MAGA’s Media Civil War

“MAGA is a scam” – Nick Fuentes, July 2025

On a November evening in 2022, Donald Trump sat down at Mar-a-Lago with two unlikely dinner companions: Kanye West and a 24-year-old live streamer named Nick Fuentes. Trump insisted the evening was “quick and uneventful.” Other sources claimed Trump was dazzled by Fuentes’ ability to recite old campaign speeches verbatim.

Either way, the fallout was immediate. Trump once branded Mexicans “rapists” and demanded a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the US. But it was breaking bread with Fuentes that, for some, proved a step too far.

Milo Yiannopoulos, ever the saboteur, later admitted he’d staged the dinner “to make Trump’s life miserable.” For a moment, it worked. With two weeks of Republicans and Democrats alike condemning Trump, the facade of MAGA unity cracked ever so slightly. Three years later, the once-united MAGA movement is splintering again—once more spurred on by the same man: Nick Fuentes.

Born in 1998 in Chicago, Fuentes attended Lyons Township High School, where he captained the student council. Later, he enrolled at Boston University until attending the far-right, neo-Nazi march at Charlottesville in 2017 led to threats which forced him to drop out.

Hearing the President speak after the rally, Fuentes said: “Trump’s comments perfectly aligned with our side… they were intentionally ambiguous to comply with Washington’s speech codes yet still managed to condemn the violent left.”

And so, reinvigorated by the feeling that the President of the United States was with him and other white nationalists, Fuentes went door to door campaigning for Trump in New Hampshire. And then he began to livestream.

He titled his show America First as an homage to Trump’s inauguration declaration that “it’s going to be only America First.” On America First, Fuentes became the enfant terrible of the online right, using “irony poisoning” to blur the line between provocation and sincerity. His followers, called “Groypers,” transformed him into a cult leader.

Fuentes routinely praised Hitler, spoke about wanting a “Catholic Taliban,” and once suggested that CNN’s leadership should be “hanged.” Fuentes’ defence? “I am impulsive. I am bombastic. I am out there. I am a maniac, you know. But my job is to put the truth out there. I am the bucket of ice-cold water, and I am dumping it on people.”

Fuentes quickly became a prominent voice within MAGA, egging on supporters in Washington on 6th January with the promise that “we are on the cusp of something big.” After the insurrection, he hailed the rioters as patriots.

His profile rose so high that, following that infamous Mar-a-Lago dinner, Trump chose not to condemn him, preferring instead to plead ignorance. “I didn’t know who [Fuentes] was.” Trump knew that Fuentes spoke to a vital corner of the MAGA base and so was too important to disavow.

Others had similar central roles in Trump’s coalition. Tucker Carlson galvanised a section of society who preoccupied themselves with culture-war skirmishes over family and gender. So too was Candace Owens, who styled herself as the anti-woke insurgent, appealing to young conservatives who distrusted both leftist elites and the Republican establishment.

For a brief time, this uneasy mix gave the movement the appearance of unity. But the coalition was always fragile. In 2024, after Trump announced JD Vance would be his running mate, Fuentes told his supporters he would not vote for Trump. In his eyes, having a “Never-Trumper” as his running mate was a “stab in the back.”

“People got fired from their jobs because they wore a MAGA hat. And JD Vance was calling Trump a Nazi and now he is the Vice President. Seriously?”

Owens and Carlson also both broke away from Trump, largely because of his foreign policy—albeit for different reasons. Each figure still claimed loyalty to MAGA’s original spirit, but their diverging priorities shattered the online right’s sense of a shared project.

Fast-forward to last month and something rather peculiar has happened. Very suddenly, and perhaps due to the accidents of X’s algorithm, Fuentes is once again a mainstream political voice online. He has racked up millions of views across high-profile podcast appearances, including Bradley Martyn’s show.

