Over the weekend, I went to DC to meet with all of the right-wing influencers and content creators who made President Donald Trump’s 2024 win possible. They were everywhere.
The 2024 election was the influencer election and inauguration was no different: There were dozens of pre- and post-inaugural parties and balls this weekend, as well as the big event itself. Theo Von sat in front of Jake and Logan Paul under the Capitol rotunda (well, until the podcaster’s chair collapsed). Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Brett Cooper walked the Turning Point USA red carpet and posed for selfies with fans. Jessic Reed Kraus, writer of the HouseInhabit newsletter, hung out with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Make America Healthy Again ball Monday night.
In August, I published a guide on the Republican and Democratic influencers shaping the 2024 election. The influencers and content creators still matter, and they will be communicating and guiding policy decisions for years to come.
Welcome to Trump 2.0, where these creators have the ears not only of their audiences but of the president as well. Here are some of the ones to keep an eye on over the next four years.
This is an edition of the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
The Podcasters and Streamers
The 2024 election was the breakout cycle for podcasters in politics. Most of the shows Trump went on catered to the manosphere, a loose network of creators who push misogynistic, racist, and pro-male ideology online. This includes people like Joe Rogan, Andrew Schulz, the Paul brothers, and Adin Ross, who shared their Trump interviews with millions and millions of their fans. There’s a second branch too, made up of creators who have branded themselves as the intellectual wing of the modern Republican party, like Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, and Lex Fridman. Fridman’s YouTube podcast reaches millions of viewers every week. Shapiro’s show is one of the most popular ones on Spotify.
These podcasters have amplified Trump and his agenda with very little, if any, pushback. They will likely be key in rallying support for Trump administration decisions.
I spoke briefly with Shapiro on Sunday night, asking what comes next for the GOP and podcasting. “The power continues to grow,” he said. “Legacy media’s completely blown itself out. We’re focused on expanding, not only our brand, but there’s so many other brands that need expansion, I think that it’s gonna be a very rich time for the podcast industry.”
The Meme Pages
DC Draino, the Typical Liberal, RagingAmericans, and Snowflaketears are some of the largest pro-MAGA meme pages on Instagram. Combined, these accounts have over 6 million followers. They act as conduit between GOP leadership priorities and platforms like X and Instagram.
Think of their accounts as news aggregators for people who otherwise may not be consuming it.
The Organizers
While the Democrats worked with influencers over the last election cycle too, no PAC or campaign organized them as effectively and efficiently as the right. Because of Turning Point USA and its leader, Charlie Kirk, many of the GOP’s most popular creators see each other at least a few times a year at the organization’s summits and trainings. According to interviews with some of the right’s top organizers, that infrastructure is only going to grow over the next four years. The organizers themselves have also become influencers to watch.
I wrote about an influencer party (and victory lap) hosted over Inauguration weekend that was put on by CJ Pearson and Raquel Debono. Pearson, a conservative creator with more than 500,000 X followers, cochairs the Republican National Committee’s youth advisory council. He’s played a key role in the party’s adoption of influencers and is planning additional trainings with organizations like the Heritage Foundation.
Debono, the chief marketing officer at Date Right, the conservative dating platform, boasts tens of thousands of followers of her own. More importantly, however, she’s become the premiere party host for young people on the right, engineering a fratty, downtown club scene for young Republicans. Trump campaign adviser Alex Bruesewitz was key in striking many of the creator partnerships that won Trump millions of views.
These events and collabs not only teach creators how to better communicate their values, but define the cultural vibe and set the tone for right-wing content.
The Substackers
Memes and three-hour podcast interviews are powerful tools, but they’re not for everyone. For some audiences, including older ones, reading is their favorite means of consuming information. Substack has found a home with these users, replacing the 2000s political blogosphere.
Jessica Reed Kraus runs the HouseInhabit Substack, which touts nearly 500,000 subscribers. Throughout the 2024 election cycle, she aligned herself closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again movement. She’s become one of the most influential right-leaning writers who primarily caters to women.
And there’s Curtis Yarvin, the techno monarchist philosopher king of Substack. Yarvin threw his own inauguration weekend party that drew “2016-era MAGA figures” like Jack Posobiec and Red Scare podcasters Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova. Yarvin’s influence among the powerful Silicon Valley oligarchs and the irony-poisoned former leftists like Nekrasova positions him as a powerful intellectual and cultural force under the new administration–especially since Vice President JD Vance is a fan of his work.
All of these creators and influencers, regardless of their platform, will be an instrumental part of the Trump White House’s media apparatus. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has even suggested that they may be invited to join the legacy media for daily press briefings. Unlike traditional journalists, though, they are not bound to any ethical guidelines. We’ve already seen the lengths to which many of these people will go for views. How far will they go for Trump?
The Chatroom
So much happened this week. The Department of Government Efficiency is now a real thing. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined other artificial intelligence leaders to announce a new $500 billion project called Stargate at the White House on Tuesday. More than 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists received pardons or sentence commutations.
What struck you the most? What are you worried about? Does anything excite you?
You can leave a comment or send your thoughts to mail@wired.com.
WIRED Reads
The Menswear Guy on What’s Now and What’s Next for the MAGA Aesthetic: My colleague Vittoria Elliott spoke with Derek Guy, the popular menswear influencer on X, critiquing the fits tech execs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk wore to the inauguration on Monday.
A Capitol Rioter’s Son Is Terrified About His Father’s Release: On day one, Trump pardoned and commuted the sentences of nearly 1,600 individuals involved in the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Jackson Reffitt, who reported his father’s involvement in the attack to the FBI, now lives in fear of what his father might do next.
How Meta Tried to Lure TikTok Users to Instagram: In the days before TikTok was set to go dark, Meta ran a ton of ads and released a flood of new features to win over the embattled app’s user base.
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What Else We’re Reading
🔗 The Crypto World Is Already Mad at Trump: Ahead of his inauguration, Trump launched his very own memecoin that quickly became worth billions of dollars in a few short hours. The president’s campaign earned a lot of support from the crypto industry, but this most recent move has some folks scratching their heads. (The Atlantic)
đź”— Welcome to the Era of Gangster Tech Regulation: Elizabeth Lopatto lays out what exactly our new tech oligarchs want out of the new Trump administration and the unsurprising ways they plan on getting it. (The Verge)
🔗 The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers: In a massive new report, Bloomberg analyzed more than 1,200 hours of content and two years of transcripts from MAGA podcast and streaming shows. As we’ve discussed at length in this newsletter, they’re moving young men further right and only growing more popular. (Bloomberg)
The Download
Last year, the Pew Research Center released a report on America’s news influencers. Next month, I’m moderating a virtual panel to take a deeper dive into the data with Mosheh Oinounou, the founder of Mo News, Raven Schwam-Curtis, a content creator, and Galen Stocking, a senior computational social scientist at Pew.
You can sign up here to watch the panel live on February 6 at noon ET. I would love to see you there!
A few other treats for you:
Aaron Parnas, a TikTok news influencer with more than 2 million followers, won Substack’s $25,000 “TikTok Liberation Prize.”
And one good thing about this Congress: Babydog in a wagon.
That’s it for today—thanks again for subscribing. You can get in touch with me via email, Instagram, X, and Signal at makenakelly.32.