One is loud, the other quiet. One is crude and unfiltered, the other reserved and prim. One courts controversy at every turn, the other mostly shuns it. One is a Donald Trump-seeking missile; the other seems to have as little to do with him as she can get away with. One got her start in the funhouse mirror of Right-wing media, the other as a model.
That Laura Loomer and Melania Trump should be two of the most important women in Trump’s orbit, though they have barely anything in common, is one of those odd realities of the Trump phenomenon. Each woman represents something essential about Trump’s 2024 campaign, and together they embody the past — and possible future — of his movement. While Laura is the keeper of the MAGA diehard flame, Melania is the inscrutable key to Trump’s life outside politics.
First, Loomer: the suspected source of Trump’s ludicrous “they’re eating the cats” claim during the recent presidential debate. The 31-year-old provocateur has made herself a crucial figure in Trumpworld to the chagrin of nearly everyone apart from Trump. She had travelled with Trump on his plane to the debate, and the following day was among his entourage to the 9/11 memorial for the yearly remembrance service despite being a 9/11 truther. The day before the debate, she had tweeted about the rumour regarding pet-eating Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, and so speculation soon began that she had helped plant the idea in Trump’s head.
Loomer is a quintessential MAGA character who gained notoriety for being shocking even by the far-Right’s standards. A self-proclaimed Islamophobe and “white advocate”, she’s been banned from nearly every social media platform for various bigoted remarks and provocations (though she’s been back on X since its sale to Elon Musk). In 2018, she chained herself to the Twitter headquarters in New York in 2018 in protest of her ban. She’s run for Congress in Florida twice; in 2020 she won the Republican primary in the district she was contesting.
“I don’t really have much of a life, you know?” Loomer told The Washington Post earlier this year. “So I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.” She had lost 25 pounds, she told the reporter, in an advance effort to look good for the communications job she hoped Trump would give her. She is the kind of wacky hanger-on that the pros around Trump have been trying to get rid of for years, never quite succeeding. While Trump’s top campaign officials reportedly blocked his effort to give Loomer a campaign job last year, they haven’t been able to keep her away from the man himself. Trump has always lacked quality control when it comes to his friends and advisers. He’ll listen to anyone who says the kind of things he likes to hear. And he seems to have no intention of distancing himself from Loomer even though almost-equally-hardcore MAGA luminaries including Marjorie Taylor Greene have condemned her. Trump told the press earlier this month that Loomer was a “free spirit” who he couldn’t control.
That Loomer could have inspired the massive flap about the Haitians in Ohio is of a piece with Trump’s long-standing modus operandi. He has always repeated half-baked rumours he hears about or sees on Fox News, no matter how sketchy the source is. The Loomer incident is a reminder of how close Trump remains to the milieu that gave him his political start and that he’ll never really abandon; in many ways, Loomer is the “ghost of Trump past”. Her brash world of Right-wing media injected Trump into the political conversation more than a decade ago, laying the groundwork for his 2016 campaign. Trump’s authenticity in this regard lies at the core of his political appeal. Unlike his rivals with their focus-grouped talking points and triangulated statements, Trump says what comes to mind, much like how his fans might act if they were in his position.
But this election has revealed the cracks in Trump’s say-anything approach. When Kamala Harris said in the debate that “bored and exhausted” supporters were leaving Trump’s rallies in droves this year, she had a point. There’s a tediousness to Trump’s rallies nowadays, and those rallies are taking place less frequently too. There’s something missing. Harris has reset the dynamic of the race; while before, polling showed Trump dispatching the feeble Joe Biden, now it shows a dead heat. Trump may really lose.
From the opposite corner of Trumpworld, another of Trump’s key women has been piping up after a long silence. The ever-mysterious Melania had so far been a non-factor in this campaign, shunning the trail and maintaining her froideur even through the Republican National Convention, when the candidate’s spouse would normally speak. Melania had seemed happy to remain behind the scenes in this election in both word and deed.
This is now changing. Next month she’ll release a memoir, Melania, which she has been promoting in a series of videos on X. In one of these gauzy black-and-white clips, she speaks icily to the camera: “As a private person who has been the subject of public scrutiny and misrepresentation, I feel a responsibility to clarify the facts.” In another, she described her past nude modelling work as part of the “timeless tradition of using art as a powerful means of self-expression”.
But why is she speaking now? And will there be any juicy revelations in the memoir? Probably not, though her husband joked about it in a recent rally in New York state. “I hope she said good things about me”, he said, encouraging the crowd to buy the book, but “if she says bad things about me, I’ll call you all up and say don’t buy it”. In all likelihood, Melania will say little directly about Trump at all. But her re-emergence in the waning days of the campaign is a reminder of the very real possibility that Trump will lose to Harris, freeing Melania from another term in DC. She’s perhaps the “ghost of Trump yet to come”. The memoir appears to be an effort to carve out her own space apart from Trump — or at least, maybe, prepare for a post-politics future. She’s selling a “collector’s edition” of the memoir for $250 on her website.
Melania has always been something of an awkward figure in Trumpworld, the bombshell Slovenian model who found herself dragged to the White House to be First Lady of the United States. By all accounts she’s a genuinely shy person who would rather lead a quiet life tending to her son, Barron, who is now a student at New York University. She lingered at Trump Tower for months before moving to Washington after Trump won in 2016, and her efforts as First Lady were generally half-hearted, like her “Be Best” anti-bullying campaign. Apart from a few moments of defiance — most memorably, wearing a “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket to a migrant child detention centre — her aloof posture lasted throughout Trump’s term in office. But the occasional disclosures she has made have been intriguing. In a statement released after the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania in July, Melania emphasised her husband as a person, not a political figure. “A monster who recognised my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion — his laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration,” she wrote. “The core facets of my husband’s life — his human side — were buried below the political machine.” Though Melania has never seemed to like Donald much, she does know him in a way that few others can.
Trump told an interviewer on Sunday that he won’t run again in 2028 if he loses this election. It’s a rare and telling admission from a man who has spent four years fervently denying that he lost the last election. Sooner or later a post-Trump future looms in American politics, and the contrast between Melania and Laura illustrates the forked road Trump himself will face. On the one hand, becoming a martyr among the Loomers of the Right-wing media; on the other, retreating to his pre-presidential life as a golfing TV celebrity with a model wife.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/