The Daily - The Right-Wing Provocateur Who Has Trump’s Ear

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Warning: This episode contains strong language.In President Trump’s second term, Laura Loomer has emerged as the most influential outside adviser, telling the president whom to fire and shaping major policy decisions.Ken Bensinger, who covers media and politics, explains how a social media provocateur became Mr. Trump’s favorite blunt instrument.Guest: Ken Bensinger, a New York Times reporter covering media and politics.Background reading: Ms. Loomer is Mr. Trump’s blunt instrument.Her role in firings at the National Security Council showed a rising sway of fringe figures on the president.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Greg Kahn for The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrow-F. This is the Daily. During Trump's second term, one person has emerged as the most influential outside advisor to the president. This morning, a major shake-up at the National Security Agency. Telling Trump who to fire. The director of the national security agency and the deputy director were fired. And shaping major policy decisions. Today, the U.S. State Department is halting medical humanitarian visas for people from Gaza.

The State Department's policy shift comes after far-right activist Laura Lumer criticized the three Gaza and children for coming to the U.S. for medical treatment. Today, my colleague Ken Bensinger, on the story of Laura Lumer. Laura Lumer is a very good patron. The social media provocateur who has become Trump's favorite blunt instrument. I guess President Trump just likes. me. You have a friendship? Yeah. I would say it's a friendship. It's Thursday, August 21st. Ken, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Natalie. So tell me, when and how did Laura Lumer first come onto your radar? Well, I cover media and politics and have been interested in right-wing influencers

and the way they shape political discourse in the country. So I'd been aware of Laura Lumer as a figure in that world, you know, going back to 2016, 17 as a noisemaker and troublemaker on social media. But she disappeared from my radar for a while when she got deplatformed and was not on any of these places. Then she came back and she came back with a vengeance. And this time around, instead of just making noise, she was making an impact. This is a person who we've now seen can get people fired and have.

has done that multiple times this year since President Trump was inaugurated. This is someone who now can actually influence policy and get different federal agencies to change their rules and regulations based on what she wants them to do. And there seems to be no one who can stop her from weighing in and at least one really important person in the current administration who's all ears. I think I know who you're hinting at. Yes, it's President Donald Trump. He is someone who listens to Laura Lumer, calls her on.

the phone invites her to spend time with him at Mara Lago, at his golf courses, even in the Oval office, someone who gives her more credence than pretty much anyone else in the country and happens to be very powerful and willing to take action on the things that she thinks are important. And I realized that this woman had now sort of become one of the most influential people in the country who wasn't actually in the White House. And to me, the fact that a regular citizen without any kind of government office without, you know, any special giant army behind her that that person is able to do all this is deeply intriguing. And it just became a real riddle. Where do this person come from? Where do they get all this power? And what makes her tick? How do you go about

unpacking that mystery? How do you figure out who this person is, how she got here? And as you said, what makes her tick? Well, a lot's been written and said about Laura Lumer. And, And I thought that if I wanted to really get to the bottom of it, I had to not only meet her, but spend time with her and really get to know her as a person to help unravel a bit, the mystery of what this person is all about. And to do that, I had to get in the road. Did we get an ice coffee around here somewhere? I met her for coffee in Beverly Hills. Well, we're going to be heading out soon. So I'm just wondering, like, if you want to ask questions.

I once went to Panama to spend time with her. Wow. Here, if we see anyone, just go to the side a little. And I know they want to get photos and everything. I will move out of the right there. And I roamed the halls of Congress with her. So, and I wanted to find a place that had a really big yard because I like rescuing dogs.

