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Brian Glenn was in Davos, Switzerland, and he was exhausted. “The time change alone can just whip you, you know?” he said. “You’ll go cross-eyed.”
It was January, and Glenn was covering the World Economic Forum for Real America’s Voice, the pro-MAGA broadcaster where he has worked since 2024. It was the first time Glenn or the network had attended the conference, and he was gushing to me about Donald Trump’s speech earlier that day, in which the president had aired his long-standing desire to take over Greenland. (Partway through, Trump started referring to Greenland as “Iceland.”) It was “a powerhouse speech,” Glenn said. “I’ve called it tipping over the apple cart of the old world order,” he said. “His speech today was very much America First.”
Glenn, who is fifty-six, is perhaps the most prominent and influential MAGA reporter covering Trump’s White House. His often fawning questions have made the rounds on social media as anecdotal evidence of how the administration has embraced the MAGA media ecosystem while attacking the mainstream press. Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration, Glenn happily accepted a “Trump Was Right About Everything!” hat from the president, and he later praised Trump’s “perfect health report,” asking: “How do you stay so healthy? How do you stay so energized?” (Trump replied: “That’s a nice question. I like this guy!”) At an Oval Office event with automakers in December, before Glenn could ask a single question, Trump announced: “We love you, Brian.”
“I love you, too,” Glenn replied.
Glenn has developed an audience among Trump supporters, Christian Datoc, a White House reporter for the Washington Examiner, told me. “But he is also growing his notoriety among people watching the mainstream outlets who think he is part of the problem.”
Glenn is tall, broad-shouldered, and open about his skin-care regimen, which features a stem cell moisturizer and related treatments. “They actually inject stem cells around your face to help your face glow,” he said. He also makes “unapologetic” use of Botox. As the fiancé of former Trump loyalist-in-chief Marjorie Taylor Greene, he was once an insider’s insider, with the kind of access to Trumpworld that most journalists only dream about. He was also the rare reporter in Trump’s second term who could point to direct and immediate impact: In September, he asked the president about the White House Peace Vigil—a daily protest on Pennsylvania Avenue that has called for nuclear disarmament since 1981—and labeled it an “eyesore.” Two days later, the White House dismantled the demonstration. “That was activist of me to help clean up DC,” Glenn told me.
But in November, when Greene and Trump fell out over the president’s opposition to releasing files concerning Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, Glenn was tugged in two directions, a reflection of growing divisions within the MAGA base. “Brian and former Rep. Greene do seem to be illustrative of the cracks growing within President Trump’s coalition,” Datoc said.
Late last year, after Greene resigned from Congress, Glenn left Washington and moved to his fiancée’s hometown of Rome, Georgia, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. In short order, Greene, once a staunch Trump supporter, and Glenn, still a staunch Trump supporter, faced rising vitriol—including death threats—from elements of the MAGA base to which they had devoted the latest chapter of their professional lives.
Glenn now divides his time between Washington and Georgia, where he broadcasts to Trumpworld from a studio that Real America’s Voice built in Greene’s house. But sometimes he thinks about leaving it all behind. “I go through phases where I absolutely want to pack up, pick up my bat and ball, and go home,” he said.
Glenn has been infatuated with Trump since 2015. “I think God told me back then that I would be doing exactly what I’m doing right now. He just said, ‘You’re going to work for the president,’” Glenn said. “I’m not employed by him, but I feel like our messaging helps support his America First agenda.”
But in Davos, he described being worn out, not just from the six-hour time difference, but from the political chaos he’d consumed for years, and now felt almost consumed by. “Our news cycle has been so heavy the last month, with everything in Minnesota, everything in Venezuela,” he said. “Everything around the world right now is so heavy that I think everyone in our industry is getting tired.”
Glenn never sought a career in political reporting. “I like lifestyle stuff. I like cooking. I like music. I like cars. I like fashion. I like talking,” he said. Raised outside Houston, he grew up going to a Methodist church and studied communications at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, where he joined the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. He spent the first chunk of his career working a variety of jobs at local TV and radio stations in Texas, including KBTV in Port Arthur.
Angel San Juan joined KBTV as news director in 2009. At the time, Glenn was working in the sales department but wanted to be on camera. San Juan tapped him to do live shots for the morning show and, later, to cohost an afternoon lifestyle program. Glenn once wrestled mixed martial arts fighters live on air, San Juan recalled. “Brian Glenn was born to entertain,” San Juan said. “He’s just the kind of guy that would basically do anything for entertainment purposes.” Reflecting on his start, Glenn agreed that he prioritized entertainment. “I was your beer fest guy,” he said. “In my mind, if I didn’t get on the edge of what was acceptable on TV or what was too much on TV at the time, then I wasn’t doing my job.”
That tendency has been evident in his White House coverage. He became internet famous—beyond MAGAworld—in February of 2025, when he asked Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, why he wore military-style clothing instead of formal attire to his meetings at the White House. “I know, war garb,” Glenn told me. “But the war is two thousand miles away. The war’s not here.” (Like Greene, Glenn opposes US aid to Ukraine, which is actually more than four thousand miles from Washington.)
Glenn was in the room because the White House had co-opted the press pool days earlier, barring the Associated Press for declining to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Glenn’s question contributed to Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s tirade against Zelensky, which shocked viewers and veteran White House reporters and dominated headlines for days. “I didn’t think it would create the earthquake that it did,” Glenn said. “I was like the punch in a bar fight.” Soon after the spat, Glenn wrote in a social media post that he had “extreme empathy for the people of Ukraine” but doubled down on his disdain for Zelensky’s sartorial choices.
When Zelensky visited the White House again in August of 2025, he wore a black suit. “President Zelensky, you look fabulous in that suit,” Glenn told the Ukrainian leader approvingly.
Glenn’s former colleagues in Texas say he was not openly political when they worked with him. “He never talked politics in the newsroom,” Nick Canizales, a colleague at KBTV, recalled.
Glenn traces his transformation to the COVID-19 pandemic. “I was very vocal that I did not like the government shutdown,” he said, referring to stay-at-home orders that he thought infringed on personal liberties. Although he lived in Texas, where shutdown orders were shorter and less strict, “I went on social media one day, and I just went scorched-earth on all of COVID,” Glenn said. Nexstar, his employer at the time, warned him to stop, but he kept posting and was ultimately fired.
A few months later, Glenn stumbled on the Right Side Broadcasting Network and sent the company a Facebook message asking for a job. The network is best known for its YouTube channel, which has hosted feeds of almost every Trump rally, town hall, and public appearance. While working at Right Side, Glenn broadcast live from Trump rallies, sometimes for up to seven and a half hours straight. “It’s normal people giving normal people the news,” Joe Seales, the founder of Right Side, told Politico Magazine in 2017.
Glenn next joined Real America’s Voice, which has traveled from the fringes of American media to the center of the MAGA movement, hastened by the Trump administration’s warm welcome of right-wing journalists and influencers. The channel, whose tagline is “Just real news and honest views,” has spread false information about the outcome of the 2020 election and noncitizen voting; it also helped distribute Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast when it was removed from mainstream platforms such as Spotify in 2020, because Bannon discussed beheading federal officials.
Besides Bannon, Real America’s Voice airs a daily show hosted by Jack Posobiec, another influential right-wing commentator. The Charlie Kirk Show podcast also airs on the network, now hosted by a rotating cast of MAGA commentators and influencers.
Robert Sigg, a Colorado-based media executive who in 2006 was convicted of federal mortgage fraud, launched Real America’s Voice in 2018 through his company Performance One Media, which also owns a weather network, WeatherNation. Initially called America’s Voice, the conservative network rebranded to Real America’s Voice in 2020 over concerns that Trump would confuse it with Voice of America. As of February, it’s available on Amazon Prime Video. Neither Performance One Media nor Sigg responded to requests for comment.
Glenn met Greene in 2022, when he was still working at Right Side. “I saw her at a rally one day, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s the mystical MTG. Anybody that has their own acronym has got to be pretty interesting,’” he told me. “She’s so little and tiny. She’s just like a little American Girl doll.” They started dating the following year, when both were in the midst of divorce proceedings. Their shared love of Trump was a pillar of their romance, Glenn said.
