In July, Laura Loomer – Trump whisperer, conspiracy entrepreneur and the self-styled “most banned woman in the world” – went to Kyiv, sat out a missile attack in a bomb shelter, and interviewed Volodymyr Zelensky and his military commanders. She returned home having found her roots in Ukraine: archivists, she says, unearthed traces of her ancestors in the records of the Pale of Settlement. With her usual energy, she now talks of her love for Ukraine. For the Russian propaganda she spent years amplifying, she feels nothing but disgust. Having seen the reality of war, she demands Patriot missiles for Ukraine, and she hopes to convince Trump to provide more aid.
Loomer’s pilgrimage is the biggest success of a Ukrainian campaign to lure the American right, which in the last decade has been surprisingly warm to Moscow. The campaign’s earlier triumph came in 2024 when Ukrainian Baptists persuaded Mike Johnson to pass the $61bn aid package requested by the Biden administration, which had been stuck in Congress for six months. Allegedly, the Ukrainians appealed to the Speaker’s favourite verse of Scripture: “You have come to your royal position for such a time as this.” Under Johnson’s leadership, Congress passed the bill, but the Speaker soon reversed his position on helping Ukraine. That is the trouble with conversions of convenience: once changed, a position can be revised again, with reference to new threats. And the American right is only one front in a wider contest. Across Europe, politicians of post-communist vintage – anti-migrant, anti-green, and quietly loyal to the Kremlin – are changing their positions on Russia’s war with a speed that scrambles the old maps of left and right. Sorting the true conversions from the convenient ones is the old problem beneath the news.
In a podcast conversation posted this month – historians will quote it as a remarkable document of our era – Loomer discussed her experience with Nate Vance, a former Marine and the vice-president’s cousin who spent nearly three years fighting in a Ukrainian volunteer unit. Vance left Ukraine just before his cousin’s inauguration because, he said, the Russians might target his unit to capture him, and he did not want to risk the lives of his comrades. In an interview with Le Figaro, he went as far as calling Trump and JD Vance “Vladimir Putin’s useful idiots”. Yet he remains hopeful that his relation to the vice-president will help the White House revise its Ukrainian policy. Both Vance and Loomer visited Bucha, and both spoke of the atrocities Russian soldiers committed there. Vance was keen to learn the reasons for Loomer’s conversion, and she produced a classic penitent’s script: deceived by the Russians, she changed her stance because she saw the truth of the Ukrainian struggle. She apologised for her earlier mistakes, but she feels no guilt for changing her opinion. In fact, she is proud of her ability to change it.
Built by converts, our civilisation does not trust them. Yet the right to change faith is a basic right, which should be respected as much as the freedom to persevere. A theorist and practitioner of conversion, St Augustine mused about the strange pleasure of watching a battle, real or staged: “Why is it, that man desires to be made sad?… He desires as a spectator to feel sorrow, this very sorrow is his pleasure.” The public is called on not to help but only to grieve, Augustine explained, and this produces “miserable madness”. But this low-risk, high-pleasure partaking in someone else’s suffering is not the only option. Outsiders can help effectively, whether as a soldier like Nate Vance or as a witness like Laura Loomer. In a society that is miserably mad but still retains traces of democracy, witnessing has a political impact.
For Maga, and the Trump movement, the deeper story is what did not change. Loomer’s conversion runs on her oldest fuel, Islamophobia. She praises Ukraine – falsely – as Muslim-free, with Kyiv’s great mosque and the Crimean Tatars invisible to her. She damns Putin as a “coward” for kissing the Qur’an, and recasts Russia as an empire where millions of Muslims dominate Moscow. Her conversion is more durable than it looks, precisely because Ukraine won her over not by curing her bigotry but by capturing it. Though the Qur’an has very little to do with this, Russia’s mutuality with Iran is real, their wars are converging, and the US is involved in both.
More American than Trump, the flamboyant but deeply conservative Loomer has an odd counterpart in Germany: the professional parliamentarian and self-styled communist Sahra Wagenknecht. Born in East Germany and partly trained in the Netherlands, Wagenknecht has developed neo-Stalinist beliefs that would make Jeremy Corbyn look a centrist. Her economics wander – central planning in one decade, social market economy in the next – but her populist conservatism never does. She admired Chávez’s Venezuela, hates green politics, and is hawkish on migrants; she has been an anti-vaxxer, a Eurosceptic and anti-American through and through. Her biggest political passion is Putin’s Russia – sympathy for the regime, indulgence for its invasion of Ukraine, and longing for Russian gas. Too radical even for Die Linke (the Left Party), she split it three years ago to found her own movement, the BSW – the only party in a German parliament since 1871 named after its living leader. Her support is limited, but in Germany’s fragmented politics a small party can be kingmaker, and the BSW plays on both sides of the board at once. In Thuringia it governs with the Christian Democrats; in Saxony-Anhalt, which votes on 6 September, Wagenknecht has signalled that her party could help an AfD minister-president into office. Opposed in everything else, the BSW and the AfD are welded together by a single force: their loyalty to the Kremlin.
