The Influencer

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The Old Post Office is a hulking granite building with Romanesque turrets and a looming clocktower that stands out from the mostly drab office buildings lining Pennsylvania Avenue a few blocks from the White House. During Donald Trump’s first term, the building was home to the Trump International Hotel, a base of operations for anyone looking to have access to, or curry favor with, the administration. On any given day, you might have spotted Mike Lindell taking selfies with tourists, or Eric Bolling posted up at his favorite corner table. Rudy Giuliani held court at a restaurant there so often, the staff made a special nameplate for what they jokingly dubbed his “private office.”

Today, the property is a Waldorf Astoria—the Trump family sold the lease in 2022—and while its lobby is no longer the center of gravity it once was, it retains a special status as something of a holy relic for a certain kind of conservative operative. On a recent rainy Wednesday afternoon, influence-seeking foreign businessmen stood smoking cigarettes on the arcaded front steps while valet drivers attended to a line of Range Rovers and Porsches; inside, Sean Hannity strode through the atrium, on the way to or from some meeting. On a velveteen couch off the lobby bar, Alex Bruesewitz, a baby-faced political operative whose fortunes have risen with Trump’s return to power, sat dressed in an off-white Hugo Boss shirt and jeans, nursing a seltzer and lime.

Bruesewitz, who is twenty-eight years old, is hardly a household name. If you recognize him at all, it might be from his unflattering cameo in an early-November article in The Atlantic, where he took the fall for the seemingly disastrous decision to invite the foul-mouthed comedian Tony Hinchcliffe to speak at Trump’s election-eve rally at Madison Square Garden—Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” (Bruesewitz denies sending the invite, but refused to distance himself from Hinchcliffe: “He’s the top roast comedian.”) In December, he made news again when he collapsed onstage in the middle of a speech at the New York Young Republicans’ winter gala. (He says he was suffering from dehydration.) 

Online, Bruesewitz has made a name for himself as a ruthless digital combatant. In 2022, he wrote a book, Winning the Social Media War, which he put forth as “a guide to beating back on a political Left who seemingly is willing to undermine each and every one of our political institutions.” (Chapter One: “Narrative Is Everything.”) He started a bitter online feud with supporters of Ron DeSantis—which later spilled out into a physical confrontation—when he shared a photo of a twenty-three-year-old DeSantis seemingly drinking with high school students. More recently, in March, he tweeted menacingly at former representatives Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, who both served on the January 6 Committee and were preemptively pardoned by Joe Biden, warning them that their pardons “might not be legally valid” if they were signed by autopen. (“Hope you have a good weekend!”) “I’ve had a unique ability to get reactions out of adversaries of the president, adversaries of the MAGA movement, that certainly has helped my brand and my street cred,” Bruesewitz told me. “And I think my usage of social media was ultimately what got me into the room with the president and his family.” 

Inside Trumpworld, Bruesewitz is almost ubiquitous, his voice often indistinguishable from Trump’s online brand. He is a senior adviser to Trump’s political leadership PAC, Never Surrender, and runs the digital media for much of the president’s political operation, including the immensely powerful X accounts @TrumpWarRoom and @TeamTrump. Last weekend, he was instrumental in managing the viral (and controversial) visit of Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley to Trump’s New Jersey golf course—he estimates he spent sixteen hours with the two men. (After Bruesewitz collapsed last year, Trump called in to the event, offering reassurances: “I know that Alex is gonna be fine, because he’s a tough son of a gun. There’s no doubt about that.”)

Bruesewitz’s public persona may obscure his real influence: in the crucial final months leading up to the election, he was one of the leading proponents of Trump’s strategy of reaching young male voters through a slew of podcast interviews with comedians or internet personalities not known for their interest in news or politics—the so-called “manosphere.” Over the course of the late summer and fall, in part owing to Bruesewitz’s encouragement and advance work, Trump appeared on nearly a dozen of these shows. It was a risky, unconventional choice that, by all accounts, paid off: these podcasters’ audiences were disproportionately made up of young men who were undecided or politically uninvolved—and swung dramatically in his favor. By the time the Kamala Harris campaign responded, engaging in talks with the enormously popular Joe Rogan Experience, it was too late. Rogan, who spoke with Trump for three hours just before the election, would go on to endorse Trump to his millions of fans.

“It’s interesting that a lot of these more mainstream and apolitical influencers, or podcasters or entertainers or whatever you want to call it, were more impactful at actually asking real journalistic questions last year than the majority of journalists themselves,” Bruesewitz said.

In the 1970s, a young Roger Ailes wrote a memo for the Nixon White House titled “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News”: “Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication,” Ailes, then in his mid-twenties, wrote. He called for the Republican Party to activate a new political base by creating content designed to reach this untapped audience.

