Lindsey Graham Gets Dragged Into MTG’s Messy Laura Loomer Fight

Alt-right activist and virulently racist conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer’s entrance into Donald Trump’s inner fold has shaken some of his longest-term allies, but the intra-MAGA fight is starting to turn seriously ugly.

After Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator Lindsey Graham came down hard on Loomer for a string of racist online posts about Vice President Kamala Harris (who Loomer said would make the White House “smell like curry”), the self-described “proud Islamophobe” decided to take some pot shots at MAGAworld’s longtime figureheads.

“Lindsey Graham has never been loyal to President Trump,” Loomer wrote on X Thursday. “He got booed in his own state at a TRUMP RALLY and was booed off stage because he is DISLOYAL to Trump and the American people. He probably shouldn’t be giving out advice to Donald Trump.”

But the attacks only got more childish from there, with Loomer overtly questioning the South Carolinian’s leadership by probing his sexuality.

“When is Lindsay [sic] coming out of the closet?” Loomer said. “We all know you’re Gay, Lindsey.… And that’s ok. It’s ok. It’s 2024. There’s nothing wrong with Gay people. I like men too. You and I have something in common we can bond over. Just be honest about it. Nobody is going to judge you for being open about who you are.”

The insult was in direct response to reports that Graham had called Loomer a “toxic” presence and had reportedly warned Trump to “make sure” that her appearance in his entourage during a 9/11 ceremony “doesn’t become a bigger story.” (Loomer has repeatedly claimed that 9/11 was an inside job.)

So far, Graham and Greene are the only two Republicans to publicly express anger at Loomer’s increased presence. But other Trump insiders worry her new spot at the Republican presidential nominee’s side is a sign that the campaign is struggling—and that staffers are more concerned with keeping their jobs than keeping Trump on track.

Donald Trump’s supporters, still upset about the former president’s poor debate performance on Tuesday, are now alleging that ABC News gave Kamala Harris questions before the debate.

On Thursday, right-wing influencer and January 6 participant Philip Anderson posted on X a “confirmation” claiming that a whistleblower at ABC signed an affidavit alleging that Harris received debate questions ahead of time, was assured that Trump would be fact-checked while she wouldn’t be, and that “several other factors were built into the debate to give Kamal a significant advantage.”

Anderson didn’t name his source, although a different X user, Black Insurrectionist, posted the same message two hours earlier. Another right-wing website, Leading Report, picked up the rumor, which was then boosted by billionaire Bill Ackman. The conspiracy theory may have originated from the Trump team, or Trump himself, who told Fox News on Wednesday that Harris was “awfully familiar” with the debate’s topics. He also threatened to shut the network down.

ABC News has denied the allegations, with a spokesperson telling The Daily Beast, “Absolutely not. Harris was not given any questions before the debate.”

The debate’s rules, released by the network on September 4, specify, “No topics or questions will be shared in advance with campaigns or candidates.” ABC’s spokesperson also said that the debate’s moderators, Linsey Davis and David Muir, were not in contact with anyone from the Harris campaign.

It’s more desperate flailing from MAGAworld, who can’t accept that Trump simply struck out Tuesday night and may have advanced cognitive decline, which even experts have noticed. Perhaps Trump’s die-hard supporters need to accept a difficult truth: Harris set a trap, Trump fell for it, and it could be the convicted felon’s final unraveling.

After getting flack this week for her 9/11 conspiracy theories and her history of racist and inflammatory remarks, instead of being quiet, Laura Loomer is doubling down. 

Loomer made headlines this week as Donald Trump allowed the conspiracy theorist to accompany him to an official 9/11 memorial service on Wednesday. Loomer previously claimed that she believed the September 11 attacks were an “inside job” by the U.S. government. 

After the incident caused a schism in the Republican Party, with both Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator Lindsey Graham calling out Loomer and urging Trump to distance himself, Loomer is instead digging a bigger hole for herself.  

“23 years later, and there’s still a lot of unanswered questions,” she wrote on X Friday morning. “The 9/11 documents are still classified to this day. The American people deserve to know the entire truth. Not just what our lying government chose to tell us.”

Attached to the tweet is a video of Trump speaking with WWOR/UPN 9 News on September 11, 2001. “How could [a plane] possibly go through the steel?” Trump can be heard saying in the video. “I happen to think that they had not only a plane but bombs that exploded almost simultaneously.” 

