Vera Bergen-Gruen
Appearances
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
He thinks that his base likes her and that she says a lot of things publicly that he can say. Right. There's a big jump between that. And as I said, having someone even come into the White House and then having the discussion at the White House be, you know, who should get fired by this 31-year-old online influencer.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
Not that we know of, but we know that she really, really wants one. She's been very blunt, almost begging. I mean, it's not subtle. On Twitter, every couple of days, how badly she wants to be, quote-unquote, vetting people. Vetting, vetting, vetting. And what we do know is that she tried to get hired by the transition.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
Once Trump won the election, they were hiring all these people for his new administration. And she kind of saw her opening and tried to promote herself as someone who could be doing this, quote-unquote, vetting. And again, she's tried to establish this reputation of, She also calls herself a journalist. That's kind of important to remember. She tends to put a lot of screenshots on Twitter.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
Laura Loomer is a far-right Internet personality. She kind of defies characterization, to be honest.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
I mean, everyone had thought that when Elon Musk walked into the NSA with his Doge guys, you know, that was game over. There was going to be some huge problem, mass layoffs. And, you know, they left and nothing major happened.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
And no one could really have imagined that it would be Laura Loomer, of all people, this person that I'm sure most of them have never heard of, who would actually get the head of their agency fired. But, you know, it's unclear whether she specifically had her sights on these people for any particular reason or because they were more high profile people.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
You know, again, it's important to remember just the level of distrust that intelligence agencies hold, you know, in the imagination of the MAGA faithful as people who are working from within the government who have all, you know, have all this information. And in their view, since the first administration, we're trying to, you know, work against President Trump.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
The NSA is in charge of just as a broad portfolio. It works obviously on cybersecurity. It collects a lot of intelligence, foreign communications. And it's a national security agency that provides all of this in order to, you know, to the president and to share with other agencies in order to make national security decisions.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
And, you know, it's been in the crosshairs in recent years, you know, for collecting information on Americans. It's always been kind of seen as this potentially creepy eavesdropping agency. So, you know, ever since the Edward Snowden days.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
So, you know, that's probably part of the reason that it has this association in Americans' minds. But again, for the people on President Trump, they have so much distrust of intelligence agencies, of intelligence officials who they think are, you know, spying on the president, trying to get him.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
Ultimately, it's an agency that's responsible for intelligence gathering and sharing with foreign allies. And, you know, there's really no reason that someone like Laura Loomer, again, would know whether someone would be a traitor to the president, what that would look like.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
She's only 31, which seems to surprise a lot of people because she's been around for a long time. And she's from Arizona and kind of has built a whole career ever since she graduated from college out of being Donald Trump's hatchet woman on the internet and doing these publicity stunts and these kind of shock tactics against anyone she thinks is this loyal to President Trump.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
Yes and no. It's not an agency that necessarily stops working when something like this happens. But of course, you know, you remove the head of the agency and his deputy very abruptly. That's a lot of experience and institutional knowledge that leaves. But really, it's the uncertainty that this creates. And again, the uncertainty.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
fear in many senses that they could be next, that, you know, that this is just a very destabilizing move to do. It also, you know, raises the question of who could be bringing other people to someone like Loomer's attention, who feels like they can, you know, push certain people out.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
There could be a lot of, you know, there could be either foreign adversaries or others who maybe consider Loomer a valuable person to raise these people to.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
And just in general, the fact that this could be enough that claiming that you are not fully loyal to the president and that definition tends to vary day by day is enough to push out such a high level agency head is is destabilizing on its own, even though the agency, of course, will continue doing its job.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
She seems to have set her sights on Earl Matthews next, who's Trump's nominee to be the Pentagon's top lawyer. And she seems to be taking issue with the fact that he was responsible, or she says he was responsible, for getting Hexeth blocked from working at Biden's inauguration because of some tattoos he has, which are tied to extremist movements.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
And apparently they saw them, they told him he couldn't work the inauguration because at that time they were being very careful with anyone associated with extremist symbols. But she seems to have taken real issue with him. And whereas in the past, she used to go after people every single day on Twitter and no one seemed to pay attention.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
Now everyone's really worried whenever she brings anyone up. The other noteworthy thing is that unlike the other people who Laura Loomer basically got fired, who haven't said anything, Earl Matthews posted a long response on Twitter where he kind of seemed to imply that somebody was putting her up to this. He said, you know, you have to ask yourself who benefits from this.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
It's clear she thinks that this is working and she has started her own vetting agency that those are her words called Loomered Strategies. And she set up a Twitter account, which didn't really have almost any followers before the NSA news, which now seems to have gotten quite a bit of pickup.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
We don't really know who her clients are, but she has a pretty prominent endorsement from President Trump himself, who says, If you're a loner, you're in deep trouble. That's the end of your career, in a sense. As if that's a verb, and it's something that she can do, which basically means investigating someone and getting them fired from their job.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
When I think it's pretty clear that a lot more people in Washington are going to be very closely watching Laura Loomer's Twitter feed to see who she mentions next, because they don't want to be on the end of that. And it's clear that she's got the power to get people fired or get their nomination scuttled. And I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of that.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
Exactly. And it's clear she's always been this way. She's not someone who necessarily picked it up recently from once these things became popular, right? But she seems to be a big fan of, you know, Project Veritas, you know, which is another kind of right-wing stunt outfit, for lack of a better word.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
