Influential MAGA blogger and former Kyiv critic Laura Loomer expects to visit the president to advocate for the U.S.-Ukraine alliance.
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Laura Loomer, the controversial but influential pro-Trump blogger, arrived in Kyiv on July 19, with only a few meetings lined up and, in her telling, no agenda other than seeing the war-torn country for herself. Ten days later, she returned to Florida as one of MAGA’s most prominent advocates for Ukraine.
Along the way, a person who not long ago was a sharp critic of Kyiv made international headlines as she interviewed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a frontline commander and tried to persuade special envoy Steve Witkoff to make his first trip to Kyiv. She challenged her MAGA compatriots to reexamine the conflict and America’s role in the world.
“I feel like I’ve changed global policy,” Loomer said in a phone interview.
Loomer said she expects to visit the White House this month to discuss her trip, among other subjects, with President Donald Trump, who promoted her interview with Zelensky online. Trump has remained a steadfast fan of Loomer to the chagrin of some advisers, praising her doggedness and devotion to him.
Trump, too, has been somewhat more supportive of Ukraine of late, declaring at a NATO summit in July that he was comfortable with Kyiv striking inside Russia and opening the door to letting Ukraine license U.S. missile defense technology. He has been warmer toward Zelensky, whom he once ejected from the White House, in recent months as Kyiv has resisted Russian battlefield advances and menaced the Kremlin deep into its territory.
Following his own meeting with Zelensky on Tuesday, Trump said he wants him to end the war and stopped short of taking sides between him and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“It’s very simple: I get along with both,” he said. “I get along with President Putin, I get along with President Zelensky.”
Loomer said she hopes to convince Americans that Russia is the problem. After years of assailing Zelensky and opposing American support for Ukraine, Loomer returned from the country a full-throated evangelist for a strategic alliance, tying its resistance to Russia with Trump’s war in Iran.
“Russia is anti-American and their values are not our values, and they want multipolarity, which means the end of American supremacy, which is not good for America,” she said in an interview — echoing points long made by hawkish politicians in both parties who have argued for strong international alliances and resistance to the Kremlin.
If she were president, she said, the U.S. “would find a way for the president of Russia to have a lethal and sudden heart attack.”
She was publicly criticizing Zelensky as recently as last September.
“Ukraine is a country full of Nazi apologists and now it’s clearly a country led by a Jihadi apologist,” she posted to X after he met with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa at the United Nations.
Loomer’s attention-grabbing public conversion came days after Kyiv lost its most prominent advocate in Trump’s close circle, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who died of an aortic dissection on July 11, the day after meeting Zelensky in Ukraine.
Her stunning reversal marked a victory for Ukrainian efforts to court American conservatives, countering years-long outreach by the Kremlin that has sidelined many of the party’s Reagan-era Russia hawks. A year ago, Zelensky and Olha Stefanishyna, now his outgoing ambassador in Washington, devised a strategy to reach MAGA influencers even if they were Ukraine skeptics, she said.
“The outcome of her visit is impactful,” Stefanishyna told reporters Thursday, adding that she had the idea for Loomer to visit a bombed McDonald’s in Kyiv. “We expect that she will encourage everyone, you know, from President Trump to anyone else who would want to do it, to come to Ukraine to make the trip to see to see with their own eyes everything she saw.”
The ambassador said that she had talked about Loomer’s visit with Zelensky when he arrived in Washington on Monday.
“My president really had a lot of fun over this interview,” Stefanishyna said. “He had a very nice smile on his face” when they discussed it.
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But she declined to answer a question about the embassy’s role in Loomer’s voyage.
Loomer said some American donors whom she declined to identify helped cover the security costs, but she received no foreign money. Loomer crowdfunds her work, earns income from her online shows, and also sells opposition research and vetting services.
By Loomer’s account, her views on Ukraine started changing gradually over the past year and a half as she noticed other right-wing podcasters spreading conspiracy theories and criticizing Trump’s support for Israel and attacks on Iran, then being promoted by Russian state media’s propaganda outlet, RT, and other pro-Russian social media accounts. She increasingly clashed with anti-war influencers online.
“Russia is running a foreign influence operation on social media to sow chaos and division in American politics and to radicalize people, specifically right-wingers,” Loomer said. “There’s a lot of conservatives who have been totally radicalized and brainwashed by Russian propaganda.”
In June, Candace Owens and other right-wing internet personalities traveled to Russia for an annual conference that Putin has long promoted as his country’s version of Davos, the gathering spot for the global economic elite. That same month, a producer working with Loomer, Andrew Moore, attended a security conference in Odesa, Ukraine, and told her people there liked how she was calling out Russia. Loomer said that made her want to go herself.
She planned the trip in secret, concerned about an Iranian propaganda video focused on her and her photo being among target-style posters displayed at Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s funeral in July.
Her arrival last month caused such a stir that Zelensky agreed to an interview that lasted more than 40 minutes.
In the conversation, she pushed the Ukrainian leader to improve his messaging to Americans, especially on issues around neo-Nazism that Russia has promoted.
“I just think you guys need to do a better job, maybe, emphasizing to the international community that it’s illegal to own Nazi paraphernalia here, that you’ll go to jail if you have Nazi paraphernalia, that it’s illegal to be an antisemite,” said Loomer, who is Jewish.
She echoed that sentiment in meetings with his subordinates, posing for a photo with the deputy head of Zelensky’s administration in front of a whiteboard on which she had written, “I hope you will improve your rapid response and ability to communicate with Americans and President Trump about how grateful you are to Americans … Love, Laura Loomer.”
She also left Kyiv, the fortified capital city where there is usually some warning ahead of Russian airstrikes, to visit Kharkiv, a city close to the border with Russia that is far more dangerous.
While there, she interviewed Andriy Biletsky, the founder of Azov, a volunteer fighting group that was later absorbed into Ukraine’s formal forces, whose historical ties to white supremacists have long fueled Russian narratives that their Ukrainian opponents were neo-Nazis.
Biletsky, a former ultranationalist politician who is now a brigadier general in the Ukrainian army, denied being a neo-Nazi to Loomer.
She said she understood she was risking her physical safety as well as her reputation. Loomer found herself in RT’s crosshairs, and her sparring with anti-war podcasters intensified. She returned to the U.S. arguing that MAGA’s isolationists were misconstruing Trump’s message and hurting U.S. interests.
“We have nothing to gain from Russia, we have a lot to gain from Ukraine,” she said, repeating Zelensky’s arguments that Ukraine can help the U.S. by sharing its technology and expertise in countering Iranian-made drones used by Russia. “It is ‘America First’ to support Ukraine over Russia in this war.”
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