For a right-wing figure on the make, Washington’s hottest real estate these days is in the White House briefing room, where press secretary Karoline Leavitt has created a “new media seat” so she can take questions from a cast of mostly conservative personalities.
But one figure whose relationship with the president has waxed and waned hasn’t been invited yet. Despite traveling on Trump Force One with Trump briefly during the campaign, and constantly churning out stories that are friendly to the Trump agenda, Laura Loomer says she’s still waiting for her White House invite.
Loomer, a well known conspiracist, concedes there may be a long list of applicants for the new media seat. But she also says she has a string of scoops—including a story about Hunter Biden’s Secret Service detail that led to it being pulled—that merits a White House pass.
“I’m certainly more high-profile than a lot of the other people who have applied,” Loomer told me.
Loomer has also taken her attempts to get into the briefing room to X.
“I applied the day the application opened!” she wrote on March 18, tagging Leavitt. “I really hope to get one so I can keep exposing corrupt judges and abuse of taxpayer funds.”
Loomer has also privately pressed her case. She told us she had asked Leavitt and White House communications director Steven Cheung directly to get her into the briefing. Leavitt and Cheung didn’t respond to my requests for comment.
Loomer is not a universally well-regarded figure within Trump’s orbit, which may explain why she has not scored a briefing invite. Not everyone was pleased when she started showing up with Trump on the trail last year. For one, Loomer has said 9/11 was an “inside job,” which made it awkward when she joined Trump’s entourage at a 9/11 memorial.
Loomer has also been willing to attack other Republicans and even administration officials—to a degree that is uncommon for traditional Trump sycophants.
Case in point: As the administration grappled with Signal-ghazi on Wednesday, she posted a thread on X that quickly took off, alleging that national security advisor Michael Waltz’s chief deputy, Alex Wong, was to blame for the fiasco.
Loomer’s evidence was thin, and consisted mostly of the fact that Wong’s wife worked as an assistant federal prosecutor in the Biden administration. The rest of her “proof” was that both Wong and his wife are Asian-American. Loomer raised the prospect that whoever invited the Atlantic’s editor in chief to the Signal chat was working to “embarrass the Trump administration on behalf of China.”
“Alex Wong should be removed from his position, and both he and his wife should be investigated by the FBI,” she wrote.
That’s the kind of loose-cannon behavior that would likely be unwelcome in the “new media seat.”
As for whether she’d qualify for the seat absent that behavior, Loomer is building out an operation that meets the low bar for a right-wing media organization. She hosts a show on the Rumble streaming platform, aptly named Loomer Unleashed. On Tuesday, one of her associates was peppering Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) with questions when Crockett grabbed the man’s camera. It was the kind of viral moment that Loomer has specialized in producing—and one that Trump world has traditionally loved.
For now, however, it’s not enough to earn Loomer a seat.
“Perhaps there’s just a backlog, but it would be an honor,” Loomer said.
Pendragon Watch
Last week, I wrote about how Jeremy Boreing, the CEO of the Daily Wire, abruptly resigned from his position. Boreing’s reduced role at the company came amid speculation that his pet-project streaming TV show, a King Arthur story called The Pendragon Cycle, has cost the company a comical amount of money. From the behind-the-scenes videos I watched, it certainly didn’t look cheap!
In an interview Monday with Megyn Kelly, Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro pushed back on the idea that his company is having financial problems.
“We are healthy, we are growing, we are thriving,” Shapiro said.
Yet even Shapiro had to admit that Pendragon, which still hasn’t been released, was expensive. He called Pendragon “the single biggest entertainment offering ever put forward” by a conservative media company. But he also conceded that its production came “at very high cost.”
Meanwhile, the Daily Wire’s leadership shake-up continues. On Tuesday, it became public that President Jon Lewis was also stepping down from his position at the company.
All this turnover has thrilled white nationalist Nick Fuentes, a longtime Shapiro antagonist. Fuentes’s online footsoldiers—the self-described “groypers,” who identify online with a sort of fat-toad version of the Pepe the Frog meme—have been urging Daily Wire stars like Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh to ditch the company. There is no evidence they’re receptive to the idea.
Source : https://www.thebulwark.com/p/white-house-censoring-laura-loomer-new-media
