Late on a warm June evening in New York’s Central Park, a crowd was enjoying a production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in 2017 when Laura Loomer stormed onto the stage and disrupted the show, shouting: “Do you want Trump to be assassinated?”

Loomer was a relatively unknown conservative activist at the time, and was upset by the theater company’s decision to recreate Caesar as a Donald Trump-like figure who was then, in line with the original play, bloodily knifed to death. “Stop the normalization of political violence against the right,” she yelled on stage. “This is violence against Donald Trump.”

Loomer was booed by the crowd and ultimately arrested. But crucially, her antics brought about her public rise as a far right activist after she was interviewed by Fox News primetime host Sean Hannity.

As her profile has risen, so too has her connection to Trump.

Over the course of the last seven years, Loomer has posted an unending stream of racist and Islamophobic content online, while pushing conspiracy theories about school shootings, election fraud, and the January 6 attack on the Capitol. She has ingratiated herself with senior figures in Trumpworld, such as Roger Stone and Donald Trump Jr. And throughout it all, Trump has complimented her, online and in person at his rallies and Mar-a-Lago home. He has shared her wild racist conspiracies, and even supported her to run for Congress.

In recent weeks, Trump and Loomer’s connection has appeared to become closer, as Loomer was seen traveling to the presidential debate on Trump’s plane just days after Loomer posted a racist attack against vice president Kamala Harris. “The White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center,” Loomer wrote in a post on X. Loomer then attended a September 11 commemoration event with Trump, despite the fact that she has repeatedly reposted conspiracies about the attack being an “inside job.” Loomer did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.

Her presence and potential influence on Trump has led to significant backlash from within Trump’s own party. Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina called Loomer’s rhetoric “disturbing”—to which Loomer responded by calling Graham “gay.” Senator Thom Tillis from North Carolina blasted Loomer as a “crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans.” Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia congresswoman who has pushed school shooting conspiracies, boosted QAnon, and even questioned if Nancy Pelosi should be tried for treason and executed, called Loomer’s recent social media posts “extremely racist.” (Greene, it should be noted, has ties to right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, a former intern of hers who was once close to Loomer but has since viciously feuded with her, and has made specific allegations, which Loomer has denied, about the nature of the relationship between Trump and Loomer.)

Despite repeated criticism from within his own party for associating with her, Loomer’s star has continued to rise within Trumpworld, and over the course of the last year, she has become a key—if unofficial—part of Trump’s reelection bid, appearing at multiple rallies and fundraisers, and receiving mentions by Trump from the stage.

When asked by reporters about Loomer on Friday in California, Trump called her a “strong person,” “a supporter,” and “a free spirit.” He did not condemn her comments, and simply said he “disagree[d]” with some of them.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump later added ​​“Laura Loomer doesn’t work for the Campaign.” He also noted that he disagrees with “the statements she made.”

Trump has been a Loomer fan for a while now. In April, while speaking in Mar-a-Lago, Trump called Loomer “a woman with courage,” warning those listening that “you don’t want to be Loomered,” a reference to the term Loomer herself uses to describe her abrasive tactics for interviewing people.

In June, Loomer wished Trump a happy birthday in an X post that called him “my favorite person in the whole world,” and featured photographs of the pair together on four different occasions. In July, Loomer attended the Bitcoin Conference in Tennessee and was pictured alongside Trump, who spoke at the event.

And over the past week, Trump has appeared to repeat conspiracies that Loomer herself has posted online. At a rally in Las Vegas, Trump referenced the false claim that Harris was wearing earrings that doubled as bluetooth earphones during the debate. Loomer has been at the forefront of a widespread social media campaign to push this theory; her post on X about it has been viewed over 6.5 million times to date.

“I heard she had something in the ear, a little something in the ear,” Trump said.

During the debate, Trump also repeated a baseless conspiracy about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets. “In Springfield they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats.” This conspiracy had spread in right-wing circles for days leading up to the debate, with Loomer among the loudest voices pushing the claims, posting over two dozen times about the conspiracy on X in the two days before the debate.

Over the weekend, videos showing the pair hugging at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort sparked rumors that the couple were having an affair, with commentator and comedian Bill Maher suggesting it during his Friday night show, and the Drudge Report posting a picture of the pair above the headline “LOOMER MAGA LOVE.” In a post on X on Saturday morning, Loomer called the reports “a complete and blatant lie,” adding that she “should sue Bill Maher for defamation.” On her Sunday night online show on the alternative video sharing site Rumble, she once again reacted to the rumors: “I know that Kamala Harris sucked dick to get where she is today,” Loomer said, repeating a decades-old false conspiracy about the vice president. “I ain’t like her, okay? I don’t suck dick to get to the top.”

While some GOP politicians criticize Loomer for her extremist views, the reality is that her presence in Trump’s orbit is no longer anything out of the ordinary.

In recent years, Trump has fully embraced deeply problematic figures on the far-right, like white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes, who Trump dined with at Mar-a-Lago in 2022; Adin Ross, the manosphere influencer who interviewed Trump on his podcast; Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec, who also disrupted the Shakespeare play with Loomer and was part of Trump’s “social media war room” during the debate; and the Nelk Boys, the conservative podcasters who recently interviewed JD Vance and have defended misogynistic rhetoric shared by people like Andrew Tate.