Bruesewitz is hardly the first person to see the value in using social media and new digital formats in a similar way—but he is among those least afraid of embracing the most trollish creators on those platforms. The podcasters Trump spent time with in 2024 are profane, often even lewd, characters, prone to outlandish and unpredictable acts. Most mainstream politicians wouldn’t have gone near them. They also draw millions of passionate young fans who are increasingly uninterested in the offerings of mainstream media—or the Democratic establishment. “The Democrats became the system, absolutely,” Bruesewitz said. “And there’s always rebelling against the system. When you’re a sixteen- or eighteen- or twenty-year-old young man, you wanna rebel.”

By the time Bruesewitz joined the campaign, on July 1, Trump had already begun dabbling in select influencer pods. In 2022, at the urging of the UFC president Dana White, he’d recorded an interview with the Nelk Boys, a popular group of young influencers who were known mostly for online pranks. (In 2019, a member of the group was arrested after smearing fake blood on his clothes and filming himself asking people at a bookstore for help in covering up a crime.) The pod, recorded at Mar-a-Lago, was the most popular episode of the show to date, bringing in more than five million views in twenty-four hours on YouTube before it was taken down, for violating the company’s policy on spreading election misinformation. 

Trump’s youngest son, Barron, was also a big fan of the shows, and in particular a provocative livestreamer named Adin Ross. In 2023, Ross was permanently suspended from the video game streaming platform Twitch, for allowing a display of hateful slurs—his eighth suspension, all of them now lifted. He’d also repeatedly hosted the white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his stream, and offered support to the accused human trafficker Andrew Tate. (Most recently he beefed with basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, both online and in real life at a UFC fight, which resulted in Ross threatening Shaq with a lawsuit.) At a rally in July, Barron introduced Ross to his father, saying, “Dad, this is who I’ve been talking about,” as Ross recently recounted on an episode of the Full Send Podcast. (Sample dialogue: “Barron’s a really, really cool guy.” “Guy’s probably hung like a fucking horse, too.”) 

Over the next few days, Ross and Bruesewitz spoke on the phone to cook up concepts for the show, including an idea for a social media video making light of Trump’s distinctive style of dancing. (The video has seventy million views on TikTok alone.) “Prepping him was me sitting with him, and I said, ‘Sir, have you heard about this rapper Young Thug?’” Bruesewitz recalled. He was looking for areas of common interest, and had settled on one: Young Thug, a friend of Ross’s, was being prosecuted by Fani Willis, the same Atlanta district attorney who went after Trump. “I explained the situation to him, and immediately he was asking a ton of questions, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s not fair.’ And then a couple days later is when the podcast happens, and there he is on the podcast saying, ‘Look, Young Thug needs to be treated fairly.’” The moment made headlines and memes and proved to be an ideal clip for one of the hardest-to-reach venues in American politics: the group chat with the boys.

Trump loved how much attention the stream was getting—“He kept talking about it,” Bruesewitz recalled—and Bruesewitz sensed an opportunity. The next day, he presented Trump with a tally of not just the show’s official livestream numbers—which topped out at around 600,000—but all of the clips he could find going viral on the secondary market. “So instead of thinking, Hey, this interview got three million views, I was like, ‘Sir, your interview got 110 million views.’ And he’d be like, ‘Insane!’” (Trump later thanked Barron for setting up the episode, in a post on Truth Social in which he also claimed that the show had drawn “over 100 million views/hits.”)

It wasn’t the most precise method for tabulating reach, Bruesewitz knew, but it felt like a more accurate representation of the appearances’ actual impact. And it certainly piqued the former president’s interest. “I don’t know if someone was necessarily presenting him with how viral they were actually going,” he said. “They might just show him the YouTube views, which had a couple million impressions or whatever. But nobody started counting the secondary clip market until I came.” 

A few days later, Susie Wiles, the campaign cochair, sent Bruesewitz a list of more podcasters suggested by White, among them the comedian Theo Von and the former football player Will Compton. “She said, ‘Go get the president on board.’” Bruesewitz called Trump while he was golfing. “He’s like, ‘The Adin Ross numbers were monsters.’ I said, ‘Yes, they were.’ And I was like, ‘We’ve got to keep that momentum going.’” He pitched Trump on the next possible podcasts. “‘You like ’em, Alex?’” Trump said. “I said, ‘I do.’ He goes, ‘Call Barron and see what Barron thinks. And if you and Barron like it, we’ll do it.’”

“I was full MAGA out of the gate,” Bruesewitz was saying, not long after we sat down at the Waldorf Astoria. “But it didn’t happen overnight for me to get on its radar.” Bruesewitz grew his profile in much the same way Trump did—through relentless provocation. Raised in the small town of Ripon, Wisconsin—billed as the “birthplace of the Republican Party” (meaning, of course, the traditional one)—he spent his high school study hall periods honing his craft on Twitter. “Instead of doing his history homework or something, Alex was trying to figure out a way to grow his social media presence,” Evan Long, his childhood best friend, recalled. When his teachers traveled to the capitol to protest the Republican governor Scott Walker, he found himself repulsed. “I realized that I wanted to be the opposite of what they were doing at all costs,” he wrote in his book.