“It was almost like a can of soup,” Trump added. “It’s an amazing thing.” 

It seems as though Loomer believes she thinks she’s in good company to continue to push her conspiracy theories, whether that be about 9/11, mass shootings, or immigrants. 

“PS: Whatever you do.… Do NOT google Building 7,” wrote Loomer on X, expanding on another aspect of her 9/11-truther dogma. 

Springfield, Ohio, Mayor Rob Rue is setting the record straight after his town’s city hall was evacuated due to a bomb threat.

Rue spoke with CNN’s Laura Coates Thursday night to hit back at the outlandish claims that Haitian immigrants had begun eating their neighbors’ pets. He asserted that while it had been “difficult” to adjust to the influx of new residents, the city was certainly not “imploding” on itself.

“Unfortunately, right now we have to focus on making sure this rhetoric is dispelled, that these rumors are just—they’re just not true. You know, Springfield is a beautiful place and your pets are safe in Springfield,” Rue said, laughing slightly at how insane it all sounded.

Coates played a clip of Donald Trump giving a speech in Arizona earlier Thursday, during which the former president claimed that Haitian immigrants had descended upon Springfield, “destroying their entire way of life.” Trump again claimed that migrants were snatching geese from local parks and “even walking off with their pets.”

Coates sighed, exasperated, while Rue shook his head. “If you could speak to the former president what would you tell him?” Coates asked.

“We need help, not hate,” Rue repeated. He criticized lawmakers who carelessly cast the city of Springfield in a negative light.

“We have a beautiful city, and we need, we need the national stage to pay attention to what their words are doing to cities like ours,” Rue added. “We don’t need this pushback that is hurting our citizens and hurting our community—I would say that to anybody who would take a mic and say those things.”

Donald Trump flubbed the last debate. His allies know it, his fundraisers know it—but that doesn’t mean they’re willing to admit it.

On Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee announced that he had decided not to debate Vice President Kamala Harris for a second time, writing in a lengthy rant on Truth Social that “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” (Apparently he’s counting his debate against Joe Biden.)

But less than 24 hours after the major reversal, Trump’s team was already working to explain away why the country would be getting less of their candidate.

“I admire President Trump for not debating her again,” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem told Fox News. “He is recognizing the fact that it is a waste of time, that she is not going to say what she truly believes, she’s not going to be truthful with the American people, and he’s going to take his argument directly to families and to people that live in this country that are impacted by her policies.”

In an interview with CNN, former J.D. Vance Senate staffer Ryan Girdusky argued that Trump was vindicated in his decision on the basis that the vice president is “the least vetted candidate” in U.S. history.

Former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard touted a stale campaign line, telling Fox News that the debate was fundamentally flawed because of the presence of two ABC moderators.

“President Trump went into a debate where it was three versus one. It was completely biased,” Gabbard said. “Why would he walk into that again?”

(In reality, ABC actually allowed Trump to speak for six minutes longer than his Democratic opponent over the duration of the debate.)

But Republican donors saw through the act. Behind the scenes of the political theater, conservative fundraisers saw Trump’s reversal as a candidate left with no other options following a “disaster” debate performance.

“I think a lot of the donors, or at least the ones that I was texting with the night of the debate, were not exactly thrilled about how that debate went down,” GOP fundraiser Noelle Nikpour told Fox News Thursday. “What I will tell you, I do think it’s smart for Donald Trump not to do the debate. I think that that was a good decision with the campaign, and I’ll tell you why. Because depending on when that debate will be scheduled, and if he has another repeat performance like he did, I don’t know if the campaign can recover that quickly. I don’t think they have enough time to recover from that.”

CNN made a video comparing Donald Trump’s debate answers against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and his answers from Tuesday’s debate with Kamala Harris eight years later, and there’s a considerable difference in how the Republican presidential nominee spoke and conducted himself.

The video comparison, aired on Thursday night, shows how Trump would stay on topic and give coherent answers in 2016. In contrast, Trump earlier this week went off on tangents, rambling and avoiding specific ideas.

In particular, on immigration, 2016 Trump was able to hammer home his points about building a wall and stopping drugs from entering the country. On Tuesday, Trump ranted about the false rumor of Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio and a disproven story about a Venezuelan gang taking over an apartment complex in Colorado.

