A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
It certainly appears right-wing activist Laura Loomer has President Trump's ear and his attention. During the first seven months of his second term in office, she has successfully lobbied Trump to fire six members of his National Security Council, remove three leaders at the National Security Agency, and end an academic appointment at West Point.
Just last week, Loomer also claimed credit for identifying 29 out of 37 current and former national security officials who were stripped of their clearance, as a threat to Trump. The group was accused, without evidence, of using intelligence for political or personal gain. Michael Scherer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He recently profiled Loomer, arguing she has become, quote, "the Joseph McCarthy of the Trump era."
And, Michael, being compared to McCarthy is something that she apparently loves, but why does this particular activist seem to have so much influence within the White House?
MICHAEL SCHERER: It's sort of a remarkable story. She's the sort of person who even five, 10 years ago, had been pushed to the fringes of sort of public conversation. She'd been de-platformed from social media companies. Uber and Lyft wouldn't offer her rides because of violations of hate speech rules. But Trump and her share a thesis, which is that his first term was undermined by people who were not sufficiently loyal to him, and that he didn't have a mechanism during the first term to find these people and to ferret them out.
And that the thing that makes you disloyal is different from what we would have thought five, 10 - basically, any administration in my lifetime would have thought would make you disloyal. Anything as small as having, you know, spoken, you know, to the other party at some point...
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah.
SCHERER: ...Or have supported both investigations in the past that adversely affected Trump.
MARTÍNEZ: So what does - why is Laura Loomer, when you say that she's the Joseph McCarthy of the Trump era, why does that comparison work?
SCHERER: I think it has to do with the standards she uses and the fear she has created. Right now, there's an unusual situation in which people in any government department or agency can tip her off to someone they feel that, you know, is a danger to the president. If she thinks the information that she gets from them rises to a level that is sufficient, she'll put it out.
The president is reading this. The president's senior staff is reading this. And very often, it's not 100% batting average, but, you know, very often, if she goes after someone for things as small as, you know, their husband once supported Black Lives Matter or something like that, that person should worry about their job.
Or, you know, if they said something 10 years ago supporting a Democratic candidate, that person needs to worry about their job.
MARTÍNEZ: You know what I was wondering, Michael, about her, is that why hasn't Trump - if she's so loyal to him and he loves this loyalty, why hasn't he appointed her somehow to some position at the White House or in his administration? Or is that maybe the reason why she's effective in that she's not in the room, so she kind of gets to go around it?
SCHERER: Yeah. I think partly, that's true. The real issue, though, is that there's an enormous tension between her and the senior staff in the White House who surround the president. She believes that she was offered a job in the White House and then never got it and was blocked by people around Trump.
You know, the chief of staff of the White House, Susie Wiles, the head of presidential personnel, Sergio Gor, talk to her regularly. But it's also true that there's an uneasy relationship between senior people at the White House and her because she's going after people they've already appointed, they have already supported.
The president likes the idea - and he liked this in the first term as well, he liked this in business - of having outside-in advisors that he could use as checks on his inside advisors, and he can kind of play them off each other. And so, instead of giving her that job in the White House, which a number of people around Trump don't want her to have, she has this outside role in which she kind of kibitzes from the outside.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah.
SCHERER: And then the president can turn to his aides in the Oval Office and say, why didn't you tell me about this? Go do something about it. And then they have to deal with that situation.
MARTÍNEZ: And, Michael, quickly, in the - in just a short amount of time here, is her influence just contingent on President Trump being in the White House? Would she have it in - on the Republican Party in any way?
SCHERER: You know, I don't know if it can last in the same way. Without Trump as her sponsor, as her mentor, she's just a political activist on Twitter, you know, and there are a lot of them. They have influence. They'll have influence in the future. But this remarkable role she has of directly causing results in how the government works and who's staffing the government, that really depends on her having this as - him as his - her sponsor.
MARTÍNEZ: Michael Scherer is a staff writer with the Atlantic. His recent profile of Laura Loomer is called "Make McCarthy Great Again." Michael, thanks.
SCHERER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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