Earlier this month, a reporter asked Donald Trump about right-wing activist Laura Loomer and her influence in the White House. He didn’t hesitate to respond.
“I know she’s known as a ‘radical right,’ but I think Laura Loomer is a very nice person,” Trump replied. “I think she’s a patriot, and she gets excited because of the fact she’s a patriot, and she doesn’t like things going on that she thinks are bad for the country. I like her.” His comments came roughly a month after the Republican also boasted to reporters that the conspiracy theorist is “a very good patriot” who makes “recommendations” he takes seriously.
Given her record, the praise was jarring. Loomer is, after all, a right-wing activist, a radical conspiracy theorist and a failed Republican congressional candidate who has described herself as “pro-white nationalism.” As a New York Times report summarized in April, Loomer is “viewed as extreme by even some of Mr. Trump’s far-right allies.”
Perhaps most importantly, however, Loomer has spent much of 2025 successfully targeting federal officials across multiple agencies and federal departments, ousting them from their positions — not because they were bad at their jobs, but because she believed she had reason to question their political and ideological loyalties.
If this sounds familiar to a dark chapter of American history, you’re not alone. The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer reported:
I suggested at one point that her effort to get federal employees fired for supposed disloyalty to Trump recalled the Red Scare of the early 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin exploited the private musings and personal associations of alleged communist sympathizers to end their careers. She loved that.
“Joseph McCarthy was right,” Loomer responded without missing a beat. “We need to make McCarthy great again.”
Given the activist’s perspective, the comments were provocative, but not surprising. What’s just as notable, however, is the frequency with which other Republicans suggest McCarthy and his demagogic campaign deserve to be rehabilitated.
Last year, for example, Monica Crowley, a former Fox News personality and a Treasury Department official during Donald Trump’s first term, spoke at a far-right event and declared, “By the way, Sen. Joe McCarthy was right. And he was trying to ring the bell in the 1950s about communist infiltration in our government.” She added that McCarthy was unjustly “smeared” for “speaking the truth.”
After the election, Trump tapped Crowley to serve as the White House chief of protocol.
Around the same time last year, Steve Bannon, a longtime proponent of McCarthyism, told his listeners, “Sen. McCarthy did a fantastic job.”
Even some GOP members of Congress have gone in this direction. It was shortly after Sen. Ted Cruz began his congressional career that a reporter for The Dallas Morning News told the Texas Republican that he’d been compared at times to McCarthy. Cruz said that criticism “may be a sign that perhaps we’re doing something right,” which seemed like a curious response given the context. Asked specifically, “Is McCarthy someone you admire?” Cruz wouldn’t answer. In 2014, after his failed Republican Senate campaign in Missouri, then-Rep. Todd Akin compared himself to McCarthy — and he meant it in a good way. Trump will occasionally complain about his perceived foes engaging in “McCarthyism,” but given how many of his allies like McCarthyism, he might need to change his rhetorical focus. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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