And I also came to her house in the Gulf Coast of Florida where I got to meet her rescue dogs. I just spent hours and hours with her in person and many more hours on the telephone with her and texting with her. to get a sense of who his person really is. And what emerged from all that for me was a portrait of a person with a lot of scars from her youth, a person with very deep grievances

and someone who has mastered the art of drawing attention to herself and turned that into her career. Tell me where that story begins for her, that origin story. All right, I think everybody's on the first. Great. So I wanted to take this opportunity to just be able to go. So Laura Lumer grew up in Arizona. She's a child of a doctor and grew up in what would seem like a pretty normal middle class home in Tucson, Arizona. I mean, I grew up in a pretty fucked up house. But she had a difficult childhood because in great part, her younger brother was deeply mentally ill from a very young age. I grew up in a very violent house. I grew up in a house. I grew up in a house.

mental illness. I grew up in a house. He told me stories about him threatening to hurt her or even kill her of kicking down her door. And so when you're a kid and you're having your hair pulled or someone's like threatening to stab you with a knife or hurt you, you have to defend yourself.

When she was not even a teenager, her parents split up and her mother more or less disappeared from her life for many, many years. My dad did, I think, did the best that he could do. Her father faced with an overwhelming task of raising this difficult brother and another sibling as well as Laura

ultimately was asked by the state authorities to come up with some solution and the answer was to send Laura away to boarding school because, you know, yeah, it sucks like the idea of sending your children away, but what's better of having your kids be in a safe environment or having your children be in a violent situation because of a brother?

So she basically says she had to learn to be an adult at the age of 12. And what about the political dynamics at home or for Laura as she's growing up? Lumer told me stories of watching the evening news with her dad as a kid. But other than that, said it wasn't a very political household. And in fact, to this day, if you ask him, which I have about where their politics align, they don't seem to align a lot. He will openly say that he disagrees with her on a number of her political views

and doesn't really know where they come from. How do those more extreme views start to form? If that's not what she's being raised in, where does it come from? It's a bit of a mystery. She says that September 11th made a big impression on her, but she also was eight years old at the time. And so it's hard to say what kind of impact that would have on a person who was eight. But the first sign of her political awakening was her feelings about Islam and about Muslims.

And when she's in high school, she's telling her classmates, some of whom were Muslim, that she's beginning to question their religion and say things that they, even back then, found kind of stunning and offensive. Her parents deny, her father anyway, denies having those feelings, but they developed. She came up with them, and when she goes off to college, she continues with her feelings about Islam. In fact, it becomes a bit of a guiding light to her. She told me and my colleague Robert Draper about this in detail of her dinner at a seafood restaurant in Florida. And kind of a breakthrough moment happens because of an event the school held to commemorate 9-11th,

and one of the speakers was a Muslim imam. And they had invited any mom, any mom, to my university to speak at the 9-11 memorial service. And this imam, even though it was a Catholic school, I'm Jewish, but I joke. She found this outrageous. It was so disrespectful, but I'm to have any mom on 9-11.

And I stormed out. I literally stormed out in the chapel, and I, like, ripped up the paper. She writes a Facebook post and says that she finds that bringing him on was an insult in it. sort of an incitement by the school and offensive to the victims of 9-11, and that Islam was about hate and violence and was calling out the school for doing it.

And I woke up the next morning, and my post was on Ripeart. It was on Sean Hannity. Pamela Geller had picked it up. This post blows up and goes viral and gets her national attention. And after that, she gets invited to a symposium where lots of people in the right-wing media sphere and right-wing politics are present. And at the event, she gets the chance to meet a guy named James O'Keefe, who ran a place called Project Veritas, a right-wing gotcha-oriented journalism outfit. And she runs him down. She says, you don't know who I am, but you should because I'm going to make a big difference and I'm going to be really important.

And he kind of laughs it off, but has her number. And a few months later, he gives her a call and invites her to come up to New York and sort of prove what she can do. And so she flies up there, grabs a hidden camera that was supplied to her by James O'Keefe, and she ends up meeting the daughter of Eric Garner. Now, Eric Garner was this person who died in a chokehold from the New York City Police. Right. And Lumer gets Eric Garner's daughter to make disparaging comments about Alice Sharpton, the prominent preacher and activist for the black community.

Project Veritas loves this, shops it, and gets the New York Post to pick it up and puts it on the front page of the New York Post. So Laura Lumer, college senior, not even graduated yet, has now gone completely viral. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like this kind of knack, maybe even instinct for attention-seeking and viral moments. She has it, you know, even in her college years. Yeah, I mean, she has a real gut for it. You know, she's studying broadcast journalism. She imagines herself one day being sort of an on-air talent for Fox News or something.