After graduation, Bruesewitz moved directly to DC: “I like to joke that I went to Trump University, and this”—gesturing at the hotel lobby—“was my college campus.” A retweet from then-candidate Trump, in 2015, had helped launch him into the spotlight of early MAGA media culture. In 2017, he opened a strategic communications firm, X Strategies, and quickly built a portfolio of rising right-wing media stars, like a young Anna Paulina Luna, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. The job mostly consisted of growing their social media accounts—and firing missives at anyone who got in the way. 

“The name of the game on X is to talk about what people are talking about,” he said. “Talk about the trending topics. A lot of the traditional GOP staff would be tweeting about free trade when ‘securing the border’ or ‘the border invasion’ was prevalent. They just didn’t get it. And the president and MAGA Republicans talked about what people wanted to talk about.”

He sees in the young men who have embraced Trump online and through podcasts something not unlike his own youth: a desire for something raw and unvarnished, a rejection of the impulse to protect everyone’s feelings. “The woke ideology, having to stand in front of your class and announce what your pronouns are, that was never something that became popular,” he said. “The kids hated it. They thought it was stupid. They thought it was a joke and they mocked it, and they started mocking those that enforced it, and those who enforced it were the Democrats.”

The strictures of the pandemic accelerated this process. “COVID was a massive game changer for young people—I think it red-pilled a lot of young people,” Bruesewitz said. “I mean, they took away a lot of great memories from a lot of these kids. They took away their homecomings, they took away their proms, they took away from people being able to sit in the stands to cheer for them at sporting events. That kind of sucked for them.”

He went on, “The millennials might be the most educated generation of all time, but they’re not having families, they’re not having children, they’re not happy in their careers, and they’re not fulfilled in a lot of their lives. And a lot of the Gen Z generation, they loved their siblings that might be millennials, but they didn’t want to follow in their footsteps.”

In this context, the impact that influencer celebrities had on politics without any real sophistication on the topic is central to their appeal—it’s the ultimate repudiation of the existing guardrails of power. “It’s a different breed of celebrity,” he said. “The influencers do not need to appease the same people. The movie producers, the people that used to be able to make you famous in Hollywood, do not have the power that they used to, because you can make yourself famous online off of one viral moment.”

Bruesewitz acknowledges that the connection these outlets have with their audiences taps into a desire for content that is more easily digestible and popular, but he disagrees with the impression that Trump’s podcast interviews were lacking in substance. “Yeah, they were fun. And yeah, they showed a different side of him, but he was pressed on policy,” he insisted. “If you go back to the Andrew Schulz podcast, a large section of that podcast was dedicated to President Trump’s position on IVF.”

In recent weeks, the actual policies of the Trump administration have resulted in some of the same influencers who supported the president shifting uncomfortably at their mics. In March, Von said he was “conflicted” about Trump’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war. Rogan described Trump’s tariff threats against Canada as “stupid,” and later criticized the administration’s policy of deporting supposed gang members to El Salvador without due process. “We gotta be careful we don’t become monsters while fighting monsters,” he said.

It’s left to be seen if Trump himself will continue to embrace the influencers. In recent weeks, he seems to have preferred spending time with more traditional outlets, like Time, and even The Atlantic. But influencer culture remains central to his media strategy—the White House press room now has a dedicated “new media seat” for fringier figures, like Breitbart and the podcaster Tim Pool.

Bruesewitz’s role in making all these podcast interviews happen can also sometimes be overstated. He acknowledges that White was instrumental in introducing Trump to the genre and many of its stars, and, even by Bruesewitz’s own account, he wasn’t directly involved in arranging the biggest interview of all, with Rogan—that was Jared Kushner and Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Don Jr., the eldest son, helped arrange an interview with Sean Ryan, a former Navy SEAL, he said. “The family deserves a lot of credit—all of the family,” Bruesewitz said. “Eric was very hands-on with our social media.”

He also doesn’t think that engagement with influencer culture will necessarily work for politicians not named Trump. “I don’t know if it should be used by everybody,” he said. “I don’t think it will be used by everybody. I don’t think you’re going to see local congresspeople explore this approach—I believe they will still focus on more of the traditional means of campaigning. Part of the reason is that the lifestyle podcasts, they don’t wanna talk to them, they don’t care about them. But I think from a national standpoint, if you’re running for president, I think it has to be part of the conversation. You have to have that at your disposal, and you have to be able to come across as authentic. I think that the days of the buttoned-up, holier-than-thou act of the politicians of the past, it’s not going to fly anymore.”

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