The Jewish antisemite on Trump’s plane

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Who’d a thunk, who would ever have thunk that we would wax nostalgic for Stephanie Clifford aka Stormy Daniels, but just about now, most of us – standard-issue non-MAGA Republicans above all – would be much happier if it were the erotic film actress whispering whatever she might be whispering into Donald Trump’s ear rather than Laura Loomer, who appears to be one of the former president’s flavours of the moment if not of the month and beyond.

Menachem Rosensaft

There is no reason to believe that Stormy is or has ever been a racist, a xenophobe, or anything other than a fundamentally decent human being. The same certainly can’t be said for Loomer who is so toxic that not only establishment Trump acolytes like Senator Lindsay Graham (Republican – South Carolina) but even the MAGA poster child Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (Republican – Georgia) can’t run away from her fast enough.

By now, anyone who’s been paying attention knows that Loomer, whom The New York Times has described euphemistically as “part of a generation of web-savvy right-wing influencers,” is in fact a bigoted reactionary flame thrower who gives most other far-right provocateurs a bad name. She proclaims herself to be a “proud Islamophobe” and calls Muslims “savages.” In 2017, reacting to a report that more than 2,000 migrants, mostly from African countries, had died trying to cross the Mediterranean, she tweeted “Good. Here’s to 2,000 more.”

Former South Carolina Governor and Trump’s U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, herself the daughter of immigrants from India, might want to take note of Loomer’s recent post on X, formerly Twitter, that if Vice President Kamala Harris were to be elected president, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call centre and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.”

Loomer is a serial proponent of hate-filled, fearmongering – and demonstrably false – conspiracy theories, including the neo-Nazi-fueled one about Haitian immigrants purportedly eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, that Trump famously regurgitated during last Tuesday’s debate.

By now, we also know that she was on Trump’s jet on the way to Tuesday’s debate with Harris in Philadelphia, and that she accompanied him the next day to the 9/11 commemorations in New York and Pennsylvania. Which is eyebrow-raising in and of itself since she has alleged on X, formerly Twitter, that that day’s terrorist attacks were an “inside job” contrived by then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to cover up $2.3 trillion in supposedly missing Pentagon transactions.

Again according to The New York Times, “Loomer has been to Mar-a-Lago at least nine times since January 2021, flew on Mr. Trump’s jet to the Iowa Caucuses and was almost hired by the campaign in the spring of 2023 until news coverage and internal pushback killed that plan.” In a shoutout at a January 2024 rally in Iowa, Trump referred to her effusively as “a woman who’s really talented . . . a very important person politically,” adding that “she’s fantastic.”

Less well known, but certainly just as noteworthy, is the fact that Loomer, who is Jewish, has no problem engaging in vile antisemitic rhetoric.

“If you’re a Democrat and you’re voting as a Jew or a Democrat, then you kind of deserve what’s coming your way,” she said in an interview this past April. “These are like the Jews during the times of the Holocaust who assisted the Nazis because they thought that they were gonna be the last to go. These are like the kapo Jews of the Holocaust . . . who helped shovel Jews inside the gas chambers and shovel Jews inside the cable cars.”

Let’s be clear, this type of vitriol is antisemitism on steroids. One of the working examples of antisemitism put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, more commonly known as IHRA, is “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” By extension, equating Jews who support Democrats rather than Trump to Nazi collaborators is no less antisemitic.

Moreover, this was not Loomer’s first antisemitic rodeo. In her unsuccessful 2020 run for Congress against Democratic Representative Lois Frankel of Florida, she used Nazi imagery in an attack ad that the ADL called “disgusting.”

But Trump and his campaign operatives clearly are not bothered by any of this. Hence her prominent presence in his entourage and on his plane.

Loomer proceeded to double down in the above-mentioned interview. “Modern Democrat Jews,” she went on, are “kapo Jews. You might as well just go put yourself in a gas chamber yourself if this is how you’re gonna behave.”

Instead of levelheaded, experienced generals Jim Mattis, John F. Kelly, and H.R. McMaster, who were in Trump’s inner circle in 2016 and 2017, he is now presumably being influenced by, and is listening to, scary out-of-the-mainstream extremists such as Elon Musk, who considers an antisemitic post on his X, formerly Twitter, platform (“Jewish communties (sic) have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them”) to be “the actual truth;” the fringe ultra-right political commentator Tucker Carlson who recently hosted a Holocaust denier on his X social media show; Trump’s former senior advisor Stephen Miller whom the Southern Poverty Law Centre credits with shaping Trump’s “racist and draconian immigration policies;” and, yes, Laura Loomer, whom Trump refuses to disavow or criticise and whom he continues to praise as “a free spirit” and a “strong person.” The most he was prepared to do, seemingly reluctantly and under pressure, was to concede obliquely in a Truth Social post that “I disagree with the statements she made,” without indicating which of Loomer’s many “statements” he had in mind and without jettisoning her in any way, shape or form.

If the spectre of Loomer having any kind of White House presence after January 21, 2025, doesn’t instill fear and panic in anyone still thinking of voting for Trump this year, nothing will.

Maybe, just maybe, such a nightmarish possibility, not to say likelihood, might motivate Republicans who care about their country to finally, finally break ranks and announce publicly – as former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger did – that they will vote for Kamala Harris.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).