Inside the rise of Trump's favorite online brawler

• Alex Bruesewitz started as a MAGA influencer, supporting Donald Trump.
• He's now Trump's ambassador to pop culture, connecting the president to celebrities.
• His high-octane approach to digital communication has shaped the administration's online voice.

There may be only one person in the United States who can put Nicki Minaj and Donald Trump on the same stage.

On a cold morning in January, Alex Bruesewitz directed a black SUV to pick up Minaj at her Washington hotel and deposit her at the Mellon Auditorium for the launch of "Trump Accounts," which she had said would encourage "early financial literacy & financial support for our children." Minaj endorsed the program, vowing to seed some accounts for members of her rabid fan base known as "Barbz."

But MAGA's impresario wasn't done. After Trump and Minaj shared a warm moment on stage, Bruesewitz — who towered above the fur-swaddled rapper in a navy suit and light blue tie — guided her backstage to a room made famous by a "Real Housewives of Potomac" photo shoot. Bruesewitz staged playful TikTok videos featuring Minaj with both Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, ensuring that the administration's development of a Roth IRA alternative was covered by TMZ and the Shade Room.

The 29-year-old Bruesewitz has become a key conduit between the White House and sports stars, influencers, and celebrities whom Trump advisors hope can help them reach audiences that do not consume traditional media. Before the 2024 election, Bruesewitz helped shift Trump's digital strategy away from its earlier focus on Facebook's older audiences and toward a more youthful emphasis on pop-culture-adjacent podcasts, meme culture, and mobile-friendly vertical video.

"I loved the split screen the American people were seeing," Bruesewitz said in an interview. "On one side, they're saying Donald Trump is a dictator. On the other side, he's sitting with Theo Von, asking about cocaine and addiction, just curious."

Bruesewitz does not have a formal role in the White House, but his high-octane approach to digital communication has informed the administration's online voice, from its gleeful meme-making around ICE raids to Pentagon videos that intersperse clips of crunching NFL tackles and video-game action with missile strikes in Iran.

Yet the political project that animates Bruesewitz is now in jeopardy. Polls show Republicans struggling to hold recent gains among young voters that some in the party hoped would herald a generational realignment. An Economist/YouGov survey this month found 64% of voters under 30 disapprove of Trump's job performance. Even larger numbers say the country is on the wrong track.

For Bruesewitz, this presents a daunting cultural challenge, as the same decentralized online ecosystem that embraced MAGA seems to be turning elsewhere. Podcasters who two years ago embraced the anti-establishment outsider corralling public anger are souring on an incumbent defending an unpopular status quo.

"It's so much easier to be on attack than on defense," Ron Filipkowski, a former Republican who leads the liberal media network MeidasTouch and has known Bruesewitz since they joined forces in 2023 to undermine Ron DeSantis's presidential campaign. "Now Alex is on defense a lot, which I don't think he loves. He isn't as comfortable as he is in attack."

The unmaking of the class president

Bruesewitz was raised in Ripon, Wisconsin, where the Republican Party is said to have been founded in 1854. But he first discovered politics on the airwaves. When he came home from school, Bruesewitz would sit with his single mother and watch Fox News: Sean Hannity, then Bill O'Reilly, on to sitcoms like "Home Improvement" and "George Lopez."

"Oh, you created this monster," Trump joked to her when they first met four years ago. (Bruesewitz hasn't spoken to his father since he was sixteen.)

At Ripon High School, Bruesewitz was elected class president after defeating a girl who had won the position every year. It quickly became clear to a friend that Bruesewitz preferred the campaign to the governance.

"He really just wanted to see if he could win," said Evan Long, who has known Bruesewitz since first grade. "After he won it, actually doing the job of being class president wasn't appealing."

Shortly after his election, Bruesewitz joked on Twitter that Ripon's varsity football team was losing because he had sold its playbook to an opposing school. Someone printed out the post and took it to the principal.

Bruesewitz decided to step down, not the only thing in high school he would abandon midway through — he quit the soccer team on the spot when he didn't get the jersey number he wanted. But Bruesewitz recognized that leaving the class presidency created a unique content opportunity: he put on a suit, rented out a room at the public library with a podium, and filmed a resignation address.

