Everybody Around Trump Hates the Unhinged Laura Loomer. Except Trump.

Loomer’s audacity and attention seeking were always aspects of her personality. She grew up in Arizona, in what she described, in a memoir, as a climate of fear and violence in her home. “The truth is, at a very young age, I learned that most people can’t relate to the horror show that was my childhood,” she wrote. “Having friends over at my house was never an option because my brother’s severe mental illness and unpredictable violent episodes meant the police were at my home on a weekly basis. Most of the time I didn’t even have a bedroom door,” she wrote, because her brother would kick it down if she locked herself in “to escape getting beaten or stabbed.”

Loomer spent high school hundreds of miles away at a ranch-style boarding school in northern Arizona with a graduating class of 32. She was blonde and pudgy, nearly unrecognizable from the raven-haired sylph of today. One classmate recalled an awkward teen who acted out in bids for attention that elicited classmates’ pity. “We were all close, you kinda just dealt with Laura,” this classmate said. “You felt bad for her.” The classmate recalled one incident that exemplified her situation: At one point, she had to have a surgery. Neither her mom, a nurse, nor her father, a doctor, traveled the few hours’ drive from Tucson to be with her. She was nursed in the dorms by the mothers of two other students. “I think they just placed there, her dad wanted her gone,” the classmate said.

Her conservatism was already chiseled: As a teen John McCain supporter, she often unleashed extreme anti-Islam sentiments, even screaming at two Turkish exchange students that they were terrorists while they were praying, according to the high school classmate. As she came of age, Islamophobia became her brand. At Florida’s Barry University in 2014, Loomer caught the attention of Gateway Pundit and Breitbart News with an Islamophobic Facebook post about how her school’s interfaith service on 9/11 was opened by, as she put it, “an imam … literally chanting Allahu Akbar.” That bit of notoriety got her invited to a 2014 David Horowitz Freedom Center gala in West Palm Beach, where she met, and offered her services to, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe.