MAGA’s influencer class is breaking Trump’s White House
For years, Donald Trump benefited from an informal court of influencers, podcasters and self-appointed power brokers who claimed unusual access to the former reality TV star. During his presidential campaigns and midterm election cycles, that ecosystem amplified Trump’s message and bypassed traditional Republican institutions. Now it’s colliding with the basic mechanics of governing and embarrassing the administration by creating a parallel power structure of clout chasers around the presidency.
This week alone offered multiple remarkably different examples of the same phenomenon. In one, alleged pardon brokers sold access to Trump’s orbit as a luxury service. In another, one of Trump’s most influential MAGA personalities allegedly converted that proximity into a payday on the prediction markets. And in another example, a freshman Republican congressman threatened to derail House business over a feud with one of Trump’s favorite influencers.
It’s not just that MAGA has grifters. It is that the grifters now help define the terms of power.
Each of these scandals is about a White House surrounded by people who have figured out that proximity to power is the only product worth selling, and who are now cashing in on it badly enough to blow up their own party’s agenda. It’s not just that MAGA has grifters. It is that the grifters now help define the terms of power.
The clearest way to see the problem is the way Trump World now treats information. In MAGAland, insider information is something to be teased, reposted and traded on. On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported that over lunch at a members-only social club in Tampa, Florida, GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna confided in associates that she already knew Trump would pick JD Vance as his running mate in 2024. According to a person familiar with the conversation, she revealed she had passed the tip on to Rogan O’Handley, the MAGA influencer known to millions of followers as “DC Draino,” so he could place a winning bet on Polymarket, and she later teased him for not placing a bigger wager. O’Handley had reportedly been quietly campaigning on social media to get Trump to consider Luna herself for the ticket, and when she told him Vance had gotten the nod instead, he cashed in on the correct pick anyway. Another account described a former investment banker saying he received the same kind of early tip through a conservative Heritage Foundation associate and used it to profit as well. Both Luna and O’Handley deny any wrongdoing, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is reportedly examining the allegations.
As the failure of Trump’s domestic agenda demoralizes his base, the defining currency of MAGA has shifted from ideology to access. So now the administration is completely besieged by unelected influencers who treat proximity to the Oval Office as a monetization strategy.
To understand how deep the transactional rot at the heart of modern conservatism goes, look no further than the spectacular saga of Torrence Hatch, rapper Boosie Badazz’ legal name. Facing a federal sentencing hearing for possessing a firearm as a felon, Hatch did what many desperate people do in the orbit of the current administration: He looked for a monetary shortcut. For the cool sum of $600,000, Hatch hired JM Burkman & Associates — a firm run by Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, a pair of notorious right-wing grifters. The deal was supposed to help him secure a Trump pardon after a federal gun case, but the pardon never materialized, and Boosie is now trying to recover part of the money through arbitration.
The Trump administration’s second-term clemency process has become so informal that a handful of White House aides and outside allies can shape who gets attention, while people outside the administration sell themselves as if they can guarantee access.
Boosie’s case reads like a perfect MAGA parable because Wohl and Burkman allegedly pitched him with the confidence of people who knew how to sound close to the center. These are the same convicted felons who pleaded guilty over an illegal robocall campaign targeting Black voters during the 2020 election and later faced millions in civil penalties. Yet in the MAGA economy, past disgrace is a premium credential. The two reportedly invoked a network of conservative influencers and Republican officials — including influencer and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, far-right media personalities Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, MAGA activist Erika Kirk, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Reps. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Andy Biggs of Arizona — as if name-dropping alone could grease the machinery of the presidency. Several of those figures denied involvement once the story went public, which only sharpened the point: the MAGA ecosystem is so saturated with pseudo-access that it is hard to tell where the con ends and the governing begins.
If the Boosie affair illustrates how MAGA influencers are monetizing the White House from the outside, a crisis that emerged this week on the House floor shows how they are breaking the government from within as that same competition for influence is now spilling directly into the legislative process.
Alex Bruesewitz is not a Cabinet official and holds no Senate-confirmed position. He serves as an outside political adviser to Trump. Yet a sitting Republican congressman spent this week threatening to gum up the GOP’s agenda in the House until Bruesewitz is removed from the president’s orbit.
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Florida Rep. Randy Fine’s break with his party over a routine procedural rule might look minor in isolation, but in a chamber of Congress Republicans control by a bare 218 to 212 margin, even one defection changes the math. On July 14, Fine did something almost unheard of for a modern Republican and voted no, the only member of his party to do so, on a 215-211 procedural rule tying the long-stalled Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act to a State Department funding bill.
The strange part is that Fine had spent months publicly begging Senate Republicans to attach the SAVE America Act to exactly this kind of must-pass legislation. He’d even co-signed a letter in March alongside Reps. Andy Harris of Maryland, Chip Roy of Texas, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and others, pledging to vote no on any Senate bill until it moved. So when House leadership finally gave him what he’d demanded, he voted no anyway, telling reporters only that he was working out “disputes inside the family,” a line he delivered, word for word, to both the Daily Caller and TMZ, which tells you it was a rehearsed answer.
The real family dispute has nothing to do with voter identification. Fine has reportedly told White House officials he intends to vote against every rule that reaches the House floor until Trump fires Bruesewitz. The feud apparently traces back to Bruesewitz’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, where Carlson, discussing Trump’s own endorsement of Fine, described the congressman on air as “that creepy fat guy from Florida who endorsed genocide.” Bruesewitz piled on, telling Carlson that Fine “has tweeted some ugly things, really ugly things,” and he promoted Fine’s primary challenger, celebrity gambler Dan Bilzerian.
Fine, who is Jewish, has built much of his political identity around confronting antisemitism on the right, once calling Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America” for platforming white nationalist Nick Fuentes. The Florida congressman retaliated on X, accusing Bruesewitz, Carlson and Candace Owens of spreading a “mind virus” that seeks to “pit Jews and Christians against each other.” He has since taken the fight off social media and turned his own vote into a weapon, threatening to freeze the House floor until Trump and Bruesewitz waved the white flag.
That a sitting member of Congress was willing to shut down his own party’s legislative business over a personal and ideological vendetta involving a Fox News alumnus and an outside political adviser is landing at the worst possible moment for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who needs something close to unanimity just to function. He’s already seen what a handful of defections can do: Weeks earlier, a separate bloc of conservative holdouts, several of whom had signed Fine’s own SAVE America letter, tanked a defense authorization rule. Suddenly Johnson was faced with a member willing to burn down the floor schedule indefinitely because the party’s most influential unofficial adviser called him fat on a podcast.
When clout brokers can provoke lawmakers into obstructing their own party’s agenda, the White House is no longer directing the coalition — it is being dragged around by it. It’s clear that Donald Trump’s unofficial MAGA court is becoming a liability.
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