But she basically loves to do these very public things things that she films on video. For example, she tried to vote wearing a burqa under the name Huma Abedin, who was Hillary Clinton's aide in 2016, to make a point about voter fraud. And these things always push very much towards offensive and towards, you know, just really attention-calling.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
She disrupted a production of Julius Caesar in 2017 in Central Park.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
She's chained herself to, you know, the doors of Twitter's headquarters.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
She's appeared at politicians' homes. And all of this is just always recorded and promoted and posted on social media. And none of it's ever quite cohesive. It's not always necessarily very smart, but it's very attention-calling because she's trying to make a point.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
So apparently, you know, she was always a huge Trump fan. And she, at some point, just must have gotten onto his radar, as sometimes his very vocal supporters on social media do. And she seems to just have, you know, over and over again tried to, you know, she bought tickets to his golf tournaments. She was trying to put herself in his orbit.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
And I don't think it's actually quite clear when they first really met. But at one point, it seemed to work when she started appearing next to him in the next last couple of years. So at one point, she appeared in a video with him at Bedminster at his golf course in New Jersey.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
And he, you know, does the Trump thing where he says, you know, she's a great person. Great to have you. And you've been really very special. You work hard. She loves me. She's so complimentary towards me. You are a very opinionated lady. I have to tell you that. And in my opinion, I like that.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
And, you know, he seemed to be aware that she was pretty fringe, even for some of the people who sometimes tend to be in his orbit when it comes to the far right. But he still seemed willing to let her in. And then she increasingly appeared around him during the last election.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
So that's one of the really interesting things about her as a character is that she's quite transparent in many ways. She on social media, she posts these very long rants, especially now that you're allowed to, you know, basically go on forever. And she kind of seems to be very stream of consciousness. And she will just say very bluntly, she said this again a few days ago.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
She very bluntly will say, I know better than anyone else who is actually loyal to President Trump and to his agenda and who is kind of a poser or who is kind of a deep state enemy.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
And she says that she's vetting these people. And this kind of became a thing of hers during the last election. She said she was vetting, you know, who was the most MAGA of them all, right? You know, she was going into their employment histories, all of their previous statements, things they had liked, people they'd interacted with.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
As far as I can tell, it's basically just using Google and Twitter the way most of us would do. She doesn't seem to be going much deeper. But she's kind of refashioned herself as somebody who's vetting people around the president and warning him if she thinks someone's not on his side. And she tends to post, quote unquote, receipts all over the Internet when she finds these people.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
She definitely falls on the fringiest of the fringe, I would say. And you can tell because you've had a lot of people who themselves have been labeled as fringe, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and some others who say that she's crazy and who say that, you know, they are kind of on the more conservative end.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
And, you know, she said she was being unfairly targeted because she was a conservative. But because she has this, she likes to be kind of offensive and, you know, really speak in pretty shocking terms about conspiracies, you know, 9-11 was an inside job, kind of trading these kind of things back and forth.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
She's, you know, she's relegated to the very fringes because it's not only things that are necessarily related to President Trump. It's a particular worldview that that she's really not shy about putting all over the Internet.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
I think what's important to remember is that it would have made headlines even if she had just sat with him in the Oval Office. That would have been shocking enough for a lot of people that someone like her, who, again, is pretty toxic, even in the far right circles, would have made her way into the Oval Office and gotten a sit down with President Trump.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
But on top of that, we find out that she walked in with a folder with over a dozen people. She said were part of the administration that weren't loyal enough to him, that were somehow enemies to his agenda. And after she walked out, some of them were fired.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
The head of the NSA and his deputy and some other national security officials suddenly were gone. And she has taken credit for it. You know, she's been saying, you know, pretty not subtly, she's been kind of taking credit for having raised these people to the president's attention.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
The White House hasn't confirmed that it was directly connected, but, you know, it seems pretty obvious that something happened there.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
So the head of the NSA was an Air Force general called Timothy Hawk. And he and his deputy were not people who were prone to go after Trump online or have any public statements where they're necessarily, you know, opposing him by any means.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
Her problem seems to have been that he had been in previous administrations and that he was some kind of deep state official who was opposing, you know, Trump's agenda.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
This is part of a longstanding suspicion among a lot of Trump supporters that people within the government are working against him and trying to make it harder for him to get his goals done. So these two people, again, career officials, not exactly well-known names or flashy people, and they were just gone after she met with President Trump.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
I'm sure there's a lot of people in Trump's own inner circle who are wondering that because there's no lack of people who are being kind of flagged as people who should be fired, right? We had signal gauge. We had, you know, war chats. We've had so many things in the last couple of weeks.
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
And it was pretty surprising to have someone like Laura Loomer come in and, again, apparently have the kind of influence to get someone fired who wasn't exactly on most people's radar. And another thing to remember is that she had tried to get hired by the Trump campaign. And a lot of people around him, including Susie Wiles, who is now his chief of staff,
Today, Explained
Laura Loomered the NSA
You know, people in this campaign thought that was a really bad idea and made sure to freeze her out. And she still seems to always warm her way back in because Trump likes people like her. Trump likes people who are offensive and brash and really supportive of him. And so he tends to call her, you know, a wonderful person. Laura, how are you? You look so beautiful, as always.