Here is one sure sign that the Trump administration understands it is in trouble with the public this week: They didn’t just recall Gregory Bovino from Minnesota. They silenced him on social media, too.
For the unacquainted, Mr. Bovino is the great-coat-wearing border patrol “commander-at-large” who led the operation in Minneapolis and became the face of the mayhem. It was a role he leaned into online, posting prolifically from his X account, @CMDROpAtLargeCA, right up until Monday morning, when the account appeared to go dormant.
“Convicted sexual predator arrested!” read his last post.
The decision to bar Mr. Bovino from his account was made not by the White House but by his higher-ups at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, according to an official at the Department of Homeland Security. A different U.S. official insisted that Mr. Bovino would eventually regain access to his social media account, once he’s back at his previous post in California, overseeing part of the border there. Both asked for anonymity because they were not allowed to speak to the media.
Nonetheless, the taming of CMDROpAtLargeCA offered a glimpse into an administration in damage control mode.
It is one thing to be demoted. It is another thing entirely to lose your social media megaphone. In this administration, there may be no worse fate.
President Trump rules by social media and it’s difficult to be a power player in his court if you’re not power posting, too. To lose one’s account is to lose the ability to brag about all the righteous work one does for him. It means losing the ability to tar one’s common enemy. How is one supposed to build a profile within the MAGA universe if one cannot post?
Mr. Bovino, who is 55-years-old, seemed to understand all of this. He used his X account to mix it up with journalists, lawmakers, critics, fans, Stephen King — whoever. CMDROpAtLargeCA became an expression of the persona he crafted for himself, every bit as important as the coat and the haircut.
Mr. Bovino could be blasé about the bloodshed on American streets. “Pipe down with the feigned outrage,” he wrote to Democratic representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who posted a video condemning the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. When Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, posted about Mr. Pretti’s death, Mr. Bovino replied: “You were there? Typical arm chair quarterback.”
Even though it became clear that Mr. Bovino would be the one to take the fall, it was somehow surprising that he would be suspended from social media. There was really nothing about his behavior online that wasn’t perfectly in keeping with how his superiors behave online.
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Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, is a social media warrior. Vice President JD Vance has been crashing out online about Minneapolis all week. Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policies, called Mr. Pretti a “would-be assassin” in a post on X. These officials have posted things that are in direct contradiction to what the president and his press secretary are now saying about the violence in Minneapolis, and yet, this does not seem to have hurt them at work. Mr. Miller was traveling with the president aboard Air Force One to Iowa Tuesday.
It’s hard to imagine what was off-kilter about the way Mr. Bovino was using social media. After all, the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, the Labor Department and other sectors of this administration have spent the year posting references to neo-Nazi literature, QAnon conspiracy theories and white-supremacist song lyrics on official government accounts.
A White House official declined to comment about Mr. Bovino’s social media account Tuesday. His social media suspension has raised a collective eyebrow on the right, as social media censorship has long been one of most animating causes for members of the president’s political base. One of the main consequences of Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, was that he was kicked off social media platforms. He started his own platform, Truth Social, which is a key part of how he governs today.
Several prominent posters with connections to the administration preferred not to comment about the silencing of Mr. Bovino when asked about it on Tuesday. One who did want to comment was Steve Bannon.
“Silencing Commander Bovino is a terrible idea,” he wrote in a text message.
What might Laura Loomer think? It was only a few years ago that she had been banned by so many platforms that, she once said, she had to go to therapy because of the “PTSD I have developed as a result of being silenced.”
These days, she functions as a combination mouthpiece and loyalty enforcer for the Trump administration. So maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that she didn’t seem too concerned about Mr. Bovino being shut up.
“So from what I was told by the White House when I asked about this is that he’s going to have another social media account, but for the El Centro sector,” she said, referring to the part of California to which Mr. Bovino has been reassigned. “It’s not that he’s being shut down or silenced.”
Another power poster in the Trump orbit is Katie Miller, the former administration aide who is married to Stephen Miller. Ms. Miller said she hadn’t been paying attention to the commotion around Mr. Bovino’s suspension and therefore couldn’t be sure if it was true. “I don’t follow him even,” she said. She said she didn’t know what he had or had not been posting.
“My algo doesn’t show him, unfortunately,” she added.
And now neither does yours.
Reporting was contributed by Hamed Aleaziz
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
The post Why Did the Trump Administration Silence Bovino on Social Media? appeared first on New York Times.
