Antonia Hitchens writes:

One night at Ned’s Club, a members-only lounge with views of the White House, Nigel Farage, the British politician who heads the populist Reform Party, was hosting a bash for the right-wing television channel GB News, which was opening a bureau in D.C. Several members of Trump’s Cabinet were there; Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, gave a toast. Loomer was at home in Florida, but longtime lobbyists and consultants were discussing her activities on two separate floors of the club. “It’s like this pay-to-play Tasmanian devil,” one veteran political operative told me. “You just feed her any sort of D.E.I. comment that some executive made over the last twelve years—then you just expect total anarchy and a wide blast zone.” On a lower floor, a prominent lobbyist said, “She doesn’t want to be seen as a hired gun because that would undermine her credibility with her base. She’s saying, ‘I just believe in the President and maga!’ But in certain instances, when she starts opining about public-policy issues, it raises questions.” He drew a comparison to his own work on the Hill: “I would call the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and then Larry Kudlow, who had a CNBC show, and tell them a few things to say. Laura’s doing her own version of Larry.”

The next morning, I met a popular Trump-connected lobbyist at his office downtown. He put chewing tobacco in his mouth, and some of it scattered down the front of his shirt as he described the stance on Venezuela he was pushing—that the U.S. should buy Venezuelan oil, which was currently sanctioned, because otherwise China would. Loomer had been posting about Venezuela, advocating for lifting sanctions on its oil sector and allowing American companies to operate there. “Hell, yeah, she’s getting paid!” the lobbyist said. “It’s just not a thing someone’s really passionate about—oil licenses in Venezuela. That’s not anyone’s natural position. It’s my position, and it’s the right position, but not because I just woke up one morning and was, like, ‘I’m going to get really involved in Venezuela.’ No, it was, like, ‘I have clients.’ ” Loomer sometimes corresponds with Harry Sargeant, a Florida oil magnate and a Trump ally who had several licenses to operate in Venezuela. When I asked her about the origins of a long and very technically detailed post she wrote just after the Administration revoked Sargeant’s licenses, among others, she told me, “I am actually very qualified, and I’m highly accomplished. These people constantly disparage me like I’m some kind of no-name floozy.”

The person with close ties to the White House said, “Do you really think Laura Loomer has an organic interest in the intricacies of Venezuelan oil leases? Give me a fucking break. Someone’s paying her to put out those tweets. Ditto with her interest in the Puerto Rican issue.” This summer, Loomer started weighing in on Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy crisis, calling on Trump to fire the island’s financial-oversight management board, which, among other things, oversees public-utility contracts. Trump dismissed the majority of the board members. Various companies and financial institutions promoted new ones who were friendlier to their interests. “She tweets about the most obscure things that only a lobbyist would care about,” the person with close ties to the White House said. “She’s a P.R. firm that the press likes to write about as if she’s the MAGA vanguard, like she’s there to police the movement. It’s horseshit.” The Trump-connected lobbyist told me, “Her whole shtick is purity, and so she believes getting paid is a dirty word—that it takes away her purity.”

I’d heard from several people that various middlemen were used to set up payments to Loomer, in some cases using a maneuver called the “Loomer two-step.” I called a D.C. operative to ask him about it. “What is that, a dance move?” he said, before speaking energetically about the practice for fifteen minutes. “I mean, I would assume, like, whatever major investment firm isn’t going to pay DC Draino directly,” he said, referencing a popular MAGA social-media account. “In the past, you would do a Fox banner, but now it’s moved toward this ecosystem of paying people who tweet about Trump all the time.”

Of course, plenty of people are compensated for posts in Washington’s influence ecosystem. One afternoon not long ago, I met up with a source who had just taken out cash to pay a right-wing outlet to write an article. “DC Draino and Libs of TikTok take thousands of bucks per post for this stuff,” the strategist who works with the Administration told me. (Neither account responded to a request for comment.) The Trump-connected lobbyist said, “I literally just ran two campaigns with MAGA influencers—by paying them to tweet.”

It is an ascendant model. Although lobbyists are required to register with the government and disclose their funding, influencers operate in a gray zone. “If Laura is taking meetings on the Hill with members of Congress and asking them to change a policy position, that’s lobbying,” another Trump-connected lobbyist said. “But if Laura is posting something on her Twitter to her almost two million followers—just because the U.S. government sees it and then decides to change their position, it doesn’t mean that’s lobbying.”

This gray zone extends beyond Loomer, and beyond domestic politics. In September, as Israel’s increasingly unpopular war in Gaza ground on, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with a cohort of influencers on a visit to New York; his government has reportedly started paying accounts in the U.S. to post pro-Israel content. (A spokesperson for the Israeli government said no payments were made.) Last year, a federal indictment alleged that Russia funnelled almost ten million dollars to a number of pro-Trump influencers, including Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, to push Kremlin-backed messages. (The influencers claimed they hadn’t known the funders were linked to Russia.) Popular online activists can be useful tools. As the high-level Administration official told me, “People start out as zealots—then they realize everything is for sale, even zealotry.” [Continue reading…]