Months after graduating high school in 2015, Bruesewitz traveled to nearby Appleton, where he stood in the rain to hear Trump speak. He had already received a retweet from the presidential candidate a year earlier, after posting a photograph of Trump's International Hotel and Tower in Chicago and observing that its sign "would look just as good on the White House."

Despite pressure from his mother, Bruesewitz didn't enroll in college. He briefly followed her into real estate before abandoning it to join up with one of his would-be clients, a Hewlett-Packard salesman named Derek Utley, to start a political-consulting firm. Their first client was a Wisconsin-based conservative online school eager to expand its social-media reach.

Bruesewitz and Utley were learning the modern political game in the place where many young Trump-era operatives now pick it up: online. In 2017, the duo got their first client, a conservative Appleton homeschool academy they cold-called via Twitter direct message. But Bruesewitz set his sights beyond Wisconsin, renting a Washington apartment to matriculate at what he jokingly calls "Trump University." The lobby of the old Trump International Hotel (now the Waldorf-Astoria), where Trump administration officials and hangers-on gravitated during Trump's first term, was his campus.

The tragic Parkland school shooting in 2018 ultimately gave Bruesewitz his first mainstream client. As student survivors of the shooting gained large followings advocating for more gun control, Bruesewitz sought out a Trump supporter whose daughter was killed in the shooting. Bruesewitz volunteered to run Andrew Pollock's social media accounts as he used them to promote his nonprofit advocacy group, School Safety Grants. Pollack introduced Bruesewitz to Georgia activist Marjorie Taylor Greene, who hired Bruesewitz to help with social media in February 2020 as she sought a seat in Congress.

Over the course of the election year, Bruesewitz grew his online footprint as a prominent MAGA influencer while moving closer to the center of the Trump orbit. That November, he watched election returns from the White House alongside Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder whom Bruesewitz had first met online when he was 16. He went to bed confident, but by morning the mood had shifted. While Kirk headed to Arizona to speak at Stop the Steal protests, Bruesewitz did the same in Wisconsin.

Bringing a knife to a Twitter fight

Trump would enter political exile, marginalized by his party's top figures in the wake of the January 6 riots catalyzed by those like Bruesewitz and Kirk who denied the election outcome. But unlike many members of the Republican political class at the time, Bruesewitz was eager to associate with Trump, with whom he first spent extended time in 2022 at a golf tournament.

"He's a cultural figure," said Bruesewitz, who told me he keeps a drawer at home filled with printouts of tweets and articles Trump has autographed for him. "That's what people miss. He is still basically the only cultural figure that we have in the Republican Party, as far as an elected official goes."

At the time, Trump's own political future was uncertain, but Bruesewitz demonstrated his loyalty by relentlessly aiming at the once-and-future president's enemies. Bruesewitz could be vicious in a way that could feel at once both strategic and personal.

His greatest zeal was for intraparty conflict with other Republicans, escalating online spats, and speaking at rallies in their districts. He targeted Representatives Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, who voted for Trump's impeachment and served on the House January 6 Committee, and senators John Cornyn, James Lankford, and Mitch McConnell when they worked with Democrats on legislation.

"Always a knife-fighter," said Garrett Ventry, a Republican consultant and lobbyist who at the time advised Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "When people weren't backing Trump in '22 and '23, Alex leaned in."

When Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher voted against impeaching a Democratic Cabinet official, Bruesewitz blasted him as a RINO and encouraged his followers to call Gallagher's office and demand he resign. Gallagher did so within days, leaving office midway through his term. Bruesewitz, who grew up in a neighboring district, disclosed to reportersthat he was thinking about running for the seat in a special election. That gambit helped freeze the race long enough for Bruesewitz to recruit a MAGA-friendly candidate, Tony Wied, and secure Trump's endorsement for him. Wied now serves in Congress.

"We treat content creation like a job because it is one," Bruesewitz wrote in his 2022 book "Winning the Social Media War: How Conservatives Can Fight Back, Reclaim the Narrative and Turn the Tide Against the Left," which included a foreword by Charlie Kirk. "If you're not planning content and it's exclusively reacting, you're losing."

As Trump prepared to run for president again in 2024, Bruesewitz was hired by the candidate's MAGA Inc. super PAC to oversee its social-media strategy. He pursued DeSantis, Trump's most formidable Republican rival for the nomination, with a relentless ferocity.

