The MAGA Media Machine Is Fracturing
Once united in support of President Trump, right-wing influencers are embroiled in feuds and losing viewers, creating a problem for Republicans in the midterm elections.
Benny Johnson, a right-wing podcaster, was racking up tens of millions of views on YouTube during Donald J. Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign, posting about divisive cultural issues and criticizing Democrats.
Things have changed.
Views for Mr. Johnson’s YouTube channel are down by millions from the heights of 2024. The surge of attention he received on X has slowed to a trickle. His loyalty to Mr. Trump has become unappealing to some Republicans who are frustrated with the rising cost of living and the president’s decision to start a war with Iran.
Other high-profile right-wing influencers are contending with similar shifts of fortune. Dan Bongino, a podcaster and a former deputy director of the F.B.I., has seen his livestream views shrink by about half from their peak in 2024. Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News host, has found moments of explosive growth, yet that attention has been hard to sustain.
The shifts add to a growing body of evidence that suggests the audience for pro-Trump content has fallen from its heights and, for some creators, has reached new lows. Views are dropping for many of Mr. Trump’s greatest allies, while some figures on the right who have taken to criticizing Mr. Trump are showing uneven gains.
The shifts threaten to complicate messaging this year for Republican candidates, who have for years relied on a united front of content creators to rile up Republicans and guide them to the polls each election cycle.
“The vote is in November, but the heart of the midterms is happening now,” said Ryan Broderick, the founder of Garbage Day, a newsletter about online culture and influence. “A lot of the propaganda that they’re pushing out just isn’t really connecting the way it would have even three or four years ago,” he added.
To assess the shifting power of the online influencers, The New York Times analyzed several years worth of audience data across podcasts, YouTube, X and Rumble, the right-wing video website, for a dozen political content creators: Mr. Johnson, Mr. Bongino, Ms. Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Steven Crowder, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, Stephen K. Bannon, Nicholas Fuentes, Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool and Charlie Kirk, whose accounts were taken over by other staff at Turning Point USA, the company he founded, after his assassination last September
Only a few saw their audiences grow since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, while many more have seen their viewerships decline. Some creators, like Ms. Owens drew new audiences by posting about a broader range of topics.
Experts point to a number of reasons for the changes, including the difficulty in stoking political outrage while Republicans control Washington, along with a quieter midterm season. All content creators are also subject to the whims of algorithms, like on X, which can change without explanation and impact their reach.
A fresh generation of influencers, such as
Clavicular and the YouTube creator Asmongold, have also siphoned away viewers by speaking about politics alongside other topics like gaming and relationships.
Mr. Fuentes, for instance, saw notable gains in 2025 and early 2026 but is now trending down. “It seems that everyone in the space is experiencing a drop-off in views from 2025,” Mr. Fuentes wrote in an email. “Seems as though 2025 was the anomaly either due to organic interest or potentially artificial boosting,” he added.
The Times reached out to all 12 creators for comment. Many pointed to their successes on individual platforms, including TikTok and Instagram, despite declining engagement on YouTube and X.
A representative for Mr. Crowder said his total monthly views on Rumble had increased by about 10 million since January 2024. Ms. Owens said that maternity leave and vacations had caused her YouTube views to dip recently and pointed to data from Podscribe, an analytics company that estimates audience size across platforms, that showed softer audience declines since Mr. Kirk’s death. A representative for Mr. Walsh and Mr. Shapiro said they were seeing gains on TikTok and Instagram, and on a spinoff series on Mr. Walsh’s YouTube channel. Mr. Bannon said in an interview that his show focused on video broadcasting on Real America’s Voice, a conservative news channel.
Mr. Johnson said in an interview after this article was published that all political creators saw view counts surge during the 2024 presidential election, so a decline since then was not unexpected. He said that his accounts on YouTube and X still earn millions of views, and that his internal YouTube metrics suggest he’s on track to reach the same number views this year as he achieved last year.
The remaining creators did not respond to requests for comment.
One shift occurred after Mr. Kirk’s assassination when a rift between right-wing creators erupted, seeming to fracture their audiences. Some creators, like Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Johnson, posted memorials for Mr. Kirk and analyses of the accused shooter. Ms. Owens went in a different direction, launching fresh conspiracy theories about who had killed Mr. Kirk, with videos like “Who Ordered the Hit on Charlie Kirk?”
Ms. Owens saw her YouTube and podcast audience surge amid the controversy. She has stoked other conspiracy theories before and since, including falsehoods about the sex of Brigitte Macron, the wife of the French president, and has expanded her reach beyond Mr. Trump’s base, experts said. Ms. Macron
sued Ms. Owens for defamation last year and the case is continuing.
“It might be a conspiracy to some people, but it’s not to me,” Ms. Owens said in an interview. “I think I do a very good job being thorough in what I present to people. We spend a lot of time on research, hours and hours and hours on research. So I would disagree with that assessment.”
A rift between pro-Trump and anti-Trump creators on the right deepened after Mr. Trump started the war with Iran.
Mr. Shapiro has been supportive of the president and the war. He lost about 60,000 subscribers on YouTube from April to June this year, according to
data from Chaotic Era, a newsletter about online influence. Mr. Shapiro’s YouTube views have also declined to their lowest in years, dropping to about four million per week from 27 million in 2024. The publication he owns, The Daily Wire, has also seen traffic plummet by half since last year, according to
The Righting.
Views for mainstream news websites are also down, the group found. But many right-wing websites have seen larger declines, including The Blaze and The Federalist.
Mr. Shapiro’s podcast has shown more resilience, partly because he has published 50 percent more content on his podcast this year compared with last year, causing total downloads to climb, according to
Podchaser, an analytics company that collects and analyzes data about podcasts.
“Obviously Ben Shapiro still has one of the largest megaphones in conservative media, and his podcast is still doing fine, but that is an undeniable shift for him,” said Kyle Tharp, who writes Chaotic Era. “I think there’s a lot of increased competition on both the right and left in the partisan media space,” he added.
On Rumble, the pro-Trump and anti-Trump rivalry is playing out between Mr. Bongino, a Trump ally and former administration official, and Mr. Fuentes, a former Trump supporter who has become deeply critical of the president.
Mr. Bongino, who was a Secret Service agent before turning to broadcasting, left his post as a livestreamer at Rumble last year, at the height of his popularity, to serve as deputy director of the F.B.I. He resigned just months later.
Mr. Bongino returned to his old job of podcasting and livestreaming in February, but his audience did not seem to follow: After an initial bump from his first few episodes, his audience settled to roughly half of what it was during the highs of the 2024 presidential campaign. He rejoined YouTube after posting exclusively on Rumble for years, and while his viewership on YouTube is climbing, it remains among the lowest of creators’ numbers analyzed by The Times.
Mr. Fuentes, a white nationalist and livestreamer who publishes exclusively to Rumble, has been more vocally critical of the president during his second term. He saw his average weekly views climb to as high as eight million views per week, from around one million in 2024.
The success of disaffected Trump supporters like Mr. Fuentes and Ms. Owens suggests they will play a larger role in the future of right-wing content online, said Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media watchdog.
Ms. Owens, in particular, is “moving from being a more typical right-wing commentary media personality” to creating more investigative narratives, Mr. Carusone said.
“She can create a story line and then push it,” he added. “And that, I think, is a sign of power.”
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