Glenn’s relationship with Greene gave him unusual access to the halls of power, at least for a time. One day in December, he used a members-only lapel pin, bestowed by Greene, to bypass security so he could reach Greene’s office before she left to cast her final votes as a congresswoman.
Glenn once told me jokingly that, in the Trump-Greene split, MTG got “full custody of little Brian.” Greene agreed: “I definitely won in the divorce.”
At the start of Greene and Trump’s conflict, Laura Loomer, the far-right activist who has feuded with Greene since at least 2024, called on the White House to revoke Glenn’s press pass. She called Glenn “a simp” for Greene, saying, “Having her boyfriend in the White House is a liability for President Trump.” (Glenn told me that Loomer “has exposed some corruption” but is “extremely toxic to everyone.”)
“I fight more with the MAGA cultist booger-eaters on the internet than I do anybody on the left,” Glenn said. “If you step out of line with what they think MAGA is, they just unleash the bots and the trolls on you, and try to basically eliminate your existence in the space.”
On a cold Wednesday morning in the middle of December, Glenn arrived at the White House toting a camouflage “man bag” and a large iced coffee. It was one of his last days reporting from the president’s home on a daily basis. Ever the entertainer, he pointed to a spot on the lawn outside the West Wing where he had made snow angels on air earlier that month. “It’s gonna be hard to tear me away from this,” he said.
He tries to distinguish himself from other MAGA reporters and pro-Trump influencers who call themselves journalists. “They’ll support no matter what, even if it doesn’t even make sense,” Glenn said, noting that he has disagreed with Trump on the wisdom of US military strikes against Iran. Still, Glenn is clear about his biases. “Do I wear, sometimes, a little bit of an activist hat? Yeah. It would be disingenuous to say that it’s not there, because I want what’s best for this country.”
Unlike other MAGA journalists, Glenn said, he cares about the truth. “I don’t do fake news. I don’t do all that bullshit. I just do my own thing,” he said, tapping my arm to emphasize his point. “I am the epitome of America First.” Yet during our time together, Glenn made plenty of false claims, including that the 2020 presidential election was rigged; that the White House Peace Vigil had become an “antifa-type place”; and that reporters had been eavesdropping on sensitive meetings at the Pentagon, so the administration was right to have kicked them out.
Several White House reporters, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about a colleague and because their employers did not authorize them to comment, told me that Glenn is kind and personable. Some said they liked that gaggles tend to run longer when he’s there because Trump enjoys talking to him. Datoc said Glenn has received less preferential treatment since Greene resigned, but “he still shows up with a smile on his face and is a workhorse for his network.”
Just because other reporters like Glenn as a person, though, doesn’t mean they respect his work. “It’s sort of uncomfortable saying that he is a hundred percent a journalist,” a White House reporter said. “He doesn’t mind being part of this buddy comedy with Trump.”
At his new home in Georgia, Glenn typically wakes around five in the morning, a habit from his time working on a morning show in Dallas years ago. Glenn and Greene drink coffee and watch birds on their Birdbuddy, an AI-powered feeder outside their living room. Glenn usually cooks breakfast—scrambled eggs, bacon—before hosting a daily politics radio show, American Sunrise Early Edition, from seven to eight.
“People have fatigue, political fatigue, to be honest with you, and I think they have chaos fatigue, and they have violence fatigue,” Glenn told me. (He seemed to be unaware of Trump’s role in the chaos he was lamenting.) He plans to start inviting apolitical guests onto his morning show, he said. “I think this show can help. I like to have fun, and I think it’s going to be a breath of fresh air in the morning.”
He acknowledged the pain of shifting MAGA loyalties. “It’s been the most hurtful thing to see people flip overnight,” he said. “I don’t treat people like that in real life.” But he said he never worries that his relationship with Trump will suffer.
Greene once felt the same way. She was so proud of having sponsored the Gulf of America Act that she hung a copy of the bill on the wall of her congressional office. (The legislation passed the House last May but never made it to a vote in the Senate.)
Glenn, perhaps feeling defensive of his fiancée, called the claim by Kevin Posobiec—who is, like his brother Jack, a conservative activist—that renaming the Gulf of Mexico had been his idea “probably the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“That’s what the MAGA does,” Glenn said. “They all grift.”
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