The New York Times reported yesterday that the media apparatus that carried Donald Trump back to the White House has come apart over the Iran war and the cost of living. Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes have all turned on him. Meanwhile, loyalists like Dan Bongino and Benny Johnson have seen their once-enormous YouTube and X views drop by half since the Iran war started.

It is a sobering turn for the MAGA media ecosystem. Yet this pattern is almost as old as conservative media itself. The American Right has always rewarded those who identify the next ideological opening before everyone else. Today’s winners become tomorrow’s establishment, only to be displaced by insurgents promising an even purer version of the cause.

Alas, few are buying what Trump is selling at the moment, least of all the conflict in Iran. The outrage machine has been running on fumes for a while now, and a MAGA machine that cannot effectively sell war or grievance will sell something else. That has opened up a space for a simpler and more sexualized product, aimed at all the sad young men who now spend their evenings alone with a screen. Hence the rise of figures such as Savanna Cannon, a MAGA influencer who has turned conservative politics into a lifestyle brand. Reclining in yoga pants, she delivers familiar Daily Wire-style talking points about transgenderism, race and the Left to hundreds of thousands of followers. Her fitness account has 42,000 Instagram followers; her political account has 285,000, which in turn funnels subscribers to her far more lucrative OnlyFans page. Indeed, when critics accused her this week of taking Israeli money, Cannon dismissed the claim, saying she had no need for it because she was making plenty from OnlyFans.

Steven Crowder, another influencer on the wane, called the sexualized output of people like Cannon a sex appeal arms race. Whine though he might, he is merely describing the obvious fact that good-looking influencers are now relaxing pick-up artists and other jacked manosphere entertainers who moved into the Right-wing space years before.

The logical endpoint of this trend is AI-generated influencer politics. Consider Jessica Foster, the blonde “Army soldier” photographed with Donald Trump on an airport tarmac on the first day of the Iran strikes, who amassed more than a million Instagram followers in just four months. As the Washington Post later established, no record of her military service existed because no Jessica Foster existed at all. Instagram eventually removed the account, but the episode illustrated something important: for a sizable section of the online Right, authenticity mattered less than the constant supply of attractive, “based” content.

That is where MAGA is headed as it enters the death throes that all cornball, past-its-stale-date content must experience. The conservative movement that got to radio, satellite television and the timeline before anyone else will reach the bottom of this brave new world as well.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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