On 13 August Björn Höcke, the AfD’s leader in Thuringia, released a video that was half-proposal, half-provocation: he offered Sahra Wagenknecht the premiership of the land. He would tear down, he said, the “firewall” that isolates the AfD, and build a bridge between the populist fringes of right and left. Wagenknecht declined the courtship – a tactical trap, she said, not a genuine offer – admitting along the way that her own Thuringian deputies would not vote for her. The timing is the clue to this kind of party politics: Thuringia’s minister-president, Mario Voigt, has been weakened by a plagiarism scandal. Earlier this year, Voigt was stripped of his doctorate by the Technical University of Chemnitz – the same university, as it happens, that granted Wagenknecht hers – for wholesale borrowings in a dissertation that examined, of all things, the manipulations of American politics in the 2004 Bush-Kerry race. Voigt is suing the university. While a premier does not acknowledge an obvious theft, his rivals are trying to steal his power in the light of day.
The same mix of socialist origins, cultural conservatism, anti-Green sentiment and unavowed Russian sympathies is spreading all over Central Europe. Robert Fico of Slovakia – formerly a Communist, now a Social Democrat – laid carnations in Moscow on 9 May; since then, his statements on Russia and Ukraine have swung so wildly that Loomer and Wagenknecht look righteous by comparison. In Czechia, Andrej Babiš – formerly a Communist and, moreover, a listed agent of the state security service – has created an exotic coalition of populists, xenophobes and motorists that has drastically reduced his country’s involvement in the war in Ukraine. The Czech-led ammunition initiative, the single largest source of Ukraine’s heavy shells, has lost half its donors since Babiš took office. All this matters: Europe now gives Ukraine the lion’s share of its military and economic aid – far more than the US, more than the UK.
In the US, the difference between left and right – two ends of a political horseshoe traditionally bent around domestic policy – is losing out to the antagonism between Russia’s fellow-travellers and their increasingly suspicious opponents. In Europe, pro-Russian actors move freely across the left-right divide, shaping coalitions that were supposed to be impossible in the previous era. The very character of Putin’s regime – left and anti-Western for naïve outsiders, oligarchic and ultranationalist for insiders and beneficiaries – mixes the bright colours of the political rainbow into a grey, indiscriminate mass. Political conversions and unholy unions come quick and easy in this climate. And since conversions are running in both directions, here is a rule of thumb: respect the conversions that come with confessions, like Loomer’s; distrust – even despise – the changes of political behaviour that come with no self-analysis at all, like Fico’s. Augustine would approve.
In war, brute force decides which ideas prevail and whose cause is just. The Trojans lost the argument because they lost the war, and it was the victors who wrote the poems we still enjoy. There are conversions that track truth, there are those that follow power, and some hybridise indistinguishably. Loomer says she went to Ukraine to find truth; her visit happened as Ukraine was turning the pendulum of war in its favour. Should the front give way, many fellow-travellers will revise their loyalties. Loomer’s script could reverse again, as Johnson’s did, but Nate Vance would still be fighting for Ukraine, even if on podcasts. Might-is-right remains the operative philosophy of politics, but the wheel of fortune completes its turn when justice becomes power. This is a lesson of the barbaric war in Ukraine. Every warrior prefers to be on the stronger side – the best warriors make their side the strongest. Ukrainian soldiers, not Western columnists, will determine what the coming European order authorises and what it leaves beyond the pale.
[Further reading: Latin America will not go the way of Venezuela]
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Subscribe here to commentA fine analysis just missing out the one thing that necon politics thrives on,the transactional nature of its relationships.If Ukraine holds the line against Russia then it can claim superiority of tactics and technology emwhich gives it leverage.With Trump or Vance or a myriad of Republican congressmen showing strength is important but deals to secure their base whether in buying US imports or personally lucrative contracts beats religion or ethnicity arguments any day of the year.