Is the ‘Influencer Right’ at Odds With Trump Over Minnesota?

After speaking with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Monday, President Trump summarized the exchange in a post on Truth Social with some choice words.

The call? (“Very good.” ) The dynamic between these political foes? (“We, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength.”) The mood overall? (Very happy!”)

It was an apparent decision by Mr. Trump to play nice, hours before a shake-up that included reassigning Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official who was leading the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. As the president seemed to soften his position, MAGA’s talking heads gathered online to offer a few rueful words of their own.

“He blinked,” Stephen K. Bannon said of the president on his podcast “War Room” a day later.

“He just sucks,” said Nick Fuentes, the 27-year-old Holocaust denier whose feelings about the president change often, but have lately soured.

“Trump is just an old, tired man who doesn’t really care — he’s just not the guy,” Mr. Fuentes added, during a segment of his podcast, “America First with Nick Fuentes.”

“This is a major blunder,” Matt Walsh, a conservative commentator who is not known for breaking with the president, said on his podcast, “The Matt Walsh Show.”

It was a somewhat uncharacteristic moment of discord for a bunch usually in lock step with the Trump administration, particularly on the issue of immigration. But after Mr. Trump’s assurance that he would “de-escalate a little bit” in Minneapolis, this clique, which some have taken to calling the “influencer right,” has undergone a week of angst, self-reflection and rage, with no shortage of sad-boy-style defeatism.

“What a humiliating surrender,” Tim Pool, a popular MAGA podcaster, wrote in response to to the news that a federal judge in Minneapolis had ordered the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to appear in court.

Not so long ago, Mr. Trump was hailed by many of these same figures as a president with the audacity to send in special forces units to punish political opponents who “FAFO.” (That’s the expletive-laden expression used by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to mean messing around and facing the consequences.)

In recent months, though, Mr. Trump has given this faithful following a few head-scrambling moments — like when he gave Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani of New York a warm Oval Office welcome in November.

Of the pledges made by Mr. Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign, few issues appear to matter more to this cohort than the blunt two-word promise of mass deportations. The president vowed to carry out “the largest” deportation effort in American history starting on Day 1.

In a term rife with MAGA rifts over the president’s stances on Israel, Iran, the war in Ukraine, the Epstein files and the rising cost of living, the mass deportation effort has acted like a strong glue.

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“It became an unifying principle ethos,” said Dan Trombly, a researcher at George Washington University who focuses on far-right movements and political violence.

“It’s connected to so many of their narratives on everything from the economy to changing cultural norms to crime,” he said. “It’s too big to fail in some ways.”

Within the online right, a highly vocal subset of young conservatives have advocated loudly for immigration restrictions, mass deportations and even the end of legal immigration approaches, like the H-1B visa. This week, several college Republican groups posted open letters to Mr. Trump in support of mass deportation. “Our message to you Mr. President: Do not back down.” read a letter published by the Young Republicans of Texas.

During a recent podcast appearance, Andrew Kolvet, the spokesman for Turning Point USA, said that younger Republicans in his organization were “way more radical” than older Republicans on the subject of immigration. “It’s not even negotiable, these issues,” he said.

Mr. Kolvet’s assertion about younger Republicans is not reflected in a recent poll conducted by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that found that a “younger, more racially diverse” segment of Republicans support increasing high-skilled immigration by a margin of 16 points, compared with the party’s older, more conservative base.

Still, Minneapolis, for much of the online right, has become a symbolic kind of fight. Many commentators, who are not generally known for exercising measured political dialogues, have attempted to whip up a frenzy over the smallest signs of political capitulation.

Nick Sortor, a conservative activist who has been posting a flurry of pro-administration content from the Twin Cities in recent days, urged Mr. Trump “do not cave” after a second phone call with Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis. “We the people voted for mass deportations!” Mr. Sortor said.

“Have we learned nothing in 60 years?” wrote Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, a social media platform for right-wing users. “You must force Walz to cooperate or jail him.”

Much of this rhetoric appeared to be animated by a fear that the Minneapolis killings by ICE officers could set off a nationwide unrest like the kind the country faced in 2020, during Mr. Trump’s first term. The Black Lives Matter protests of the time, coupled with the right’s response to the protests, helped shift public opinion away from Mr. Trump, who went on to lose the presidential election that year.

Many on the right view this current moment as existential test for the president, as well as the MAGA movement: Force, unambiguous and swift, against the “chaos,” as the podcast host Tucker Carlson put it on his show this week, appears to be the only answer that will satisfy them.

“If we lose in Minneapolis, it proves the American government on a federal level is effectively defunct,” Andrew Beck, the vice president of communications for the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that is closely aligned with the administration, wrote on X on Saturday.

Amid the distress, some on the right called for cooler heads to prevail and pointed to other actions by Mr. Trump that suggested he was still committed to the crackdown in Minneapolis.

Mr. Trump has installed his border czar, Tom Homan, to oversee operations in the city. Immigration enforcement is still underway.

And for anyone concerned with a conciliatory shift by the president, Mr. Trump appears to have gone back to his old ways. On Friday, in a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump wrote that Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old I.C.U. nurse who was killed by federal agents, was an “agitator” and “perhaps, insurrectionist,” repeating the administration’s early attempts to blame the victim.

Some on the influencer right have suggested that perhaps the influencers themselves were to blame for the panic in the first place.

“Their primary goal is attention, and they should be taken about as seriously as an ant or a child’s drawing,” John Doyle, a 26-year-old podcaster who hosts “The John Doyle Show” on the conservative platform BlazeTV, told The New York Times in an email.

Mr. Doyle, for his part, had already begun to share a different message to his followers.

“Trump wants to deport illegals,” he said. “Democrats are cooperating at the state level in these operations, despite flirtations with obstruction. Trump wins. There was no surrender.”

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