Trump’s performance during this week’s debate was widely seen as poor, as Harris was able to bait him into ranting about personal grievances, going against the game plan made by his advisers. At one point, he tried to combine right-wing talking points on transgender people, migrants, and criminals, and he also gave a word-salad answer about Afghanistan policy,

It’s a stark example of the convicted felon’s cognitive decline, which has become more pronounced during the current presidential campaign. Earlier this month, Trump appeared to forget at a Fox News town hall whether he was running against Harris or President Biden. A few weeks before that, he went on a weird rant about bacon and wind power and accidentally praised Harris’s record. As the 2024 presidential campaign enters its home stretch, it’s becoming more and more apparent to the public that Trump’s mind has lost a step.

The judge in Donald Trump’s Georgia election interference case tossed three of the charges, including two against the former president, Thursday. 

In his ruling, Judge Scott McAfee dismissed three counts related to filing false documents, finding that bringing such charges was outside Georgia’s jurisdiction. Instead, he determined they belonged in federal court. 

“Because Counts 14, 15, and 27 lie beyond this State’s jurisdiction and must be quashed, the Defendants’ motions to dismiss the indictment under the Supremacy Clause are granted in part,” McAfee wrote.

The three counts that were dismissed were criminal attempt to commit filing false documents, conspiracy to commit filing false documents, and filing false documents. Trump had been indicted on the latter two of those three counts.

The motion to dismiss the charges was brought by two of Trump’s co-defendants, John Eastman and Shawn Still, who argued that the charges were in violation of the supremacy clause. 

McAfee separately declined a motion to toss the indictment’s racketeering charge. He wrote that the charge remained “facially sound and constitutionally sufficient as alleged.”

Still, the case against Trump, which has been stalled for months, has only continued to narrow. McAfee previously threw out six counts in March, three of which were against Trump. The former president is still facing eight of his original 13 counts.  

Donald Trump’s meager attempt to prove a group of immigrants had begun dining on their neighbors’ pets has predictably fallen apart.

After Trump was brutally fact-checked during Tuesday’s presidential debate when he tried to baselessly claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating local pets, the former president took to Truth Social to provide his own so-called proof.

What he was able to provide were blurry screenshots of one call report from the Clark County Communications Center, which had been obtained by the right-wing opinion blog The Federalist. The report detailed a call from August 26, during which a caller claimed that they had seen a group of people walking down the street carrying geese.

The caller “said he could tell they were Haitian because he was within earshot of them to hear them speaking Haitian Creole,” according to the report. The identifying information on the report had been removed.

The report was meant to justify Trump’s extreme claims on national television, but a closer examination of the facts—and testimony from the caller—shows that the right-wing hysterics are over basically nothing.

Steven Monacelli, a freelance investigative reporter for The Texas Observer, decided to follow up on the report with the Clark County sheriff’s office.

A clerk for the sheriff’s office passed along the original report, as well as a recording of the call. “At this time we have not found any other record concerning Haittians [sic] harvesting geese. At this time we have not found any record of Hattians eating pets,” the clerk wrote in an email, which Monacelli posted to X.

Monacelli also spoke with the caller, whom he identified simply as “Toby” to protect his privacy. Monacelli detailed what he learned in a series of posts on X.

Toby explained he was simply trying to report what was potentially illegal goose hunting, which requires a permit outside of goose-hunting season, which starts in September. Toby also pointed out that a viral photo of a man walking down the street holding a goose, which many on the right have cited when pushing this conspiracy, was from Columbus, Ohio, not Springfield.

“I’m not trying to really be put on the news, famous or anything, I was just a citizen on his way to his orientation, and just happened to see that,” Toby explained. “I just made a report, that’s literally all I did.”

When asked whether he had seen anything similar since making his initial report in August, Toby said, “No I haven’t.”

Monacelli asked what Toby thought about the right-wing claims that there had been widespread pet abductions, to which Toby replied he “hadn’t seen any pictures, or anything like that myself. But then again, I’m not on social media.”

Donald Trump’s attorney Alina Habba recently escaped some legal trouble of her own.

On August 27, Habba settled a case brought against her by Alice Bianco, a former waitress at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, who had sued the club alleging that she was tricked into a hush-money deal after a supervisor sexually harassed her. Bianco also sued Habba, accusing her of betraying ethics by offering her legal advice while helping the club secure a $15,000 deal in exchange for her silence. Just a few weeks after the deal, Habba joined Trump’s legal team.