"Governor, if I may, what are those?" Bruesewitz posted along with a photo of DeSantis' strangely shaped cowboy boots, using the Gen-Z "what are those?!" meme to amplify a lighthearted mockery of DeSantis' shoe choice.

Bruesewitz relished the petty back-and-forth, which he usually conducted from a Florida apartment while playing video games. He quietly allied with Filipowski, the Democratic influencer who also saw DeSantis as a central threat, sharing research and clips so they could game social-media algorithms by amplifying one another with coordinated posts.

"If they got in the mud with me, then I was like okay we're going to finish it out," Bruesewitz told me. "A guy like DeSantis was fun because he and his team would always react."

What started online did not always stay online. At the CPAC conference in March 2023 , a pair of pro-DeSantis influencers confronted him in a hallway while filming to harangue him about the cowboy-boots episode. Bruesewitz erupted in response, referencing a since-deleted post from one of the DeSantis supporters.

"You're the one who said that you think 18 year-old girls are hot, right?" Bruesewitz clapped back in front of the DeSantis influencer's wife.

After observing the verbal altercation, Trump adviser Taylor Budowich pulled Bruesewitz aside.

"Alex, you can have two paths in life. You can do the path that we just saw and be a social media person your entire life, or you can become a serious person. But it'll be hard for you to do both," Bruesewitz recalls his friend telling him. "Which one do you want?"

Young man, there's a place you can go

In August of 2024, Bruesewitz moved from MAGA Inc. to Trump's campaign, joining the political team to help bolster relationships on Capitol Hill. But the assignment lasted only weeks, until he received a call directly from Trump asking him to take on a different role.

Trump's team had begun the year anticipating a natural online supremacy over President Joe Biden, who had adjusted only haltingly to shifts in the way voters received information. But when Biden stepped aside for Vice President Kamala Harris, those assumptions were dashed. Harris had a large staff managing her irreverent KamalaHQ accounts, whileTrump had just two employees focused on posting to Trump's accounts. "You have great people," Bruesewitz told Trump, "but not enough."

Bruesewitz began working closely with a University of Utah student named Jack Fuetterer — whom Trump labeled "TikTok Jack" — to develop ideas they could pitch to the candidate. Sometimes Trump dismissed their ideas as "too cute." But often he obliged, helping inform an overall strategy based on what Bruesewitz considered Trump's greatest advantage with young audiences: his unrehearsed personality.

In one video, Bruesewitz and Fuetterer positioned a pair of legendary wrestlers next to Trump as they called out his Election Day opponent and her own wrestling-world supporter. "You can go with President Trump, Kane, and The Undertaker, or you can take Kamala Harris, [retired wrestler] Dave Bautista, and Tim Walz," said The Undertaker, the stage name of Mark William Calaway. "Choose wisely; the nation depends on it." The video generated 36 million views on TikTok.

Co-campaign manager Susie Wiles asked Bruesewitz to assume the campaign's podcast-outreach portfolio after he helped prepare Trump for an August appearance with online streamer Adin Ross. (The candidate's son, Barron, had helped to arrange the interview.) Bruesewitz explained to Trump that Ross could ask about the case of Young Thug, a rapper being pursued by the same Atlanta prosecutor who had charged Trump with racketeering in a since-dropped case. During the interview, Trump told Ross that he thought Young Thug was being treated unfavorably.

That led to other podcast bookings, many at the direction of wrestling executive Dana White. They became a sphere for Trump to pursue conversations that often weren't expressly political, about his brother's battle with alcoholism with comedian Theo Von and extraterrestrial life with Joe Rogan. Trump's nearly three-hour conversation with Rogan alone generated nearly 30 million views on YouTube in the first 24 hours. Trump's defiant, funny, and socially unfiltered presence on these so-called "manosphere" shows, Bruesewitz believed, undercut the grim "dictator" narrative about his presidency pushed by Democrats.

"What Alex is good at is finding those rare celebrities, those quasi-celebrity types who are Trump-adjacent, and getting his hooks into them," said Filipkowski. "He was breaking through to so many new people, largely through podcasts aimed at young men. That was a big part of the gains in 2024."

