Katy Balls, Washington Editor
Monday July 27 2026, 8.34pmBST, The Times
It was an image that captured the world’s attention. Laura Loomer sat opposite Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, Ukraine. Just a year ago, the 33-year-old Maga influencer and right-wing conspiracy theorist was claiming on social media that Ukraine was “full of Nazis”. Now Loomer, who has a reputation in DC as a Trump whisperer, was apologising for falling for Russian propaganda.
Trump seemed impressed. He approvingly shared a clip of the interview with the caption “very good!!!”. As Trump prepares to meet the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office on Tuesday, it’s leading to cautious optimism that the Trump administration and Maga base are starting to view Ukraine more favourably in a stark contrast to the scenes last year when Zelensky fell out with the president and his deputy on live television and Trump declared that “without us, you don’t have any cards”.
For some behind the scenes, this has been a mission long in the making: trying to convert a sceptical Trump and his supporters to the Ukrainian cause. While Loomer organised her own trip (she has faced calls from other Maga influencers to reveal who — if anyone — funded the trip), her producer Andrew Moore visited earlier this year in a visit facilitated by Steven Moore, a former Republican chief of staff who founded the Ukraine Freedom Project aimed at countering Russian propaganda.
“Laura had been making increasingly pro-Ukraine posts on social media and we started paying attention,” he told The Times. “Through our network, we reached out to her editor Andrew Moore and said: ‘We’re putting together a journalist trip to Ukraine, come with us.’ He said yes.”
Moore added: “We took him, we didn’t put on a show or anything, we just embedded him with troops that were shooting down Shahed drones, spent an afternoon with a military unit that is fighting the drone war, put him together with a Christian relief organisation. He was able to report back to Laura: ‘Yeah, I think this is for real.’”
Moore, who spent seven years working on Capitol Hill, mostly as chief of staff for the former chief deputy Republican Party whip Pete Roskam, moved to Kyiv early on in the conflict, largely to focus on humanitarian efforts. He did so after calls from concerned friends in the capital.
However, from Ukraine he started to have worrying conversations with Republicans back in DC. “I’m calling them on the phone and they’re lecturing me on things that are going on there: ‘Ukraine can never win. Don’t you know they’re full of Nazis and Vladimir Putin is a great Christian leader.’ The one that really got me: ‘Zelensky is persecuting Christians,’” he recalls.
So Moore became part of the wider effort — which has included US journalists based in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government — focusing on winning over American conservatives. The idea is simple: spend less time on those already converted and focus on Trump’s opinion. He realised that to get to Trump you needed to meet his allies where they were, even if that meant having to spend time debunking conspiracy theories.
So Moore became part of the wider effort — which has included US journalists based in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government — focusing on winning over American conservatives. The idea is simple: spend less time on those already converted and focus on Trump’s opinion. He realised that to get to Trump you needed to meet his allies where they were, even if that meant having to spend time debunking conspiracy theories.
“I’ve been working Republican politics all my life,” Moore says. “There are ways to shift public opinion and public policy. It’s not that complicated. There are people around the president that he listens to and Laura Loomer is one, and there are others that we’ve been able to help more fully understand what’s happening in Ukraine.”
This has included a focus on faith, telling Republicans that despite what they might read or hear on a podcast, Putin is not a great Christian leader. Tucker Carlson is among the voices pitching Russia as a defender of Christian family values. “Forty-seven per cent of Trump’s voters are evangelical Christians. Another 25 per cent are Catholic. So if you want to effect change in the Republican Party, telling the truth to American Christians about what’s going on in Ukraine is a good pathway to doing that,” says Moore.
In 2023, the pro-Ukraine speaker Kevin McCarthy was pushed out of the House of Representatives after passing a $300 million aid bill for Ukraine which caused Maga Republicans to retaliate by teaming up with the Democrats to force him out. Mike Johnson eventually took his place; he had a record of voting against Ukraine aid. There began an effort to meet Johnson where he was by appealing to his deep Christian faith.
The Ukrainian Baptist Serhii Haidarzhy, who lost his wife and four-month-old son, travelled to DC in a trip facilitated by the Ukraine Project to meet Johnson and share his story. The idea was to give the speaker the “emotional connection” about the need to support Ukraine. Johnson later risked his job when he put up a bill that included $60 billion of funding for Ukraine, despite threats from Trump loyalists that they would oust him as a result. Earlier this year he told The Times of the decision: “That was one of the most difficult things we did.”
Another effort has been to depict Putin as the worst thing one can be in Trump’s eyes: a loser. European leaders have been working to highlight Ukraine’s success in holding off Russian offensive operations while US defence figures have been impressed by Ukraine’s drone technology. The Ukraine Project tried its own effort with a “Putin is a loser” advert which claimed that Putin lost 1.4 million men to take an area the size of Palm Beach County. According to their data, 4,000 West Wing insiders saw the ad 127 times on average.
Those who have worked on lobbying Republican politicians and Maga influencers over the past few years say that some of their work was not made easy by Zelensky himself. “If he’d ever talked to any Republican in the world, he would not have done these things — but he was getting bad advice from left-leaning people,” says one pro-Ukraine campaigner.
Insiders cite several own-goals such as an appearance during the US presidential campaign with Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro at an ammunition plant in the swing state. While officials insisted this was not a campaign visit, it led to complaints from Republicans that a foreign leader was trying to influence the election.
As for that infamous Oval Office meeting, there were some Republicans who thought Zelensky should not have attended — and sent a foreign minister instead — as talks over the mineral deal were too tense and the anti-Ukraine sentiment in the movement too high. The late Lindsey Graham advised him to smile for the president, flatter him and leave. Instead the meeting proved to be a political trap which Zelensky spent months recovering from.
When the Ukrainian leader returns to the Oval Office on Tuesday, there are unlikely to be such repeats. Instead, Zelensky — who spent Monday in London with Andy Burnham, the prime minister, and has taken sounding from Republicans and EU counterparts on tactics — will turn up in a suit and play the game, focusing on the audience of one.
To read the full story, please go to The Times website.
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