Trump’s Disastrous Choice for 9/11 Memorial Guest Shocks Everyone

Donald Trump spent the twenty-third anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks accompanied by a far-right conspiracy theorist who previously claimed the attacks had been an inside job.

Laura Loomer, a self-described “pro-white nationalist” and “proud Islamophobe,” accompanied Trump and J.D. Vance Wednesday to the annual service at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, and then to a fire station in lower Manhattan to meet with New York firefighters and commemorate those who died in the 9/11 attacks.

But for Loomer, those deaths took on a special meaning, because she believes that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans—or at least, that’s what she posted on X last year.

“On 9/10/01 , one day before 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld under the Bush administration said the US Government ‘lost’ $2.3 Trillion dollars. The very next day, 9/11/01, we were attacked,” Loomer wrote in a post in June 2023.

In addition to those killed on 9/11, another 6,781 people are believed to have died as of December from illnesses linked to exposure to Ground Zero in the days after the World Trade Center fell. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, an estimated 70,000 civilians were killed between 2001 and 2023 as a result of the U.S. military campaign.

It makes sense that Loomer kept close to Trump and his posse, because she’d already been hanging out with them on the plane ahead of Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

Loomer has hawked plenty of far-right conspiracy theories, including that Kamala Harris’s mother committed immigration fraud and that former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, who survived being shot in the head, was “brain dead.”

Loomer spent her time at Ground Zero Wednesday posting on X about how President Joe Biden “looked like death.”