But she really has a gut for the gotcha. moment and for catching people on tape. And when the opportunity strikes, she always seems to go for it. And it's around that same time, soon after she graduates from college, that Donald Trump goes down the golden escalator, the Trump Tower, and announces his candidacy for president. And what does she tell you about that moment, about Trump's kind of entrance onto the political scene? So as she tells it, she's in for Trump to be president from the beginning. She's not interested in the other people who were running at the time like Jeff Bush. She said that she liked the way that he spoke, the way that he said what was on his mind, and she says that she liked his

values, what she would now call America first values, in a way that she didn't think the other candidates were. So Trump obviously wins in 2016. What's her relationship to him then? She doesn't have any kind of relationship with him at that period. She doesn't know him at all. So instead, at that time, she's working hard on the kind of work she does, which is undercover her journalism, catching people saying things on video they shouldn't say and blasting it out as loud as possible. She's developing a huge following on social media and less than two years out of college.

She's now famous and also infamous at the same time because part and parcel of all this is being outrageous and saying things that most people won't say. One particular target of hers is Ilhan Omar, the Somali immigrant congresswoman from Minnesota. Ilhan, why did you marry your brother? Why did you commit immigration fraud? You know, that's a crime here in the United States. Why do you hate Jewish people so much? She's been after her for years and has alleged that she married her own brother

and violated immigration rules, none of which is true. I would say her entire loyalty and her entire focus is to Islam. She once, really, in a very ghoulish moment, celebrated the death of 2,000 Syrian migrants who drowned in the Mediterranean, and trying to flee the war there in 2017 said that was great, and there should be 2,000 more. Whoa. There's kind of no bottom to the pretty despicable, nasty thing

she's willing to say, at least in a public forum. March against Syria! She has even called herself a hashtag proud Islamophob. There's no question she is an Islamic feminist. And that kind of stuff starts getting her into trouble. Well, how do you get banned from Uber? How do you get banned from Lyft? How do you get banned from Uber Eats?

Just by being an existing. as a conservative in this country. She, in 2017, gets kicked off of Uber and Lyft because she made comments about them having Islamic drivers and her not wanting to ride in a car with a Muslim. And the following year, she gets kicked off Twitter because she has been abusive, particularly towards Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman,

just going after her relentlessly on the platform. So she gets kicked off that site. I have been defamed, okay? My life has been destroyed. And pretty soon, it casts. And she's getting kicked off almost every social media platform. I literally can't make a living anymore even though I have a degree. And that's an interesting thing because it becomes an effective muzzle to her in a lot of ways.

Yeah, being deep platform for this person, it does undermine her livelihood at this point, right? I mean, her professional success depends on her being able to spread her message. That's right. And if you read her book, which I have, you will hear in her words that this is one of the most scarring and pain events of her entire life. Getting kicked off the platforms affects her in a way that I don't think it would affect most people. And she's desperate to find a way to get her voice back and trying to figure out some other way to be relevant now that she can't speak to millions of people on social media. So what does she do? So she runs for Congress, obviously. Clearly. In 2020, she runs for Congress And though she wins the Republican primary, she loses in the general election.

And she runs again in 2022. And in that case, she loses in the primary. So that second run fizzles out as well. You know, it strikes me that around that time, Trump had also been experiencing some of this. He had also just lost an election. He was de-platformed from social media in the aftermath of January 6th. Their trajectories are kind of aligning. Yeah, it's a really good point. She's off Twitter. Now he's off Twitter. Her voice can't be heard and his voice can't be heard in the same way. And they're suddenly sort of out in the wilderness, in a sense, together. And then for both of them, a life raft comes to them in the form of Elon Musk of all people. Elon Musk buys Twitter in the fall of 2022. And one of the very first things he does is reinstate Donald Trump's account. And also, importantly for this story, Laura Lumer's account, she gets reactivated in December 2020.

and immediately pivots to her next big plan, which is to get Donald Trump reelected and back in the White House. And what does that look like, that plan, going all in on getting Trump reelected? Well, it starts with focusing on the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. And while lots of people on the right were embracing DeSantis

and excited about him, Laura Lumer saw him as an obstacle and decided to focus essentially all of her energies on making it as hard for him as possible to win the Republican nomination. And right into the beginning of 2023, before he's even declared that he's going to run for president, she stages a protest outside of a book-signing event that he's hosting at a bookstore in Florida.

