We begin our show with a clip from a June 3, 2025 White House Press briefing in which Karoline Leavitt is asked about Laura Loomer’s influence on White House decision making.
In the news:
* Peeved by revised job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, President Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics late last week. Trump I had a record turnover of 92%, and Trump II seems to be on track for that, but this decapitation in a boring little backwater of the federal government puts a new spotlight on the administration’s war on facts.
* On Monday, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren endorsed New York City Democratic primary winner Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City. A new poll this week has Mamdani currently polling higher than all the other candidates combined. August is usually a somewhat fallow month for the mayor’s race, but Mamdani is collecting endorsements while his chief rival, Andrew Cuomo collects—billionaire donors?—many of whom are Donald Trump allies. As this turns into a national race, let’s talk national money. Politicians like Warren ($3.9 million cash on hand), Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders ($20.1 million), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ($9.8 million) also have money they can legally throw into this race.
* It’s Groundhog Day in the Texas legislature! This week, most of the Democratic minority in the legislature have run away to Blue states to block a vote on a gerrymander delivering five more Congressional seats to Donald Trump. The last “quorum break” was in 2021, when Governor Greg Abbott called a special session to restrict voting rights. Unlike last time, where they all went to Oklahoma and Washington, D.C., they are camping out in Blue states where governors like California’s Gavin Newsome, Illinois’s J.B. Pritzker, and New York’s Kathy Hochul are threatening to re-gerrymander their own states if Texas continues down this road.
Influencer and MAGA gadfly Laura Loomer at a "No Eminent Domain! No Carbon Pipelines!" rally at the Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines, Iowa in January, 2024, only weeks before the caucuses. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
Your hosts:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Photo courtesy of Loomer for Congress/Wikimedia Commons
Today’s focus: right-wing Influencer Laura Loomer’s impact on the Trump administration.
* Loomer is a 32-year-old far right media activist, influencer, and conspiracy theorist from Tucson, Arizona. Proudly Jewish, she also identifies as a white nationalist, an Islamophobe, and is fiercely anti-immigrant. Loomer attended Mount Holyoke for one semester but quickly left, completing a degree in broadcast journalism at Barry University in South Florida.
* Before 2020, Loomer mostly specialized in theatrical confrontations, many framed as “journalism.”In 2015, still a college student at Barry University, she went undercover for Project Veritas to “expose” administrators at the school as supporters of Isis.
* In 2017, Loomer and Jack Posobiec disrupted a Public Theater performance of Julius Caesar that depicted Donald Trump as Caesar, saying that the play “normalized violence against the right.”
* In 2018, Loomer was an architect of conspiracy theories surrounding the Parkland School shootings. Broadcasting on behalf of Alex Jones’s InfoWars, she created videos asserting that the shooting was a false flag operation sponsored by the “deep state.” You name a hoax, Loomer has promoted it, including the 9/11 “inside job” conspiracy, that the 2020 election was stolen, and that a blizzard that occurred on the day of the 2024 Iowa Caucuses was caused by deep state actors using a secret weather technology.
* In 2020, Loomer ran for Congress in Fl-21 (West Palm Beach south to Delray Beach.) She won the nomination decisively, then lost to incumbent Democrat Lois Frankel by 20 points. In 2022, Loomer primaried Republican incumbent Daniel Webster in FL-11, losing by 7 points. Claiming voter fraud and weeping copiously, refused to concede.
* In 2023, Loomer launched a show on Rumble called Loomer Unleashed (which you can also get as a podcast.)
* In 2024, Loomer campaigned for Donald Trump vigorously. Although campaign staff tried to distance him, and at one point kicked her off the campaign plane, Trump embraced her. Loomer accompanied Trump to official events only weeks before the election; when Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lindsay Graham pushed back on her racist comments about Kamala Harris, she taunted Graham about his sexuality on social media.
* Despite continuing efforts to create air between Loomer and President Trump, she has significant influence on him and he appears to like her. Loomer has succeeded in getting at least 15 people fired, most recently Jen Easterly, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), to serve as a distinguished chair of the US Military Academy at West Point’s social sciences department.
* Who’s lying? On CNN, Loomer claimed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has enlisted her to ferret out leakers; a DOD spokesperson characterized her work as “outside advocacy.”
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What we want to go viral:
* ·This week is the 80th anniversary of the day the United States used nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing thousands and decimating both towns. Claire’s pick is a book about that event that went viral almost eighty years ago: John Hersey’s Hiroshima (Alfred A. Knopf, 1946). Harold Ross, the managing editor, devoted the entire August 31 issue of The New Yorker to the book, keeping the 31,000-word piece a complete secret until the issue hit the stands, and it was published as a book later in the fall. The Book-of-the Month Club sent it out as a free pick, while ABC and other radio stations, including the BBC, sponsored complete readings.
* Neil’s viral pick is Caroline Fraser’s new epic history of the late 20th century northwestern United States, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers (Penguin Press, 2025): like Fraser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the book ties human history to the land—and this time, the land is poisoned.
Short takes:
* If you did not already think that Donald Trump and all the people around him responsible for sending 250 migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison are a bag of dicks, you will after you read a stomach-churning story about what happened to those men. “One detainee was beaten unconscious,” a Washington Post team reports. “Others emerged from the dark isolation room covered in bruises, struggling to walk or vomiting blood. Another returned to his cell in tears, telling fellow detainees he’d just been sexually assaulted.” In fact, sexual assault—from other prisoners and from guards—is a feature, not a bug of what was quickly characterized as a “torture prison.” El Salvador is being investigated for crimes against humanity, and the Trump administration—which paid $6 million to brutalize these men—may well be implicated. In addition, “The Post has found that many of the detainees had entered the United States legally and were actively complying with U.S. immigration rules.” (August 6, 2025)
* Confession: I had no idea who Sydney Sweeney was before she and American Eagle, a company recovering from a crummy second quarter earnings report, were boosted into the news because of an ad campaign—one that features the white, blonde, blue-eyed actress and a tagline advertising “good jeans”—that was supposedly eugenicist. In a surprising twist, blonde, blue-eyed, MAGA chicks have decided to own that.“While at first some mocked progressive outrage as `hysteria,’ now they are proud to embrace the ad campaign’s celebration of whiteness, throwing off the yoke of woke,” Joan Walsh writes at The Nation. “Right-wingers Megyn Kelly and Fox’s Laura Ingraham are declaring the ad part of a long-overdue backlash against definitions of beauty that don’t center whiteness.” (August 6, 2025)
* Have presidential libraries become a racket? As usual, the Trump administration raises the stakes of a question we should have asked decades ago, as anyone who has visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (and compared it with the far shabbier Jimmy Carter Center) is aware. “When Trump announced that his Administration would accept a luxury jet from the government of Qatar—an act widely decried as brazenly corrupt—it was reported that, after a period in service as Air Force One, it would end up in the library,” Jon Allsop reminds us at The New Yorker. “Also going to the library: the proceeds of settlements that Trump has wrung out of media and tech companies following lawsuits that many critics have characterized as blatant shakedowns.” (August 1, 2025)
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