Trump Wants to Take Over Cities. Influencers Are Giving Him the Fuel to Do It

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.”