The night before president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, right-wing influencers celebrated with cocktails, dancing, and McDonald’s cheeseburgers passed around on platters. They carried ring lights, posed with cardboard cutouts of Elon Musk wearing cowboy hats, and partied with Waka Flocka.
The event was sponsored by TikTok and called the Power 30 awards, to celebrate the right’s online cultural takeover. It took place at the Sax, a club decked out with plush velvet walls and garish gold decor located only a few blocks away from the White House.
In 2024, Trump and the Republicans won the election with TikTok collabs and podcast interviews. At this party and others across Washington DC on Sunday night, dozens of podcasters, influencers, and Republican digital strategists took their victory lap, boozing with their online mutuals and handing out awards for their accomplishments.
“I wanted to recognize the people who paved the way for the president’s return to the White House,” says CJ Pearson, cochair of the RNC’s youth advisory council and a host of Sunday’s event. “We won the influencer election in 2024. We won one of the most important battles, one of the longest standing culture wars of our time.”
This party was for celebrating their victory—and preparing to continue their work under the incoming Trump administration.
Creators and influencers were all over the 2024 election. They were at the Republican and Democratic conventions and the presidential and vice presidential debates. They streamed from fundraisers and rallies, and appeared on every social media app. They took to the airwaves, too—content creators turned podcasters spent countless hours promoting candidates.
While Democrats had spent years building out their cohort of influencers, hosting them at campaign events and even President Joe Biden’s White House, the GOP did it better. Despite the Trump campaign’s steep fundraising disadvantages, it partnered with popular podcasters like the comedian Theo Von and Joe Rogan. The interviews were cost-effective and reached massive audiences, in the millions, within hours of their publication. Trump collaborated with OG vloggers turned professional fighters Jake and Logan Paul, along with Kick streamer Adin Ross and other creators, catering to the “manosphere.” During the presidential debates, similar faces—and others—stowed away in conference rooms that turned into makeshift influencer “war rooms.”
For years, conservative political influencers picked fights with platforms that would, they claimed, “unjustly” ban or fact-check them. But recently, with Elon Musk’s control of X and Mark Zuckerberg’s removal of fact checking and many hate speech protections from Meta’s platforms, times have changed. These creators and influencers aren’t working on the fringes anymore, but have found a home right back on these platforms and in the mainstream.
Throughout the inauguration weekend, Silicon Valley tech companies hosted a variety of creator-focused parties celebrating Trump’s White House takeover. Spotify held a special brunch for podcasters, including the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro. Google and YouTube are hosting their own reception for creators and podcasters, a source familiar told WIRED.
At the Power 30 party sponsored by TikTok, conservative content creators leaned into their newfound patrons, dancing to top 40 hits for hours in Make America Great Again hats with TikTok-labeled ear muffs stretched over them. At another TikTok-sponsored party at the Capital One arena Saturday night, conservative creators received company merch, like a koozie with a graphic of Trump dancing or ear muffs in the company’s highlighter pink and blue colors. (Behind the scenes, TikTok appeared to be in turmoil. The app had gone offline Saturday night ahead of the presumptive ban, but returned Sunday and pushed a notification assuring its users that Trump would save the app once he took office.)
“One of the best parts about my job is actually getting to spend time with our YouTube Creators, because they really do set the culture,” Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, said in a statement following the company’s Sunday creator event. “They are experimenting with new ideas in the media landscape, and it was amazing to have a front row seat this past year.”
At Sunday’s influencer awards party, Trump campaign advisor Alex Bruesewitz, an architect of this winning influencer and online-focused strategy, received an award honoring his digital contributions. Years before joining Trump’s team, Bruesewitz ran X Strategies, a political media agency, working with young, online political candidates like Matt Gaetz. In 2022, he published Winning the Social Media War: How Conservatives Can Fight Back, Reclaim the Narrative, and Turn the Tides Against the Left, a book instructing Republicans on how to use social media for electoral gains.
“Social media has created an entirely new battlefront for us,” Bruesewitz wrote in 2022. “We have to fight back, we will make them listen, and we will reopen the marketplace.”
Bruesewitz saw the potential podcasts had to bring Trump’s message to voters who weren’t already hearing it. The podcasts played a major role in Trump’s election, providing him with massive audiences of what Bruesewitz described as “medium and low propensity male voters” in an interview WIRED after the election. It was these voters, who Bruesewitz said don’t usually consume mainstream media, that secured the win.
Others agreed: Shapiro told WIRED on Sunday that podcasts “gave a window into the authenticity of the candidates.”
And according to Pearson, this year’s conservative influencer takeover is just the beginning.
Over the summer, Pearson hosted an event with the Heritage Foundation to train more than two dozen conservative creators on how to communicate their politics with voters online. Savannah Chrisley, Sean Mike Kelly, and Emily Saves America, some of whom came out of the Turning Point USA ambassador program, attended the event.
Since 2019, Turning Point has recruited and trained at least 400 conservative influencers in what is essentially an incubator. Some of the most popular influencers on the right have come out of Turning Point’s program, including Alex Clark, Benny Johnson, and Candace Owens. The training typically takes place at summits held around the country where Turning Point leadership, like Charlie Kirk and Tyler Bowyer, teach attendees how to post. Once an influencer is onboarded onto Turning Point’s influencer program, the organization’s public relations team actively pitches them to producers on networks like Fox News. They’re invited to special events where speakers (including Trump and Tucker Carlson) give speeches and allow for creators to network and collaborate to grow their audiences.
“TPUSA has partnered with hundreds of dynamic personalities and content creators, from in-house contributors crafting content five days a week to influencers seamlessly integrating the message of freedom into their online presence and attending our premier events,” the organization’s website says.
“We instituted our influencer program right after Trump got elected the first time,” Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, told WIRED on Sunday. “The left has gotten lazy depending on Hollywood for influence, while we’ve had homegrown influencers that come right here from Turning Point. The amount of reach we’ve received is in the billions with people that people actually listen to while the left has relied on Hollywood.”
GOP operatives are already planning new influencer training events to take place. “In the coming months we’ll be recruiting up and coming influencers, molding them, investing in them, and helping them grow their platforms,” says Pearson. “And this event also is a little bit of a kickoff to that, so we’re super excited about it.”
The Biden White House invited influencers to events and special briefings, but the incoming Trump administration seems eager to incorporate them into its everyday media apparatus. At Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing for defense secretary, there were at least two conservative creators in the room. Graham Allen and Rob Smith, a pair of veterans and Turning Point USA influencers, sat in on the hearing, shooting video clips and writing tweets supporting Trump’s nominee and combating any criticism he received in real time online.
When asked if the influencers were requested by the Trump team to attend and create content at Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Trump advisor Jason Miller told WIRED, “Hegseth has many friends, former military colleagues, Gold Star families, and more who back his nomination, dozens of which are here to support him today!”
On Monday, a handful of the creators who bolstered Trump’s campaign online will attend the incoming president’s inaugural events. These moments will not only symbolize a new political era in the US, but a cultural one: one where people like Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, Von, and the Paul brothers have the ear of the president.
“We’ve won a really important battle in the culture war but it’s certainly not over. The war continues,” Matt Walsh, a conservative political commentator for the Daily Wire, told WIRED on Saturday.