The Vicious MAGA Feedback Loop Feeding Trump’s L.A. Crackdown
Who’s really calling the shots—the government or the anonymous internet trolls?
How online bloodlust drove the Los Angeles ICE raids
Three months into the Trump administration, Chaya Raichik, the social-media entrepreneur behind Libs of TikTok, donned a bulletproof vest and an ICE badge and joined Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on immigration raids in Phoenix.
For Raichik, the April raid represented a golden opportunity to get not just original content for her feeds but the type of content her followers would love: tough crackdowns on illegal migrants.
And it did go viral, but not in the way she was hoping for. Megyn Kelly complained that Raichik was doing “cosplay.” Other right-wing personalities on social media griped that Noem was too focused on photo-ops with MAGA influencers and not enough on ratcheting up DHS’s deportation stats.
Perhaps worst of all, the propaganda coming from the Noem-Raichik collab wasn’t even that satisfying for the anti-immigrant crowd. Raichik got a few videos of Noem hectoring undocumented immigrants whom Raichik claimed were also criminals, with the secretary leaning into squad cars to tell the men in the back to turn their lives around. One man successfully avoided Raichik’s camera by blocking it with a Croc.
But instead of being dissuaded by the Raichik episode from bringing along right-wing media figures on ICE raids, the Trump administration seems to have been convinced that they just needed more alarming scenes to film.
This month, Dr. Phil McGraw was allowed to embed with ICE for the raids that sparked protests in Los Angeles. And instead of confrontations involving Crocs, this scene involved Donald Trump deploying both the national guard and a Marine battalion.
It is a thrilling way to show the Trump faithful that the administration is really doing something. It also underscores one of the most underappreciated elements of what is currently happening in Los Angeles and elsewhere: Much of it is being driven by a feedback loop between the Trump administration and online MAGA-world, each urging the other on to more cruelty.
This desire to sate the base’s endless need for action, expressed via social media, is seen throughout the administration. It’s the same dilemma that plagues Dan Bongino, whose tenure at the FBI has been marked by repeated public pleas for online conspiracists to recognize that the crazed portrait of the world that he, Bongino, once presented to them is not actual reality.
In a similar vein, Trump world figures like Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller have spent years telling followers that the world around them was a horrifying hellhole—with millions of illegal immigrants terrorizing the country and threatening the very fabric of our civilization.
But while Bongino can’t really cook up a fake Jeffrey Epstein murder plot to win back his fans, Noem and Miller definitely can ramp up deportations. And they can do so while bringing the MAGA media ecosystem along for the ride.
The administration has pitched its deportation plans on social media since the inauguration. Early on, the White House posted videos of elaborately staged deportations to El Salvador and the Studio Ghiblified crying deported woman.
But all that gloss wasn’t enough to placate the base, which complained that deportation numbers remained woefully inadequate for the problem as the president himself outlined. And so, we reached a turning point this May, when Miller hectored ICE officials to step up deportations.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested,” one official recalled of the meeting, as reported by the Washington Examiner. “‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’”
When an ICE raid took place near a Home Depot, setting off the Los Angeles protests, right-wing media figures were thrilled.
But feedback loops always build to something more. And now that the right-wing MAGA ecosystem has been emboldened, it has a new demand: a ban on “third world immigration,” as embraced in strikingly similar language by Jack Posobiec, Charlie Kirk, and the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh.
How “third-world” would be defined, of course, is up to them.
Proof that much of what the administration is doing is being driven by the ravenousness of their online followers is everywhere. On Sunday, amid a situation that he was describing as an unfolding crisis, Trump’s deportation czar, Tom Homan, managed to take time off to appear on Laura Loomer’s online show.
And even as Homan claimed that the violence was ticking up, he was able to summon up a smile at Loomer’s proposal that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) be investigated over bogus right-wing claims that she committed immigration fraud by marrying her brother.
As for the conspiracy theorists, they seem both insatiable and eager to participate in the show that the White House is producing. As has become a pattern whenever images of urban unrest appear on social media, right-wing “investigators” seized on piles of bricks from construction sites around Los Angeles as proof that shadowy forces are behind the protests.