We're simply supporting President Trump. She's wearing Trump gear, carrying Trump flags. And then while the cameras are rolling, something happens. To say it's his people who are in there saying, have me come out to tell you guys not to be here, why he's here. Signed in the book. I thought that Governor DeSantis was, like, he always talks about how he's in favor of free speech. Like, we have a First Amendment right to be here to rally and support a president.

Security hired by Ron DeSantis goes out and tells her that she has to leave. I need you guys to leave, please. Okay? We don't want DeSantis to run for president. Okay, that's fine. And that turns out to be a viral moment. Laura Lumer puts that out everywhere. Yeah, I mean, what a bad political move by the DeSantis camp, right?

Like, that just plays right into Laura Lumer's hands. This is her playbook, and he's just following it, basically. I mean, total red meat for Laura Lumer. She jumps on it, makes a slice of bologna into a giant ham sandwich, and goes crazy with it. And she also catches the attention of the one person she's most interested in seeing this, which is Donald Trump himself. And all of a sudden, I get an unknown phone call, and I'm like, oh, God, I don't like to But something told me to take it.

Right? I don't know what this, but I just had to steal it. Yeah. It's the same night. Same day. Yeah. Like hours, like three hours after Ron DeSantis and just called the cops on me.

She loves to tell this story that her phone rings and it's an unlisted number. I answer it and it's like, hello. I was like, who's this, right? I was very annoyed. It's like, hello, Laura. It's your favorite president of Donald Trump. And I thought it was a prank call. And I was like,

I was like, no, really, honestly, who is this? Don't waste my time. And she doesn't believe it's him at first, but it is. And he convinces her, but it's Donald Trump. I just love what you did today is at the St. Termonians. And it was really honestly President Trump. And I just couldn't believe it. And we had a phone call for like 15 minutes,

and he was telling me how much he loved me, and he thought it was amazing. And she cannot believe this is happening to her. This is the culmination of all this work and dreaming she's had that Donald Trump is calling her. And to make it even better, better, he says to her, he wants her to come to Moralago and meet him in person. Wow.

And that is major, huge for Laura Lumer. And she could not be more excited. She gets her nails done. She gets her hair done. She buys a new outfit. And she goes to Mara Lago and is ushered into his office. And there he is with Susie Wiles, who was going to be running his campaign. And I was so nervous.

I sat in his office. He started talking to him. It was just supposed to be like a thank you. You know, like, oh, Laura Lumber's your biggest fan. You can meet her. And I gave him a signed copy on my book, and I said, Mr. President, you're my hero. So they're there together in Marlago,

and Trump asks her what she's seeing in the political space. And we started talking to me. He started asking me the opinions about people. And I was just rattling off opposition research. That person sucks. This person sucks. And she launches into lots of attacks on lots of Republicans that she says

aren't really loyal to the MAGA movement that aren't loyal to Trump that she thinks are not worthy of his attention. And he's just staring at me. He goes, wow. He's like, you really know what you're talking about. She's making a huge impression on Trump. You know, this is her opportunity

and she's not going to squander it. And it clearly works because towards the end of the meeting, Trump tells her she should run for Congress again. So he said, let's find a district for her. And I just looked at the president and I said, you know, Mr. President, I don't want to run for Congress.

I want you to win. I said, there's no point of anyone being in Congress if you're not the president. And so he loved what I said. I said, I want to put you in her. And she says, I don't want to run for Congress. The only thing I want to do is to make sure you get elected. Well, of course, that kind of public open show of loyalty

is exactly what Trump wants to hear, and he loves it. And it has a big smile on his face and says, Susie, we should hire this woman. Susie said that she was going to get me set up. And she wanted me to come down to the campaign headquarter office to meet with her. And so this begins the application process for a job within the Trump campaign. And Blumer is expecting to start, I think, on April 1st or somewhere around that, 2023 for the campaign.

