Laura Loomer is Trump's Rasputin

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Laura Loomer is Trump's Rasputin

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Every court gets one eventually. The unvetted outsider who holds no office, runs nothing, answers to nobody, is despised by the entire palace — and has the emperor's ear anyway. Russia got Rasputin. America got Laura Loomer, and this week she finally crossed the blood-brain barrier for Nick Mortensen, who has spent years scrupulously refusing to discuss her. That refusal ends now, and Dr. Craig Johnson — UC Berkeley lecturer, PhD in fascism studies — is on hand to explain why the comparison isn't a joke.First, the numbers. Craig comes in at a six, and his is the structural one: the federal fight over mail-in ballots went through a full whiplash cycle this week, with the Supreme Court clearing a procedural path for the administration's Postal Service rule, a district judge lifting her block, two dozen states immediately suing over the final rule itself, and the courts fighting about it again within days. Craig's read cuts through the litigation: nobody is ending mail voting. They only need to make it harder enough, in enough places, for enough people — and the House stays where it is. He reaches back to Dred Scott for precedent on federal overreach in a rightward direction, and tells a Soviet joke about a midnight mob and the young men in suits chasing after them, asking which way the people went so they can lead them there. Nick names the moment: a new low. Not the fun kind, where somebody embarrasses themselves on the White House lawn. The structural kind, where a branch of government signals it will hand over whatever gets asked for.Nick's six is the woman herself. He explains, honestly, why he's avoided her — partly to deny her even a growing platform, and partly because he didn't know how to talk about her without walking into misogyny. That second problem gets real treatment, including the story of how Nick very nearly minored in feminist history in college and the department chair whose discouragement he was certain was secretly a Willy Wonka test. It was not a test. There was no prize. What follows on tape is a genuine tightrope act, performed with full awareness of the tightrope.The résumé: born 1993, Project Veritas alum, coiner of her own verb, self-described proud Islamophobe, banned in her day from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, PayPal, Venmo, Uber, and — most impressively — Lyft. She chained herself to Twitter's headquarters. She ran for Congress twice. And in this administration she has become something no title could contain: the woman who walked out of a single Oval Office meeting having gotten National Security Council staffers and the director of the NSA fired. Trump, asked about it: she's a very strong person.Then this past week. Loomer posted a video naming five Black women — Angie Nixon, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — and attached to them a slur so squalid that Nick reads it exactly once. In the same thread, she wrote that she knew it would be called racist. She posted anyway. Nixon — Florida's brand-new Democratic Senate nominee, fresh off a primary upset — answered with the reply of the year, involving Queen Latifah, a certain dog food video, and a closing instruction: when referring to me, it's Representative Angie Nixon. However, you can call me Senator. Loomer's escalation from there lands, in Craig's professional estimation, somewhere between the nineteenth century and a mimeographed neo-Nazi zine. It's the kind of racist, Nick observes, that makes racists quit — do I sound like that?Even Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced her — a thousand percent, calling this Trump's new MAGA and wanting nothing to do with it. Which brings the show to the history: we get into the feud that Loomer has had with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and we should all appreciate Nick's restraint in not characterizing it as a "beef." There is a documented prior chapter between these two women that you will simply have to hear to believe, and Nick walks through it on the narrowest tightrope of the episode. Craig's live reaction is its own review.The analysis is where the title gets earned. Everything on Loomer's résumé is designed to be ridiculous, and the ridiculousness is the mechanism: the White House can use what she says and disown who she is in the same breath. She absorbs the damage — she's a sin eater for them — so nobody with a title has to say the thing. She wasn't invited to Pam Bondi's Epstein binder photo op alongside Jack Posobiec, Libs of TikTok, Liz Wheeler, and DC Draino; every one of the binder kids was a punchline by July, and the woman who didn't get invited outranked the room she wasn't in. Her two million followers aren't the point. Her audience is the enforcer class — she doesn't persuade the public, she audits the staff, and the NSC firings were a loyalty audit delivered by a woman with no job. Craig lands the historical comparison: Rasputin — unvetted, running nothing, hated by the whole ...

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