As Sam Stein observes:

> Loomer isn't the disease, she's the product of a MAGA movement that both attracts and produces attention-hungry fantasists"a movement that routinely whips up threats against minority communities and - not so long ago - attempted an insurrection.

"The former president has been a prolific conspiracy theorist for decades," observes Stein. "Let's take a tour through what Trump was thinking even before Loomer joined his entourage":

Trump was the de facto leader of the Obama birther movement, even casually suggesting that the director of the Hawaii Department of Health, who died in a plane crash, was murdered as part of a coverup.
He openly mused that former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers wrote Obama's memoir and that Obama never actually went to Columbia University.
He floated the idea that Ted Cruz's father had ties to Lee Harvey Oswald. He raised doubts about Vince Foster's suicide.
He wondered aloud if Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was suffocated to death.
He pushed the story that Muslims in New Jersey were cheering after 9/11.
He raised the idea that Marco Rubio was ineligible to be president because his parents weren't yet U.S. citizens at the time of his birth. He did the same about Ted Cruz. And Nikki Haley. And Kamala Harris, too.
He questioned the authenticity of the Access Hollywood tape (this was after he apologized for it).
He claimed Obama had him wiretapped at Trump Tower.
He claimed the death toll from Hurricane Maria was inflated to make him look bad.
He said the noise from windmills causes cancer.
He pushed a video saying that the Clintons killed Jeffrey Epstein.
He said Ukraine could be hiding Hillary Clinton's missing emails.
He said that "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
He said that fears about asbestos were a conspiracy designed to line the pockets of asbestos-cleanup companies run by the mob.
He retweeted several conspiracy theories around the death of Osama bin Laden (that it could have been a body double).
He has said jobs numbers are manipulated, the unemployment figure was made up, the COVID death numbers were inflated, the Obamacare enrollment numbers were exaggerated, and the border crossing numbers "manipulated" to make the Obama administration look better.
And, of course, he's spread a steady stream of lies about election numbers. The 2012 one: dead people voted for Obama. The 2016 one: cheating in blue states like California and New York deprived him of a popular vote win. The 2020 one . . . where do we even start? Sharpies did not invalidate Trump votes; Dominion did not either. People weren't throwing away bags filled with Trump ballots or randomly finding suitcases filled with Biden ones. Thousands of dead people didn't vote multiple times. And, no, Italians did not use military technology to tamper with U.S. voting machines.