Jessica Reed Kraus, the Substack writer affiliated with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., claimed that the Los Angeles protests were just the beginning of a plot meant to trick “patriots” into launching “a civil war type scenario.” One of the hosts of the Fresh and Fit dating podcast, former DHS agent Amrou Fudl—who goes by the alias Myron Gaines (as in “[ad]mirin’ gains” made in the gym)—volunteered in an X reply to Bongino to return to his old job and help pursue the protesters. (The FBI and DHS are in two separate departments of the executive branch, which is something one would hope all DHS agents know.)
Scott Presler, the voter-registration star, offered to join ICE to help with the deportations on the grounds that he “studied criminal justice in college.”
How harsh the crackdown would have to be before these people are satisfied may be impossible to know. What’s clearer is that we are not yet at that point, even with soldiers being deployed to an American city.
After Trump floated the idea of arresting California Gov. Gavin Newsom, right-wing personalities began calling for the administration to actually follow through on it. And when Vice President JD Vance merely told Newsom to do his job, they let it be known that wasn’t enough.
Referring to Newsom pro-Trump figure Gunther Eagleman demanded of Vance, “Arrest him.”
Homan has stated publicly that Newsom hasn’t done anything to warrant arrest—but trivialities like the law and due process seem to matter little to MAGA die-hards who want the blood, detentions, and incarcerations they were promised.
How Trump beat Elon for custody of MAGA influencers
As soon as I saw Catturd’s tweet, I knew Trump had won.
Thursday’s showdown between Trump, the world’s most powerful man, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, put right-wing influencers in a bind.
On one hand, their entire careers are based on supporting Trump. On the other hand, Musk is lining many of their pockets in the form of payouts for generating engagement on X. More importantly, Musk can nuke their visibility on the platform if he gets mad at them, vaporizing their careers in the process.
And both men can offer right-wing media figures otherwise impossible opportunities that generate the attention on which they thrive—like an invite to a White House “social media briefing,” or a love child.
That’s probably why, in the feud’s first hours, all the big MAGA names just stood to the side. If they said anything, people like Laura Loomer opted for posts with a neutral “haha, wow, crazy…” tone.
But when Musk accused Trump of being in the Epstein files, he went too far. It was then that Catturd—the alias of Phillip Buchanan, dean of MAGA Twitter trolls—correctly recognized that when Trump is being accused of being a pedophile, the entire MAGA project is in jeopardy.
“When you come out and call Trump a pedophile—that’s when you’ve crossed a redline,” Buchanan tweeted.
Once Catturd drew the line in the sand, pretty much everyone went with Trump. Only Ian Miles Cheong—a Malaysian man who, through years of videogame-forum arguments, has amassed a strange amount of clout on the American right—backed Musk’s call for Trump to be impeached and replaced by JD Vance.
Cheong, incidentally, has posted in the past that he makes a huge amount of money off of X payouts—as much as $20,000 in just one month. Presumably, that has nothing to do with his decision to back Musk.
Speaking of X money, the New York Times has an interesting profile of Dominick McGee, the prominent MAGA conspiracy theorist who goes by the name “Dom Lucre.”
Lucre has 1.5 million followers and is prominent enough to get invited to the White House. But his offline life seems pretty depressing. He makes an average of $55,000 per year in payouts from the social media site, but at eleven hours of posting a day, the Times calculates that he makes less than minimum wage.
When I meet people in the real world and they find out what I cover, they often lament that they themselves have too many scruples to go MAGA, assuming that it’s a guaranteed cash cow. But the reality is much stranger—and sadder.
For every Candace Owens or Ben Shapiro, there’s a whole supporting universe of third- and fourth-tier wannabes. They might get their airfare paid to conferences every so often or even go to the White House, but they otherwise drift through life, waiting, maybe forever, to get called up to the big leagues.
And what happens when they deport them all? Which American citizens do they turn on then—Latino Americans? African Americans? Black and Asian Americans? Liberals? There is no end to the craving for bloodlust.
Thank you Will for a well written, informative article. It’s distressing I don’t know hardly any of these people but their incitement, posts, and proximity to the administration is affecting us all.