She submits her tax forms. She does all the things you need to begin that job. And she's thinking she's going to be probably working on comms, communications for the campaign, and that her political career and her dream of working for Donald Trump is about to take off. And what happens? The job never materializes. It never happens. She learns, in fact, from a story in this newspaper that after discussions inside the campaign about hiring her, there's been a decision not to hire her.

Nobody called me. I never got a phone call from anybody on the campaign telling me after that. By the way, you know, if we're really sorry about this or never got a phone call. She is absolutely devastated. Well, like I said, it's always been about Trump for me. So I was upset. I was so depressed. I cried so much.

I locked myself in my apartment for like a month. And I lost like 15 pounds. I was so depressed. I was crying every day. I was so upset. And do we know why? Well, we have reporting that people inside the campaign, were quite worried about hiring Laura Lumer,

didn't think it would be an asset to the campaign to have her there, fears that she was too loose of a cannon, that she was too hard to manage, and that she could be a liability to the campaign. And even though Donald Trump had asked for it, there was just such strong pressure not to that those in power beneath Trump made sure it didn't occur. And if you follow her social media or you talk to her,

she brings this up more of an almost any other topic, This almost getting hired and then not getting hired is another foundational moment in her life and one she's very upset up. And so she takes the feelings of this rejection and channels them through her grievance into a new and arguably more important mission to rid his campaign and his administration of anyone she considers an enemy. There's something about rejection that motivates you to become even more efficient. We'll be right back.

So tell me about this new mission that Lumer pours herself into after she's turned away by Team Trump. So the thing that Lumer starts to think about is that the enemies are everywhere and that the campaign and the incoming administration and the entire Republican Party is riddle with people who are not sufficiently loyal to Trump. And so her project develops as what she calls vetting, or sometimes she calls it extreme vetting, which is finding people who don't love Trump the way she does, who don't love MAGA the way she does, and to publicly out them. And hopefully she frequently says to end their careers. I really enjoy, and I take great pleasure in humiliating people who suck at their job. I do.

Especially when people steal opportunities from me, I really like rubbing it in their face by showing them that I can. can do a job way better than they can. So she walked me through her process, actually, in a conversation we had about this. She looks for names for people on the list of people who are being appointed or nominated or considered for nomination or in the party or have jobs in packs and fundraising committees and things like that. And then she begins to pick them apart. There's like a judge that rules against Trump.

I start looking into the judge. You Google his name. I Google his name. And then I start looking at their LinkedIn, their resume, like looking up, you know, they're more, That's a normal process. And look for anything she can find on the internet, on public filings, on campaign contributions, anything she can find that suggests to her that they might not be 100% in line with what her vision of MAGA is. I mean, I go through finances, I go through like marital relationships, spouses, kids.

She told me that if she can't find anything in the first past, then she looks at their spouse. And if she can't find anything in the spouse, she looks at their children. And if she can't find anything in their children, she looks for their siblings. She can't find anything in their siblings. looks for their parents. She looks for any link in the family that might not be sufficiently MAGA for criteria, and she weaponizes that. It just happens to be the case that there's always a conflict, like especially with the spouses who gets every time. And so if she finds out that someone's uncle, you know, was a democratic councilman from some city or their grandfather owned

a business in another country, she will bring that forward as evidence that that person shouldn't be there is dangerous and is a threat to the administration. Can you just give me some? some examples of her targets? Yeah, well, perhaps one of the most prominent ones is a group of people who worked for the National Security Council who she, on mass, tried to get fired in early April and was fairly successful. I was doing all my own vetting at this time, and then Signalgate happened. She got interested in these people because of what we now call Signalgate, which was

this incident in which Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, created a group chat with all kinds of people in it to discuss plans to attack. Houthi rebels in Yemen, and accidentally a journalist was admitted in the chat who got to observe this happening. And Laura Luma noticed that one of the people in the chat was a guy named Alex Wong, who was a deputy to Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor. And I started during my own deep dive on Alex Wong and his wife. And she discovered that he worked on the 2012 campaign of Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee

for president and a fierce critic of Donald Trump. Then she discovered that Wong's wife worked in the Justice Department under Joe Biden. Wait, so how does somebody become the deputy national security advisor and their wife was involved in prosecuting J-Sixers? It was very shocking stuff. That was, to her mind, a red flag, even though, of course, the woman worked previously in the first Trump Justice Department. So she starts going on to acts like crazy and saying that Alex Wong is unfit for, for office, shouldn't have a job, he's a threat, he might even be deep state or some kind of subversive element. And then, I got a phone call from the White House, and it was President

Trump. Donald Trump gets wind of this. And he goes, wow, so I have your report here on Wong and tell me about this report. And he's asking me about my report, and I'm telling him. And he said, oh, I want you to come to the White House, Nana. I want you to let me know who else is problematic. I mean, those aren't the exact words that he used, right? But that was the sentiment, right? Obviously, I don't know. And invites her to come to the White House. It's her first ever Oval Office visit, first ever White House visit. And she walks in with a sheaf of papers about 12 different people that she thinks she'd be fired, including Alex Wong. And what does Trump do? What does he say? So he listens to this presentation,

and it's a pretty incredible scene. list and presented it. And then Michael Waltz was freaking out when he found out I was there and he stormed into the Oval Office while I was there. And in the middle of this conversation, Mike Waltz himself walks into the office and has to listen to Laura Lumer, besmirch him and the people who work for him. And according to various accounts, including Laura Lomers, but others as well. The president said he wanted all of the people fired. Trump ends a meeting by saying, we have to get rid of these people. We have to fire these people. And indeed, within hours, Trump has fired six of the 12 people that she put on a list

in front of him. Wow. So basically Trump sides with Lumer over Waltz, his own national security advisor. Yeah, that's right. And it's worth noting that Wong never did lose his job, but Mike Waltz did. He was pushed out of the national security advisor job and sent over to be the ambassador to the United Nations. Okay, that's her first big success, and I do remember it. It made a lot of waves.

What else does she do? How does this progress? Well, she realizes she's hit on something big, and she goes on what could more or less be thought of as a rampage, trying everything she can to get more people fired, and finding success doing it. She calls them scalps,

and she's racking up one after the other throughout the spring and into the summer. Michael Waltz, General Hogg, Also, Hunter Biden, like, I got his Secret Service detail completely revoked, so that's great. She gets Hunter Biden's Secret Service detail taken away from him. The Surgeon General, Jeanette New Schwatt, so that's great, too. She gets people who are going to be nominated to be important jobs like the Surgeon General gets their nomination pulled. She gets an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles fired.

Like, some of the betting I do, while all of it is always intended to support the president, I do go out of my way a lot of the time. to highlight very specific cases of actual incompetence when I know people don't have those jobs because they deserve those jobs and they're not doing a good job. And it's an incredible run and one that sends terror throughout the entire Republican Party.

And just to gut check us for a minute, obviously it's in Lumer's interest to claim what she calls scalps, but how can we be sure that she's behind it? It's a good question. The administration has generally stopped short of saying Laura Lumer got this person fired. They haven't disabused people of the idea either, but she's claimed it. And certainly the fact that she is going there in person saying this stuff and seeing results almost instantly is a very strong indication that if she's not the only factor, she's a big factor. We've seen several instances where she out of the blue has posted about someone being nominated for a job or in a job that she thinks they shouldn't have. And within 12, hours or even less sometimes, that person is gone. And she discovers pretty quickly that she can weigh in not just on who gets higher to fire, but what the government decides to do.

And one of the things she starts getting into is policy. And one example of that happened recently, she learned that a charity was bringing in children from Gaza who had been injured in the conflict there and was bringing them to the U.S. for important, often life-changing surgeries. These are often kids who had legs blown off and arms blown off. some of them were emaciated, and Lumer went online and said that this was importing terrorists, and it must stop. And after a day of posting about this online, she picked up the phone and called Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and told him that he needed to pay attention to this. Well, the next morning, Marco Rubio announced that he was pausing all visas from Palestine for further review and was checking for ties to terrorist organizations for this charity.

