Even the Pizzagate King Is Souring on Trump
Mike Cernovich’s journey from Trump diehard to Trump critic should be a warning for the president.
MIKE CERNOVICH IS NOT JUST ONE of the original MAGA influencers, he’s arguably a paradigm case—the ever-active operative/influencer who just won’t stop coming up with crazy new ideas.
After rising in the nascent manosphere of the early 2010s with his blog “Danger and Play”—the idea being that a real man needs both danger and play—Cernovich became one of Trump’s most ardent Twitter boosters in the 2016 campaign. Then he got his big break a few months before that election by becoming an early embracer of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
Cernovich advocated what he called the “Gorilla Mindset,” which was essentially that you should act and think more like our great-ape cousins. He self-published a book by that name in 2015 and started marketing lifestyle products under that brand; he even sold brain pills with worrying names like “Gorilla Mind Smooth.”
Not that he needed the money. That’s because, as the New Yorker revealed at the time, Cernovich—one of neo-masculinity’s leading advocates—was, in fact living off a divorce settlement from his wealthy ex-wife. You couldn’t make this guy up if you tried!
Cernovich’s influence isn’t what it was in the very first days of the first Trump administration, when he organized a “DeploraBall” inauguration party for the new White House hangers-on. But he’s still on X, and over the last few months he has made an interesting turn: Like a growing number of MAGA influencers, he is openly talking about how he’s fed up with Trump. But what stands out is the issues that have made him so uneasy with the administration—a mix of policy disappointments along with disillusionment over just how corrupt he believes the administration is.
Cernovich’s frustration with the second Trump administration first became clear in November, when he