Bianco settled with the club in March, but Habba at the time was curiously left out of the deal—leaving her open to being sued.

According to New Jersey state law, an agreement like the one Habba set up “relating to a claim of discrimination, retaliation, or harassment” is “against public policy and unenforceable.” After attending mediation, Bianco and Habba agreed to an out-of-court settlement, but terms were not disclosed. It’s unclear how much Habba had to pay to make the lawsuit go away.

“I feel very proud. I’m very grateful to have my life back. This was a three-year-long fight that caused many sleepless nights,” Bianco told NOTUS. “I pray that she gets what she deserves.”

In the summer of 2021, Bianco sought legal counsel after getting fed up with her supervisor requiring her to “engage in sex as a quid pro quo for continued employment and protection,” according to her lawsuit. She hired an employment lawyer, and discussed her case with co-workers.

Habba then approached her as a concerned friend, offering to give her legal advice. Bianco didn’t know who Habba was, only having seen her as a member of the club who liked to sing at the club’s party nights, according to court documents. Habba convinced Bianco to drop her lawyer and hire her instead, then advised Bianco to accept the hush-money deal and keep the story out of the news.

When Bianco found out that she would owe taxes on the $15,000, she reached out to Habba via text message, who was unsympathetic.

“I can’t technically give u legal advice,” Habba texted back, according to the lawsuit documents. “That’s the problem.”

This would seem to explain why Habba was left out of the golf club’s settlement, with its lawyers saying that the club “cannot be held liable for Ms. Habba’s purported misrepresentations.” Bianco hired a new lawyer, Nancy Erika Smith, who helped the waitress put together a timeline showing how Habba kept Bianco quiet to impress Trump.

Habba persuaded Bianco to sign the $15,000 deal on August 21, 2021, and three weeks later, the attorney joined Trump’s legal team in his defamation lawsuit against a former Apprentice contestant, Summer Zervos.

“The timing could not be more definitive. She silenced me in order to be in Trump’s good graces,” Bianco said to NOTUS. “She is evil. She does the devil’s work for free. She acted as a caring guide in my life. She acted like she could help me, only to then completely ghost me and use me for her own success.”

Habba’s representation of Trump has brought her legal expertise into question, with her statements at times sounding like admissions of Trump’s guilt. In defending the former president, she seems to misunderstand legal terminology like “due process,” and during Trump’s E. Jean Carroll defamation trial was reprimanded 12 times in one day by the judge. Her case with Bianco is something entirely different, though: It calls into question her ethics and morals.

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Donald Trump went too far by spending time with Laura Loomer this week.

On Sunday, Loomer said that if Kamala Harris wins the presidency, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center,” referring to Harris’s Indian heritage. Days later, Trump visited Philadelphia for the first presidential debate with Loomer right by his side—and he then traveled with her to a September 11 memorial event.

Now MAGA infighting is erupting in public view, with Greene leading the charge against Loomer.

“This is appalling and extremely racist. It does not represent who we are as Republicans or MAGA. This does not represent President Trump,” wrote Greene on X, hours after Trump visited the 9/11 Memorial with Loomer. “This type of behavior should not be tolerated ever.”

But Loomer didn’t roll over, hitting back at Greene with a slew of insults, calling the Georgia representative “extremely jealous and vindictive,” accusing Greene of saying the n-word and being antisemitic, and throwing some jokes about CrossFit into the mix. “She is not representative of the GOP or what it means to be America first.”

More than anything, Loomer slammed Greene for not being loyal enough to Donald. “Guess you gave up on Trump when he gave up on your boyfriend @SpeakerMcCarthy,” she wrote, asking the representative why she wasn’t at the debate.

Loomer’s racist tweet shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. In the past, she has referred to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and “pro-white nationalism” and even claimed 9/11 was an inside job.

When Greene was asked by CNN if she had contacted Trump about the argument, she confirmed they had spoken but was sparse on the details. “I just felt like it was time to call it out. I think it’s wrong. We’re not a party of identity politics,” Greene said, stating that her party should focus on policy, “not attacking people for their race.”

Fellow Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has also chimed in, echoing Greene’s talking points and condemning Loomer’s comments on 9/11 and Harris. “Marjorie Taylor Greene is right. I don’t say that a lot,” said the South Carolina senator. “I think that the president would serve himself well to make sure this doesn’t become a bigger story.”