Some of the most notable gains came with men under 50, a mix of both securing swing voters and mobilizing infrequent Republican-leaning ones. After backing Biden by 10 points in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, men under 50 swung to give Trump a 12-point advantage four years later. Bruesewitz believes much of Trump's appeal with them came from offering an alternative to liberal rhetoric that makes them feel guilty about masculinity.

The podcaster backlash

After Trump won a second term, Bruesewitz was offered a midlevel job as the White House's new-media director. He decided not to take it, choosing instead to stay at his 11-person firm, X Strategies, which has been hired by outside interests seeking his help in framing their causes in MAGA-friendly terms.

Among those clients is American Rights and Reform PAC, which paid Bruesewitz $300,000 for social-media posts encouraging the administration to reclassify cannabis as a less-dangerous narcotic. A Wall Street Journal report on Bruesewitz's contract caused consternation in the White House among those who accused him of cashing in on his Trump ties. He says he has supported marijuana decriminalization and that Trump backed such a policy as a candidate.

Even outside government, Bruesewitz remains a primary online narrator of the MAGA project. As a senior advisor to the super PAC Never Surrender, he runs the Trump War Room and Team Trump X accounts and helps manage the president's TikTok presence. His firm also produces podcasts hosted by Donald Trump Jr. and Katie Miller, a former administration staffer married to Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

"Alex is one of the most talented operatives in the business and he developed key relationships that helped tremendously during the 2024 campaign," White House communications director Steven Cheung said. "He continues to advise many people within the White House and in Trump World, and his advice carries significant weight." White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described Alex in a text as "bright, loyal, and highly respected" by the White House.

Along the way, Bruesewitz moved from the online shadows into the onstage spotlight. He also developed his public persona, with a schedule packed with speaking engagements at Republican events. Bruesewitz, who did not have a passport until 2023, visited 21 countries last year — from Argentina to South Korea — for speaking engagements promoting the MAGA message abroad.

He remains the White House's unofficial ambassador to pop culture, ushering a steady stream of celebrities and sports figures to Trump's side during his second term — from "Wedding Crashers" star Vince Vaughn to NFL coaching brothers John and Jim Harbaugh.

"Alex is a connector," said Indiana Sen. Jim Banks, who has hired Bruesewitz to advise his campaigns and the right-wing Republican Study Committee during his time as a House member. "He develops relationships with significant and influential people in our culture that are aligned — maybe on this part, or that part, of our agenda — and brings them into the fold. I think it's so much more than social media."

Bruesewitz recently arranged for Trump to appear on the debut episode of a new podcast from Jake Paul, in which the 29-year old influencer interviewed Trump following a rally in Kentucky. The interview, which drew 3.4 million YouTube views in its first few days, brought Trump in front of Paul's 21 million subscribers — and millions more across other platforms.

But such engagements have grown rarer in 2026, as many of the same podcasters and influencers that Trump legitimized in 2024 as political communicators are now moving away from Trump on issues like health policy, the Iran war, immigration enforcement, and Israel. It reflects a turnabout among young men, part of a broader retreat from MAGA among younger Americans. Polling this week from The Economist/YouGov shows Trump's approval rating among Gen Z voters has fallen to 24%.

"He's doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for," comedian Andrew Schulz said during an episode of his "Flagrant" podcast that aired six months after Trump took office. "I want him to stop the wars — he's funding them. I want him to shrink spending, reduce the budget. He's increasing it. It's like everything that he said he's going to do, except sending immigrants back, and now he's even flip flopped on that."

Adin Ross also suffered major financial losses after Trump's tariffs hit the market, losing over $10 million in his stock portfolio. In a separate livestream, he said he voted for who he "thought was the better candidate" at the time. Ross has said the experience makes him unlikely to ever again use his entertainment platform to support another politician or be otherwise involved in politics.

"I like these guys personally, but their criticism is unfounded and unfair. I'm not saying they don't have influence but I don't think people really tune into them for political dialogue," said Bruesewitz. "These are comedians and funny people who talk about all trending topics. It's important to remember these guys weren't Trump lovers."

