When Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem touched down in Oregon on Tuesday to meet with Immigration and Custom Enforcement officials in Portland, she was followed by more than just her staff. Her entourage included three right-wing influencers—Benny Johnson, Nick Sortor, and David Medina—who trailed her motorcade, cameras rolling, capturing footage that would ricochet from their social media feeds to the GOP’s favorite prime-time shows.
For the Trump administration, these creators don’t just amplify the White House’s messaging, they manufacture the evidence to justify it. The administration needs visual proof that Democrat-led cities, like Portland and Chicago, are overwhelmed by violence, and these influencers supply it in real time, often becoming the spectacle themselves. Influencer embeds are now fixtures of the administration’s media strategy–a content mill for consensus, flooding social media feeds with state-sanctioned clips and patriotic spectacle.
This symbiotic relationship became unmistakable over the past week in Portland and Chicago where the Trump administration’s law-and-order narrative and the influencers creating the imagery to sustain it collided in full view.
Last Thursday, Sortor was arrested by Portland police for disorderly conduct for his alleged involvement in a fight outside an ICE facility. On Wednesday, an attorney said to be representing Sortor threatened to sue the Portland Police Department and claimed that his arrest was actually an attempt at “silencing conservative media.” Ultimately, Sortor was not charged. Katie Daviscourt, a former Turning Point USA staffer now working for the right-wing blog The Post Millennial, alleged that she was hit in the face by an antifa protester outside the same facility. Images she posted of herself with a black eye following the event have gone viral on X. While both Sortor and Daviscourt claim to be acting as reporters documenting the chaos, they’ve instead become the proof of it themselves.
This is what the Trump administration appears to value the most about the content these influencers produce. Sortor and Daviscourt were invited to the White House this Wednesday for a roundtable discussion on alleged violence by antifa. To be clear, antifa isn’t an organization; it’s an antifascist ideology with no organized group component.
“They have attacked journalists reporting on their crimes,” Trump said of antifa, as well as “agitators [and] anarchists” during Wednesday’s meeting. “At least three of these courageous journalists have personally been victims of Antifa attacks.”
The third right-wing influencer Trump was likely referencing as being on the receiving end of alleged antifa attacks was Andy Ngo, another Post Millennial blogger and right-wing influencer, who was also in attendance on Wednesday. Ngo has spent years attending protests across the country filming them and defining the right-wing narrative of antifa as a domestic terrorist threat. Ngo has spent years targeting Mark Bray, a Rutgers historian and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. Following social media posts from a number of right-wing influencers, including Ngo, Bray is now trying to flee the US after receiving death threats.
Samuel Woolley, a researcher who studies digital propaganda at the University of Pittsburgh, believes the blurring of lines between state messaging and influencer content serves a strategic purpose. “Politicians and government officials will use influencers as a means to legitimize either the information they’re spreading or the actions they’re taking,” he says. “Oftentimes, influencers are now used to create the illusion of popularity for particular ideas to manufacture consensus around those ideas.”
The feedback loop created by these influencers and leveraged by the Trump administration is exemplified best by Johnson’s own X account. Johnson, a right-wing creator and former Turning Point USA contributor, shared clips of his Portland trip with Noem, including a video of the secretary praying at the start of a meeting and later interrogating someone who was purported to be an immigrant in the back of a government vehicle. From there, those clips are reposted and shared by other right-wing creators and sometimes plastered onto television news. In this case, Johnson was interviewed by Newsmax about his experience in Portland on Wednesday.
“Kristi Noem had to walk the premises with body armor men standing beside her, because the left is so violent here. Every time we came or went, left-wing protesters had to be cleared out of the streets,” Johnson said on Newsmax. “They spat on the vehicles.They screamed at us.”
These creators were some of the few media figures allowed to tour the Portland ICE facility. On Wednesday, The Oregonian reported that its reporters were denied access to the facility despite multiple conservative news outlets and creators being granted access. The paper first asked for access on September 25. Eight days later Fox News reporter Bill Melugin filmed a report on the facility’s roof. Reporters for the paper tried again on October 6, receiving no answer. Three days before, Daviscourt had toured the building.
“They can be used as a conduit for pushing manufactured stories or pushing particular propaganda messaging,” Woolley says of these right-wing creators. “They're incredibly potent.”
The Trump administration has created a seamless loop of content inspiring policy and policy inspiring new content as the government performs its own justification in real time. First comes the boots on the ground. Then comes the content. Rinse and repeat.