“I am way more famous now than I ever used to be. I think this is the peak,” he boasted. “I put up a tweet—95,000 likes. Another tweet—60,000 likes. Another tweet—45,000 likes. I am just printing this engagement. But with all this engagement, now the world is attacking me.”

If the MAGA movement was divided over Trump, they were suddenly united in another cause: despising Nick Fuentes. The circular firing squad was about to begin. Owens and Fuentes had a public feud over a video in which Owens confronted him on his controversial statements. Fuentes saw it as a feeble attempt at a hit piece, and Owens dismissed him as a career provocateur who bullied allies then played the victim.

Meanwhile, Carlson wondered aloud how Fuentes could possibly know details about his father’s CIA ties – concluding that Fuentes must be a federal agent used to discredit right-wing voices.

Yiannopoulos – the same man who engineered the Mar-a-Lago dinner – joined in, calling him a federal informant, to which the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, chimed in by replying: “Doesn’t make sense that the FBI leaves Fuentes alone… unless he is an asset of some kind.”

Fuentes’ counterattack was simple: everyone else must be a federal agent.

Owens? CIA.

Carlson’s father was “the head of the CIA’s propaganda empire,” and Carlson, per Fuentes’ argument, is guilty by association.

Musk was a “literal defence contractor.”

And Yiannopoulos? “Literally just Google ‘Milo’, ‘Federal’, ‘Informant’.”

“None of them are from America,” Fuentes protested. “These four people are calling me, a guy from Chicago, a federal agent… Yeah! Totally organic, guys! They definitely believe what they are saying!”

A once-united political media machine now devolved into mutual suspicion that their contemporaries were federal agents. This fixation on infiltrators made sense to them: if their movement was truly revolutionary, surely the state would be trying to infiltrate it. But in practice, it was ego, not the FBI, that tore them apart.

Looking forward to 2028, with Trump suggesting that Vance is MAGA’s heir apparent, Fuentes is not on board. “You can’t make me vote for that freak… I won’t.”

His critique of Vance is ubiquitous: “If JD Vance is the nominee, not only am I not going to vote but I am going to go to Iowa and I am going to tell people not to vote.”

His hatred for Vance is so apparent that Fuentes is signalling his support for Newsom were the choice in 2028 to be Vance versus Newsom. His reason for supporting Newsom? Newsom is white, and Vance’s wife is not.

“This is Gavin Newsom’s family. He is white, he is tall, he is handsome. His wife is also white, she’s good-looking. His children, they are also all white, with blue eyes and blonde hair.”

“Now this is our fearless leader, the entity known as JD Vance—this is his family. He’s fat. He is quite ugly. His wife and kids are not white, okay? Brown skin, black hair—this is an Indian woman.”

So, if Nick is not guided by Trump anymore, nor is he guided by the principles of the Republican Party, what is his endgame?

“My endgame is that I radicalise 100,000 brilliant young American men. And over the next 10 years they hide that they love this show, and they spend every day getting more powerful and more influential. And one day they are running the country, and they are in a position to change the course of history.”

For anyone else it may be applicable to state that his ‘mask has slipped’. For Fuentes, however, viewers already knew this was the type of political analysis they had signed up for. This, then, is what MAGA has birthed: a movement so toxic that even its own children now seek to devour it from within.

Fuentes’ life shows how a political movement that once promised to renew Washington has been utterly corrupted and polluted. Perhaps this was inevitable, given the online extreme far-right machine it relied on to gain prominence.

It elevated a collection of opportunists, provocateurs, and would-be prophets, giving them prominence far beyond their talents. It corroded trust in every institution it touched—the courts, the press, even the ordinary bonds of life. It created a space where a former president could dine with a Holocaust-denying, Hitler-admiring white supremacist before returning to office. And in the end, it smashed everything up—civility and truth—for no greater purpose than the egos of its loudest voices.

Or, in other words: “MAGA is a scam.”

Edited by Charlie Windle. Cover Illustration by Haris Khan.