Bruesewitz said his party will have to be more creative as it works to hold together the MAGA coalition — and its place in the Republican Party — without its figurehead on the ballot. After the 2024 election, he recalled, he was approached by many members of Congress seeking to replicate Trump's podcast strategy. But he struggled to get any of them booked on the same shows.

"These podcasters don't really want to talk to just rank-and-file everyday Republicans. They want to talk to people that transcend politics," he said. "The president is kind of the only person that does that."

The MAGA-fication of Nicki Minaj

The January event at the Mellon Auditorium was perhaps Bruesewitz's biggest coup yet: enlisting one of music's top stars to endorse a new policy initiative that needs public buy-in to have any impact.

Bruesewitz first met Minaj last year through Amber Rose, a model and influencer who spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention. When Bruesewitz learned over dinner with Minaj that the Trinidad-born rapper's pastor, who was with them, was Nigerian, he brought up the topic of the killing of Christians in Nigeria. Days later, after Trump coincidentally made a Truth Social post that "Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria," Bruesewitz sent it to Minaj, who posted a screenshot along with thanks to Trump for "taking this seriously."

Minaj accepted an invite from Ambassador Mike Waltz to participate in a United Nations panel in November, where she called on world leaders to take action to block terror groups ISIS and Boko Haram from terrorizing Christian populations. Waltz called her "not only arguably the greatest female recording artist, but also a principled individual who refuses to remain silent in the face of injustice."

Trump launched strikes on ISIS in Nigeria on Christmas Day, calling it a consequence of the militant group's killing of innocent Christians "at levels not seen for many years, and even centuries" in a post on social media. The president told POLITICO he ordered the strikes to be delayed by one day so it would fall on Christmas, for symbolic reasons.

After a volley of mutual praise between Minaj and Trump-affiliated figures on social media, the administration scouted her as a potential champion for perhaps its biggest new policy program of 2026. Trump Accounts, a new tax-free investment vehicle established by provisions in the Big Beautiful Bill, would rely on individuals to voluntarily enroll.

A Treasury Department official asked Bruesewitz to approach Minaj, who agreed to participate in the program's launch event alongside Kevin O'Leary, the businessman and "Shark Tank" host. Minaj also promised to give several hundred thousand dollars to match Trump Accounts for her fans.

The program's launch was planned for just a few days ahead of Bruesewitz's scheduled wedding to fiancée Carolina Urrea, a black-tie event at Trump's Doral golf club whose invite list was filled with prominent names from across politics and pop culture.

"Carolina might not be happy that I've packed these few days before my wedding with so much," he said.

Before heading to Minaj's downtown hotel that morning, Bruesewitz stopped at a Georgetown salon for a trim of his short, neatly tapered haircut. He said his barber, Giuseppe Stalteri, had known him longer than many of the Washington figures who would be attending his wedding and were familiar with Bruesewitz only as one of Trump's most hard-charging defenders.

"Sometimes online persona doesn't match in-person persona," said Stalteri, with a laugh.

When they first met on the campaign trail in late 2024, Urrea — who was not on X — was unaware of Bruesewitz's social media identity. She was shocked at the end of their first date when the well-mannered guy in front of her showed her a derogatory tweet he had posted about former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's waistline.

"I get it out mostly online," Bruesewitz said.

Bruesewitz's efforts to elevate his own profile, including by taking credit for political wins in which he played a limited role, have rankled some at the White House, according to interviews with two Trump associates granted anonymity to discuss interpersonal dynamics.

Exclusive photos from the "star-studded, MAGA-packed wedding of Trump's podcast guru" ended up in the New York Post's Page Six gossip column. The guest list included 50 Cent and Mike Tyson, alongside FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf, and Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters.

While Bruesewitz has worked to mend relationships with past Republican nemeses, like former McConnell aide Josh Holmes, he still knows how to hold a grudge. The morning after Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw was defeated by a primary challenger earlier this month, Bruesewitz nostalgically exhumed the origins of his multi-year online feud with Crenshaw. After locating a 2022 post in which Crenshaw told Bruesewitz he wasn't really "America First," Bruesewitz mused with satisfaction that, "I wonder if he regrets tweeting."

This story originally ran in POLITICO and appears on Business Insider through the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network. The network publishes major stories from the Axel Springer network of publications, a worldwide group of news outlets that includes Business Insider.