Laura Loomer has made a bunch of racist and xenophobic statements, so of course Trump is a fan
I envy the people who, unlike myself, are not irrevocably brain-poisoned by too much internet and not enough, I dunno ... fresh air, maybe? I envy them for a lot of reasons, but today I envy them primarily for not having spent the past few years knowing who Laura Loomer is, and why her victory in a Florida Republican primary race Tuesday evening is such a cataclysmically bad development.
Unfortunately, Loomer's congressional victory means she has moved on from her trollish origins as a self-proclaimed "proud Islamophobe" who palled around with Nazis and chained herself to the doors of Twitter headquarters when they said she'd done bad tweets, to become the newest accredited manifestation of the GOP's racist, reality-averse id.
In addition to celebrating her Tuesday night primary win alongside some of the ultra-right wing's most ghoulish villains, Loomer is also the recipient of multiple presidential adulations, as President Trump shared tweet after retweet lauding her victory.
That Loomer is an unrepentant bigot and grifter is obvious, as is why the president seems to have an affinity for someone who once crashed a public performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to accuse the actors of "the normalization of political violence against the right."
What's noteworthy, then, is the White House's official explanation for why the president tweeted or retweeted five separate messages of congratulations for Loomer over the past 24 hours, despite her overt racism and xenophobia.
"The president routinely congratulates people who officially get the Republican nomination for congress, so he does that as a matter of course," White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany explained, when asked about the Trump's emphatic embrace of Loomer and her fellow embodiment of the GOP's conspiratorial mania, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
"He hasn't done a deep dive into the statements by these two women," McEnany continued. "I don't know if he's even seen that."
Think about that for a second. McEnany would have you believe that the president of the United States went out of his way to not simply congratulate, but repeatedly amplify the victory of someone whose entire public career is predicated on a history of bigoted trolling, without knowing any details about her defining political stance.
Of course, if that is true, then McEnany just effectively stated the Trump is shooting his mouth off without knowing what the hell he's talking about — something that, while hardly a stretch of the imagination, is quite the admission as official White House policy.
While Greene is likely to win a congressional seat in the upcoming general election, Loomer is running in a heavily blue district against an incumbent Democrat who beat her last Republican opponent by a nearly 2-1 margin. Still, with the president's hot air at her back, and newfound access to the GOP donor class, even if Loomer loses in November, it's safe to say we won't be rid of her anytime soon.
