Laura Loomer Isn’t Trump’s Achilles Heel. She’s a Whole Achilles Leg.

Remember back in the spring when the conventional wisdom was that this Trump campaign was a highly polished operation? Chris LaCivita and Susie Weil, we were told, were total professionals. They’d be bringing a more traditional sense of discipline to the campaign and to Donald Trump himself. Gone would be those days of 2016-style excesses and own-goals. This campaign, and this Trump, was going to be different. Democrats beware.

I have to say, it seemed to be working, for a minute. As long as Trump was running against Joe Biden, everything was basically going according to plan. Then the Democrats switched candidates, and, as they did for Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory (and no, not apologizing for a 1950s pop culture reference!), things started going a little haywire. The new candidate was good. She was young. She was vibrant. She knew how to goad him. She was Black. She was multi-racial. She was…a woman.

Suddenly, Trump’s vaunted campaign is looking about as professional as the ’62 Mets. LaCivita and Weil were able to smother their candidate’s true impulses and personality for a while. But, like mold on an old loaf of bread, Trump’s personality was bound to take over.

Which brings us to Laura Loomer.

A lot of gossipy speculation popped up late last week, winking and nudging about the true nature of their relationship. I will confess to a mild level of interest in this topic, although never before mealtime. It is shocking that Trump can have her as a regular travel companion while his wife is nowhere to be seen. Can you imagine what the press would be doing if Doug Emhoff were back home in California and Kamala Harris was hopping across the nation in the company of, oh, of some young-ish left-wing social media star? Whose views were of the left-extremist variety? Yes, we can imagine.

But once again, Trump gets away with it. Sure, there’s a lot of press now, but he got away with it for weeks—and, in fact, he’s still getting away with in the sense that Loomer is still traveling with him, and Melania is still AWOL. (Although Melania did release an appalling video over the weekend whining about how her “privacy was invaded” by the FBI Mar-a-Lago raid, for which the nation’s top law-enforcement agency had a search warrant approved by a federal judge.)

How does he get away with it? It’s important to answer this question in the right way. The standard media answer is: His base loves it. It’s incredible how much disqualifying stuff gets swept under the rug on the excuse that MAGA-land thrills to it. But there are two more factors in play here that tell the full story.

The first is that Trump lives mostly inside the bubble of a right-wing media that will never challenge him about things like this. If they did challenge him, I mean actually challenge him, and not just ask one pro forma question and move on, things would be different. But the right-wing media sees its job as not only electing Trump, but protecting him, rebutting any and all criticism that comes from liberals or the mainstream media (two different things, it’s worth remembering).

The second is that elected Republicans won’t challenge him. And that’s the biggie—this takes us back to the famous Access Hollywood crossroads; the moment GOP elected officials weighed what they were signing up for and plunged ahead. This is their original sin. If elected Republicans had had the courage to say “no,” this whole train would have been derailed at some point. But they are almost to a person moral cowards, beyond the known exceptions who’ve paid for their principles with excommunication from the Republican Party.

A handful of electeds have raised their voice about Trump’s newest pal. Lindsey Graham, one of the few who occasionally gravitate back to the planet to which John McCain usually kept him tethered, criticized the Trump-Loomer association last week. Bully for him. Senator Thom Tillis joined him. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, objected as well. Politico reported Sunday morning that the relationship has become “a source of deep worry for mainstream Republicans and Trump allies concerned about the far-right activist’s influence on the former president.” But no one new was quoted on the record (well, some very tepid comments from J.D. Vance, whose Indian American wife, I hope, wasn’t impressed by Loomer’s statement that if Harris won, the White House would “smell like curry”). This leaves us in the same place as always: Ninny Republicans ninnying away to reporters off the record, but petrified of doing anything that might resemble standing for something.

And as for the phrase “the far-right activist’s influence on the former president”…well, the question here is who is influencing whom. A presumption that this influence river is flowing in just one direction implies that if not for Loomer, Trump wouldn’t be entertaining extremist and racist ideas.

Well. Have a gander at this story, from NPR last week, about two speeches given this year at Trump’s Bedminster club by a certain January 6 rioter by the name of Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. Click on the link in this paragraph to feast your eyes upon Hale-Cusanelli. He’s aiming for a certain look. The hair part, the mustache. He’s channeling someone from history, and it sure ain’t David Ben-Gurion.

And again, yes, let’s talk about the mainstream media in general, and The New York Times in particular. NPR’s Tom Dreisbach broke his story on Thursday. You might think that the fact that a January 6 rioter who walks around literally trying to look like Adolf Hitler and who gave not one but two speeches at Donald Trump’s golf club would be news. But not a word so far in the Times. I guess maybe to the paper’s Joe Kahn, that would constitute putting a finger on the scale for Harris.

Trump didn’t need Loomer to tell him to invite this man to his club. He has plenty of hateful instincts of his own. But certainly, Loomer makes it all worse. And as long as Trump keeps having her around, and defending her as a “free spirit,” Democrats and the media should be relentless about the presence of this hatemonger in his orbit.

I think it’s safe to say that a strictly platonic relationship between Loomer and Trump is grotesque enough. Among her many ghastly comments, we have this one, from back in March, literally stating that murder would be understandable: “Every damn day, we see another story about illegal aliens going to the Ritz Carlton, illegal aliens getting free flights, illegal aliens getting free clothes and free cellphones — and someone’s going to snap. Someone’s gonna snap. It’s going to happen and you know what? I’m not going to care when it happens. You know why? Because there’s only so much people can take.” Free spirit-y enough for you?

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who’s been all over the Loomer story, summed up the importance of all this last Friday: “This is not just guilt by association, okay? She’s flying on his plane. He is using their rhetoric. He’s choosing to empower people like Laura Loomer. Those are the sorts of people who will enjoy greater power in a second term.” So this is about a lot more than whether Trump and Loomer are exchanging more than ideas.