The Fitness Influencers Who Tried to Make Me Like Trump

It was March 2020 and suddenly I had much more free time on my hands. Presumably you did, too. 

All the hours we’d otherwise have spent commuting, traveling, or socializing were suddenly ours to fill with other diversions. In hindsight, it’s striking how much we gave over to screentime. That includes all the restless evenings wiled away in the infinite scroll. But even bringing our favorite hobbies and goods and services home entailed logging on. 

How do you make sourdough starter? Ask the internet. 

What’s the best recipe for your favorite cocktail? Ask the internet. 

How do you exercise in your living room with bodyweight or minimal equipment? Ask the internet. 

With these questions, we gave precious details about ourselves over to the companies that control the information our computers feed to us. 

And it was through this give and take that I eventually realized our information ecosystem had undergone a transformation. Where the digital-media universe had, for most of its existence, resembled a content archipelago divided by niche, somewhere along the line it had become an amorphous blob, and politics had suffused everything — often in subliminal, insidious ways.

The big social media platforms were already formidable players in 2020. By then they had already eaten into the audiences of more traditional news and entertainment outlets, which increasingly struggled to maintain our attention. Per-capita movie attendance began declining way back in the early 2000s, thanks first to web 1.0, then social media, then streaming, before COVID sent it into collapse. Mainstream news dominated political discourse long after I entered the field in 2005, but I’ve never worked at a mainstream news company. From my digital-first perch, I’ve seen mainstream outlets slowly disintegrate as digital alternatives busted their monopolies, only for those digital operations to disintegrate, too, as consumers spent more and more time scrolling through headlines, and less reading news articles. I’ve watched audiences gravitate to online sources of sensationalism, propaganda, and conspiracy theory, shrinking the reach of credible news and analysis, and allowing false beliefs to flourish. 

But when we look back on it with the benefit of critical distance, I suspect we’ll come to see COVID-19 as the natural force that tipped us into an era of digital-media dominance, where more Americans inhabited right-wing phantasmagorias than reality-based communities. Whether your pandemic hobby was fitness or baking or scrolling for scrolling’s sake, algorithms would eventually feed you material clumsily inflected with reactionary politics.

This has upended the formation of public opinion, and with it, the obligations of news professionals, policy makers, and politicians. 

It didn’t dawn on me all at once, but over a series of strange encounters with content that, just a few months earlier, might not have carried a whiff of partisanship.

In my case, home fitness was the gateway. All gyms in Washington, DC, were closed on mayor’s orders, and I lived in a small condo. Exercise was an antidote to forced sedentariness, and a healthy way to cope with all the ambient stress and uncertainty. Major online platforms were already overrun with scammers and clout-chasers, but my career experience served as training to filter out charlatans and find credible, transparent professionals providing workout tips and free programming.

As weeks turned into months, these influencers became digital companions. But as months turned into years, I noticed a change. This dumb little reel struck me as particularly uncanny when I happened upon it back in 2022. 

I’m not scoldy or prudish about any of this. When I happened upon that video three years ago, I laughed. But I also thought it was odd. I knew how unusual it was for brands and marketers with cross-partisan appeal to make overtly partisan gestures. Brands might align themselves with issues and causes (like voting rights and same-sex marriage) which they understood to be popular, particularly among people inclined to spend money. But they’d leave cheap shots at politicians to late-night comedians. 

In my experience, influencers were little different. They wanted big audiences and to go where the money was. But suddenly this kind of tribal signaling was ubiquitous, and it arose in stark contrast with what came before, when politics and culture did not overlap in such obvious ways. 

When George W. Bush was president, books cataloging his malapropisms became best-sellers, and David Letterman and Saturday Night Live would take the piss out of him. But there were fitness influencers even in the early aughts, and it’s impossible to imagine them asking “Is our children learning?” with a wink to the camera. Twenty years later, left- and right-wing political influencers can film a workout collab wearing “LET’S GO BRANDON” merch and it seems totally unremarkable. 

This happened across platforms. Dig through YouTube archives, and you can watch the Canadian sight-gag troupe NELK (the Nelk boys) transform from a mostly apolitical production into an explicitly pro-Trump one. 

As 2022 gave way to 2023, then the fateful election year of 2024, I began to wonder how much of this was an artifact of technological development, and how much was propaganda. Stealth marketing. Donor bucks flowing into the pockets of lifestyle influencers via campaigns and party committees. Was it really in anyone’s interest to cape for Trump and the GOP in this way without getting paid?

After Trump won re-election, commentators and political strategists credited these influencers and podcasters with helping Trump find new supporters, young men in particular. The Pew Research Center published a comprehensive report detailing just how conservative our news ecosystem had become, with a higher percentage of news influencers leaning right on platforms from YouTube to X to Facebook. Simultaneously, a growing number of Americans get their public-affairs information from social media and podcasts.

This can all be tough to swallow for us digital lifers. The utopian hope of the early internet era — around the time TPM launched, in 2000 — was that digital media would allow knowledge and expertise and citizen journalism to effloresce. The masses would gain a voice, and the best voices would have the greatest reach. But after a brief golden age, the outlook darkened. Instead of 1,000 TPMs blooming, we got a profusion of slop and sponcon. 

It’s unfortunate. But it doesn’t make professional-quality digital-news media — or expertise, generally — worthless. It just creates new challenges: to arm dedicated readers (or listeners or viewers) with credible information so that they can share it as widely as possible; to package news and information so that it captures the attention of podcast producers and twitch streamers instead of cable producers. For consumers — at least the civic-minded ones — it makes distinguishing between credible journalism and garbage an essential skill. 

Those of us who don’t adapt will be left behind. Those who do can still thrive … at least until we write our retrospectives on the dawn of the A.I. era.