“At this point, it’s hardly a surprise to see Laura Loomer’s racist and Islamophobic rhetoric embraced by Trump and the MAGA movement,” Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, tells WIRED. “Hatred and fear mongering has long been a feature, not a bug, and after years of this movement welcoming in Nazis and antisemites like Nick Fuentes, it’s more surprising that it’s taken this long for a toxic influencer like Loomer to become a visible presence in this campaign.”

The Trump campaign has been relatively open about its goal of using these figures to reach an audience of disaffected young men, but they are also unified in their unwavering praise for Trump no matter what he says and does—and no one is more dedicated to deifying Trump than Loomer.

Loomer, who was born in Tucson, Arizona, first came to prominence while completing a broadcast journalism degree at Barry University near Miami, Florida. In 2015, Loomer, working with right-wing agitator James O’Keefe and his undercover video group Project Veritas, secretly recorded a university official and published a video making it appear as if the official was fine with the formation of a student group in support of the Islamic State.

That effort earned Loomer a job with O’Keefe after university, and over the course of the next several years she worked on a number of undercover projects, including a stunt where she filmed herself trying to vote while dressed in a burqa and claiming to be Huma Abedin, the vice chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Loomer would go on to work with a number of known disinformation peddlers and conspiracy theorists including the Geller Report, Rebel Media, and Alex Jones’ Infowars, pushing school shooting hoax claims and September 11 conspiracies.

She also continued to post virulently anti-Muslim content, calling the religion a “cancer” and herself a “proud Islamophobe.” Muslims, she said, were “savages f**king everything up for everyone.”

Her account on Twitter, which had 265,000 followers at the time, was banned in 2018 for sharing this kind of content; a decision she responded to by handcuffing herself to Twitter’s New York headquarters. The final straw was a post attacking Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota who had just been elected to Congress, in which Loomer called her “pro Sharia” and “anti Jewish.” Loomer was also banned from Instagram, and services like Uber and Lyft. Her X account was reinstated in 2022, more than a month after Elon Musk took control of the platform, and she currently has 1.3 million followers.

Loomer has also tried to step into more official roles in the GOP. In 2020, Loomer won the Republican primary for a congressional seat in Florida; her victory party was attended by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, notorious troll Jacob Wohl, “Stop the Steal” leader Ali Alexander, and former Trump adviser Roger Stone, who calls Loomer his protege. Loomer also secured Trump’s public support for her campaign, though she lost decisively to her Democratic opponent Lois Frankel in the general election.

Loomer’s links to the Trump campaign in 2020 appeared to run deeper than just an endorsement. Mediaite reported at the time that the Trump campaign was using Loomer’s email list to solicit donations, and a Trump campaign fundraising email sent in January 2020 sent from ‘2020 Illoominate Media,’ a media firm owned by Loomer.

Loomer also ran for Congress again in 2022 in a different Florida district—this time without Trump’s endorsement—but failed to win her Republican primary.

In April 2023, the New York Times reported that Trump had tried to hire Loomer to be part of his reelection campaign team, but the idea was ditched following outrage from some of the former president’s biggest supporters. Several months after the New York Times report was published, Loomer posted a video of herself with Trump on X, captioned: “Best President Ever. I love him so much.” Trump reciprocated, calling Loomer “terrific” and “very special,” adding: “You are a very opinionated lady, I have to tell you that. And in my opinion, I like that.”

Not everyone in Trumpworld hates her, either. In October, Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller appeared on Loomer’s show on Rumble, and said to her: “I love what you’re doing.” Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump campaign advisor, also praised Loomer, writing on X: “Laura is a great journalist and a great American.”

In November, Donald Trump Jr. said he would “love to see” Loomer appointed as his father’s press secretary “just to watch DC just explode.” Loomer responded by saying she would “gladly accept” and that “nobody will fight for President Trump harder or defend him against the fake news media harder than I will.”

A few months later, Loomer traveled on Trump’s plane when he visited Iowa on a campaign stop in early January. Her associations with Trump didn’t stop her conspiracy-addled posts: while there, she claimed the attack on the Capitol was an “inside job” and wrote on X, “Personally, I think J6 should be a national holiday in which we celebrate the bravery of American patriots who protested a stolen election.”

Trump’s support of Loomer is well documented, even by Loomer herself. The official Trump campaign website has shared articles from Loomer’s own site on multiple occasions, including several articles attacking the judges overseeing Trump’s various criminal trials. When Loomer posted a video of her badgering Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s campaign challenger, the former president shared it. He shares a lot of what she writes, including her false claim that she obtained a copy of Harris’ birth certificate that does not say the vice president is American or Black. “Kamala Harris is NOT black and never has been,” Loomer wrote in a post on Truth Social, which Trump shared on the platform.

“Every time President Trump sees me, he always says, ‘You’re so smart. I love your site so much. You’re so intelligent. I love your articles. … I read your website every day,’” Loomer said on her Loomer Unleashed podcast.

Unlike a lot of other far-right figures in Trump’s orbit, Loomer does not appear to be playing politics. She doesn’t couch her hatred in coded language to appear more mainstream, and though this has led to her being ostracized by many right wing figures, Trump has stayed loyal.

“She was largely a joke among the far right, who saw her antics as cringe and over done,” Joan Donovan, an assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University tells WIRED. This is exactly what Trump wants, Donovan says: “She is willing to say the quiet part out loud. She is known for the kind of incendiary and bigoted rhetoric that Trump is told by political strategists would sink his chances of winning.”