Meth Scandal Rocks Nascent Greg Bovino 2028 Campaign
Plus: MAGA media women fend off gay husband allegations.
The Meth-Tied GOP Operative Behind Bovino 2028
Just five months after being fired from his leadership role in Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, former U.S. Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino is eyeing a run for president. He made his interest formally known earlier this week, after having just returned from a racist convention in Portugal in which he appeared alongside literal neo-Nazis.
“If running for President is what it takes to actually get it done, then all options are on the table,” Bovino wrote in a post on X endorsing the exploratory bid.
This post raised a lot of questions. Does terrorizing a major American city for weeks on end really serve as a strong platform for a run for office? Are there height restrictions for presidential candidates? And who, exactly, is behind this effort?
After all, to most observers, you’d have to be on meth to think that Bovino could actually prevail in a 2028 GOP primary against the likes of Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Right?
Well, maybe!
Bovino’s 2028 exploratory run is the brainchild of Jacob Engels, a former protégé of notorious dirty trickster Roger Stone and a Laura Loomer pal who has since turned on them and the rest of Trump world.
Engels put out a video announcing this effort back on May 31. Walking across a bridge in a suit and sunglasses, sporting a tightly cropped haircut, Engels extolled Bovino’s tough leadership and blasted White House chief of staff Susie Wiles for “86”-ing the former border commander from the administration. Engels then hawked a Cash App link to help fund the nascent effort and pledged to send Bovino back to Minneapolis for a “hero’s welcome.” Engels also launched a website for the campaign, now promoted by Bovino himself, that features weird fascist imagery and a picture of Bovino under the Game of Thrones-style name “House Bovino”:
In an interview with me, Engels confirmed his involvement and said he thinks Bovino could offer “true leadership.”
It’s quite a come-up for Engels. He has no obvious campaign experience at this level. And if this one actually does take off, he could have several distractions while spearheading it. Because just a few weeks ago, Engels was being wrestled to the ground and handcuffed by police outside a motel, allegedly with meth in his pocket.
According to a police incident report obtained by False Flag, sheriff’s deputies in the small Wisconsin town of River Falls were called to a budget motel around 1 p.m. on May 20. Engels must have been starting to catch the notice of law enforcement, because the night before, he and his mother had been arguing so loudly that police had been called to separate them. When the cops showed up again the next afternoon, Engels was refusing to check out of the motel.
Staff initially gave him extra time to leave. But Engels still wouldn’t budge—allegedly calling the receptionist a “special bitch.” When officers did eventually make it into the room, they found it strewn with empty liquor bottles. According to the report, Engels himself was “highly intoxicated” and “reeked of intoxicants.”
“His speech was repetitive, vulgar, confrontational, argumentative and he was overall incredibly uncooperative,” one officer noted.
Engels allegedly waved around a wooden paddle in a threatening manner, and boasted about having once played football.
“I could scoop you both!” Engels purportedly declared to the deputies, a boast they took to mean that he could body-slam them.
Having met Engels myself, I doubt the diminutive Gen Z’er could body-slam one police officer, much less two. Making matters worse, deputies claim the ornery Engels launched into explicit rants, spouting such words and phrases as “motherfucker,” “queer,” and the evocative “double-jointed pussy.”
After Engels allegedly refused to leave the room, deputies wrestled him down to the ground and forcibly handcuffed him, according to the report. Deputies claimed a dollar-bill with traces of methamphetamine on it fell out of Engel’s pockets. They also allegedly found muscle relaxant pills and Xanax in his other belongings.
The incident raises obvious questions about whether Engels is capable of managing a motel bill—let alone Bovino’s political ambitions. The report notes this was actually the second motel Engels was banned from in the area in just one week.
It’s quite a fall for someone once considered a leading henchman of Stone. Engels had a starring role in “Stop the Steal” protests in Florida in 2018, and joined Loomer and fellow mischief-maker Jacob Wohl on a bizarre trip to Minneapolis to investigate whether Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) had married her brother.
Once, Engels’s upward climb in the world of cut-throat ratfuckery seemed destined to result in some role in the Trump administration or D.C.’s extended universe of far-right rabble. But that promotion never came. Instead, Engels has been out in the cold, nursing various grievances in Wisconsin and resenting old MAGA friends amid a feeling he’d been shut out of the Trump world career he deserved. Among other claims he’s made in a series of strange right-wing media appearances is his insistence that Loomer is transgender.
Maybe Bovino is Engels’s ticket out of this dumpster. But if this is the ride, he’s taking it while facing a felony meth charge, as well as four misdemeanors related to resisting arrest and possessing the pills. Engels claims he told Bovino about the dustups, and the “commander had no concerns.”
Instead, in our interview, Engels asked why other right-wing media figures like Clavicular were able to use meth without facing similar public blowback. And he suggested that he’s the victim of some conspiracy, saying he was targeted only after accusing Stone himself of being a meth user.
“I just find it curious that, out of nowhere, I’m the meth-head,” he told me.
The Gravest Insult in the MAGA Womanosphere
For right-wing men, the worst insult you can lob at your opponent is calling them a federal informant or “fed.” But for conservative women, the jab that sticks the hardest is accusing your MAGA foe of having a gay husband.
Consider the plight of Alex Clark, a former reality-TV contestant who has reinvented herself as a MAHA podcaster for Turning Point USA.
Clark has long been dogged by the fact that she’s preaching a sort of traditional housewife lifestyle without being married or having kids herself. At just 33, Clark would hardly be doomed to be a “femcel,” or female incel, in the regular world. But by TPUSA standards, she’s practically a spinster.
So it was a big deal last weekend when Clark, speaking at TPUSA’s Women’s Leadership Summit, unveiled her new fiancé: champion fiddle player and wellness blogger Vance Voetberg.
Clark’s detractors remained unconvinced, pointing to a video of Voetberg adopting a sort of effeminate accent while working in a coffee shop as proof that he’s gay. Candace Owens, a longtime foe of both Clark and TPUSA, played clips of Clark calling for a return to American masculinity on her show and contrasting them with videos of Voetberg.
“He is, without question, objectively effeminate,” Owens said.
There’s no evidence that Voetberg is gay. And since he’s engaged to a woman, I think it’s fair for our purposes to assume he’s not! Even if he were, God bless.
But in the den of vipers that is women’s MAGA media, this was no small matter. Things got so bad that Voetberg was forced to put out a video statement, released on Clark’s own X account, saying, in effect, that he’s not gay and that Owens would definitely not be invited to the wedding. Clark herself retweeted a post saying her fiancé “sounds completely normal.”
Accusations of “lavender marriages” are frequently lobbed in MAGA’s civil wars—so often, in fact, that it’s become a trope. Laura Loomer and others have speculated about whether Owens’s own husband is gay. Amy Dangerfield, the “groypette” who organized a controversial America First conference earlier this year, has faced allegations that her husband is transgender, only because he’s a slight fellow.
And of course, podcaster Benny Johnson and his wife threatened to sue Milo Yiannopoulos last year for his insistence that Johnson is gay. (No lawsuit has been filed as of this writing.)
Corrections (1:45 p.m. EDT June 11 2026): The originally published version of this story incorrectly stated that during the arrest at the motel, police claim to have found Xanax and muscle relaxant pills on Engels’s person; the pills were allegedly found in his other belongings. The story has also been updated to clarify that Engels does have some lower-level campaign experience.
YMMV but the best part of this newsletter is the fiddling vid Will found.
I graduated high school in 1979. Why oh why does it feel like I never left? Stuff like this, that’s why.