeletons in political closets. Her crowded timeline is essentially a case study in mean, self-promotion by way of being last woman standing: Means, in the running to become America’s Next Top Doctor, is more akin to a witch than a doctor, in Loomer’s characterization, and a photo of Kraus hugging Michael Cohen (who, as you’ll recall, is Donald Trump’s former fixer who testified against him in the hush-money trial that led Trump to becoming the first president to also be a convicted felon. After the election, Cohen unsuccessfully called for the case against his former boss, who once referred to him as “a rat,” to be dismissed) is evidence that she is a Democratic plant sent to infiltrate and destroy the presidency. Unspoken is the implication that Loomer, with the power of Google at her fingertips, not only passes the purity test, but should be the one to administer it to others before they cross the threshold at the White House.
MAHA, according to Loomer, is failing its health exam. Loomer is about as far right as it’s possible to go, self-describing as a “proud Islamophobe” during her unsuccessful 2020 congressional bid and maintaining that Muslims are “unfit for holding office.” The frequent twitterstorms and shitfits, complete with shock-value name-calling (on a February 28 episode of her streaming show, Loomer Unleashed, she referred to Kraus as an “insufferable cunt”) and stunts worthy of a Jackass spin-off (handcuffing herself to the Twitter headquarters for hours when she was banned from the platform; asking a person who she thought looked Muslim to “disavow terrorism;” eating MAGA-coded dog food for a few bucks and going back for seconds, and more) would seem to make her easy to write off as another shrieking harpy, but, terrifyingly, she seems to have the ear of Donald Trump.
The self-proclaimed pro-white nationalist has traveled on his plane and in his entourage multiple times, and in April, after Loomer met with Trump, JD Vance, and other officials, claiming that she had a list of people within the administration who were disloyal and undermining, six National Security Council officials were promptly canned.
“Laura Loomer is a very good patriot and she is a very strong person,” Trump told reporters the next day on Air Force One. “I saw her yesterday for a little while. She makes recommendations of things and people, and sometimes I listen to those recommendations.”
What Loomer left out of her recap of the remarks on social media was Trump denying that she had influenced the decision to fire the staffer. “No, not at all,” he said, according to the New York Times.
Loomer also claimed in late April that Trump has told his team to offer her a job several times, but those White House scoundrels “do not listen to him. His staff undermine his authority.” In April 2023, the Times reported that Loomer was set to be hired on Trump’s campaign, but that staff backlash halted the hire. Loomer, then, declined to comment “out of respect for President Trump.”
Still, Loomer is kamikaze-ing into the heart of MAGA, taking down those she believes to be bad actors down with her. “MAHA is literally being taken over by Marxists and Grifters,” she tweeted on Thursday, declaring the current situation “A TOTAL CRISIS!”
“I’m glad I initiated the MAHA breakup,” she asserted, also on Thursday. “Many of these grifters needed to be exposed for who they are.”
She doesn’t specify in those tweets who the breakup was between, but in another missive she points out Means and her family as the Marxist grifters in question, partly due to Means’s father, Grady Means, authoring a children’s book, The Adventures of Felix the Flamingo: Based On Many True Stories.” In the book, the titular Felix “begins to discover that he is an unusual bird who has lost his way,” according to its Amazon summary, which also touts exploration of gender and sexuality issues in the brightly colored pages.
When Calley Means, brother of Casey and son of Grady, as well as a current advisor to Kennedy at the Department of Health and Human Services, pushed back on one of Loomer’s many critiques of Casey as being not a real doctor, Loomer dared the siblings to “condemn your father for writing a book encouraging children to be transgender.”
“I don’t want a Surgeon General that isn’t capable of condemning their own family member for pushing child mutilation,” Loomer continued. “Do you and your sister condemn your father?”
They did not, it would seem. Calley said that the book was written “when a gay family friend was suicidal. It has nothing to do with trans.”
Loomer also suggested Thursday that Marco Rubio should take on yet another federal side hustle and add surgeon general to the list, appending a screenshot from an October 2024 newsletter published by Casey Means listing things she did in pursuit of finding love, including praying to photos of her ancestors, talking to trees and asking them to help her out, and wishing on stars.
Loomer, a woman who makes her living as someone who says a lot of inflammatory things on the internet for attention, found another woman who makes her living saying a lot of inflammatory things on the internet for attention—beyond Means—to put in her crosshairs this week.
In a tweet Tuesday styled as a note to Lara Trump, Loomer highlighted Kraus for hugging Cohen, who, she says, “tried to have your father in law jailed for life.” (The maximum sentence for Trump’s charges is four years in federal prison, and though he was found guilty of 34 counts, legal experts said that any sentences would likely have been served concurrently.) She accused Kraus and wellness influencer Vani Hari, who also sat front row at the confirmation hearings for Kennedy, of being “opportunistic liberal women who are pariah social climbers” and “subversive infiltrators in your circle who are trying to serve as Trojan horses to possibly undermine you and your family with their leftist agendas.”
She pointed out that Kraus was a Kennedy supporter and didn’t vote for Trump—which is true. Kraus has in fact taken heat for not voting at all in the 2024 election, claiming, depending on the day, that she was either too busy supporting Trump and traveling to get her ballot in, or that she wanted to “remain untethered” to political parties. She has also spoken about identifying in the past as a “super liberal” Democrat, but changing her allegiances during the Covid-19 pandemic.
When Cohen responded to Loomer’s tweet by proclaiming himself to be a “bipartisan hugger,” Loomer was having exactly none of it. She also offered up a new spin on the “not like other girls” ‘tude.
“There are women who are workers, and then there’s women who are social climbers and opportunists who will throw anyone under the bus for some access and a selfie,” she wrote in part. “I’m not like those women. It’s why I go out of my way to avoid groups of women.”
And for good measure? “You won’t ever get a hug from me. I value loyalty and principles.”
It would appear that Loomer is saving her affections for former veep candidate Sarah Palin, who on Wednesday praised Loomer’s “belated vetting of political appointments,” including an uncropped screenshot of a photo of herself and Loomer together.
Loomer happily accepted the praise from the famously undervetted Palin, retweeting her and adding: “Thank you, @SarahPalinUSA! Very kind of you to say! I have always admired you! Vetting matters!”
Yes, just ask John McCain about how much vetting matters.
Laura Loomer, Casey Means, Jessica Reed Kraus, and the White House did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair‘s request for comment.
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