President Donald Trump’s allies kept tearing into one another nearly a week after the midterm losses, with one accusing a prominent pro-Trump activist of having “crashed the MAGA train.”
Mike Benz, a former State Department official and former speechwriter for Stephen Miller, leveled the charge Monday against right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who had complained on X earlier that day that she was the target of a “b— hit piece.”
Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in last week’s midterm elections, and Trump’s allies have been trading blows ever since.
“The White House did everything you said, and crashed the MAGA train into a mountain,” Benz wrote. “You spent the whole past year attacking every effective and compelling voice of our 2024 coalition. You killed our coalition. You will not be in charge of the autopsy.”
“Haha if the White House did everything I said, I’d be PPO Director,” Loomer replied, referring to the Presidential Personnel Office. “You are such a petulant child.”
Benz’s attack built on allegations that Loomer sold the influence she holds in Trump’s White House.
The Washington Post reported Saturday that private clients had paid Loomer to post political messages on X without disclosing it, citing Alex Bruesewitz, an adviser to Trump’s 2024 campaign, and three other people.
Loomer denied it, telling the Post she is not “some influencer that makes money from tweeting.”
“It’s utterly indefensible how much fear was instilled in the White House,” Benz wrote Sunday, adding that people there knew “you’d be fired if she tweeted about you, while she cashed in that influence as a business model.”
Loomer has traveled with Trump and met privately with him in the Oval Office during his second term, the Post reported.
“Sometimes I listen to those recommendations,” Trump said last year after the White House fired National Security Council aides whom Loomer had accused of disloyalty, the Post reported. He denied that she was involved in the firings but acknowledged she had recommended some.
Benz’s complaint that the White House did everything Loomer said is also a complaint about choices Trump made.
Loomer had criticized even a pause in the Iran war that Vice President JD Vance blamed for the losses, and Benz accuses her of turning on its critics within the movement.
“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote on X after the election.
“The ceasefire will fail,” Loomer wrote on April 7, the night Trump agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, Reuters reported. “And Trump will be proven right about how this regime needs to be wiped out.”
“I can’t think of one MAGA voice against the Iran War you haven’t used your very bizarrely privileged role as Loyalty Czar (the irony) to stab in the back,” Benz told her Monday.
“I’m not sorry for ‘attacking’ them,” Loomer had written in her earlier reply, calling figures such as commentator Tucker Carlson “anti-Trump.”
Trump has already replaced his chief of staff, and her departure has not quieted the blame.
Fox News guest Caroline Sunshine called on Nov. 4 for White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and others involved in “a preventable election wipeout” to resign, Media Matters reported.
Two days later, Trump announced that Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, would replace Wiles.
“I think he had severe poor advice from people, I think, who treated him like a baby in many respects and used him,” said Calley Means, a former White House senior adviser who quit last month, according to The Washington Post.
Means also accused Wiles of blocking some of the administration’s health initiatives, according to the Post, which said the White House did not immediately respond.
Miller was set to start the job Monday, according to Trump’s announcement.