I mean, it's just remarkable when you think of how many foreign leaders in this world would love to be able to pick up the phone and get Marco Rubio's ear right now. Yeah, it's true. It's incredible. I mean, the access she has is amazing. And I think it's an interesting thing to contrast with the fact that if you ask her, she still thinks that she doesn't have the access she deserves and still is fostered by resentment because she didn't get invited to go to the summit in Alaska the way that another right-wing influencer did. I was texting with her recently, and she complained that it's so unfair and no one respects her. It's really hard to get rid of a chip on your shoulder. I have to ask, we know Trump is loving it. How's the rest of Washington reacting to her outsized role? I think the word you would probably associate with how most Republicans feel when they see Laura Lumer is abject terror. When I spent time with her in the halls of Congress on Capitol Hill, Whenever a Republican congressman would see Lumer, their eyes would get big, and it looked like they have trying to battle with their fight or flight reflexes. They didn't know whether to get away from her or to come up to her.

And ultimately, what most of them choose to do is go up to her in a very guarded and careful way. And I think their fear of her is quite palpable and, frankly, understandable, given the influence she has. You know, we've seen the Trump administration empower many influencers, not just lower. are a Lumer, people in non-traditional media, you know, bringing those folks into the White House press briefing room, they've kind of fed that beast in many ways. And it's worked well for them a lot of the time. But there have been these moments at which those influencers have kind of turned against them. Epstein being the darkest, most recent example of that. And I wonder whether you think there's a world where embracing people like Lumer, who are willing to

to cross all of these lines might come back to bite the White House. There are a lot of people in the administration who think of her as a ticking time bomb as something that is extremely dangerous and should be kept as far away

as possible. So the other day there was a hit piece about me. They obviously talked to some people at the White House and it said Trump's staff are getting tired of Laura Lumer. And literally the next day I'm at the White House meeting with you. But grouping her in the same bucket as other influencers or other social media trolls or anything like that,

it's kind of a mistake because she isn't like them. She doesn't go to their parties. She doesn't live in a mansion. She lives in a little rental house in the Gulf Coast of Florida. And she spends all day on the phone trying to find dirt on people and trying to make noise. Why would I give a shit about what they think about me when I play for an audience of one? She has a singular mission that is truly, I think, unique in this fear. And it sets her apart. And it is the mission that motivates her and keeps

her going every day. And it is the thing that makes people wake up in the middle of the night with a cold sweat. And just to be clear, that mission is defending Trump at all costs. That's it. That's the one goal she has in mind. And it is all she knows how to do. And I don't think she's capable of imagining anything else that she'd want to do, nor is there anything she would really trade it for, I think, at this point. The only person that really matters is Donald Trump. She is his perfect, blunt instrument that can do the jobs that no one else will get done. In exchange, what she gets out of this is the approval and acceptance of Donald J. Trump.

Ken, thank you so much. Thank you, Natalie. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, Israel approved new settlements in the West Bank, fragmenting land that had been envisioned as part of a Palestinian state. Under the plan, 3,400 additional housing units would be built in one of the most sensitive areas of the West Bank,

Bank near Jerusalem. At the same time, the Israeli military moved ahead with plans to take over Gaza City, saying its troops had advanced to the city's outskirts. Tents were being moved into southern Gaza for people who would be displaced from their homes. Together, the moves raised questions about whether a new ceasefire proposal for the war in Gaza had any chance of moving forward. And on Wednesday, after weeks of partisan fighting, the Texas House passed a new congressional map that delivered President Trump to gerrymandering he'd asked for. The goal was to clinch five new Republican seats in the House next year. The State Senate is expected to vote on the map as soon as Thursday evening and would then send it to Governor Greg Abbott for his

promised signature. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Caitlin O'Keef, and Asta Chatharvedi. It was edited by Rachel Quester and was engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to Ashley Calloway Blatch and Dana Green. That's it for the Daily. I'm Natalie Kittrowaf. See you tomorrow. Thank you.