Under the Influence

An intimate account of the MAGA movement's most powerful social media influencers--their history, playbook, and performance tactics--as they shape an alternative vision for America at a moment of unwinding trust in its institutions. We tell ourselves stories about how the world works to help us make sense of reality. When these stories don't align with our lived experiences, reality itself can feel like it is unwinding. One segment of Americans felt this dissonance when a reality television show personality and his army of sycophants won the White House. Another group of American voters believed someone was finally speaking truth to their reality. After years of crises--including financial collapse, foreign wars, and the opioid epidemic--Donald Trump crystalized an accessible narrative about how American institutions worked to benefit everyone but Americans. Yet, Trump wasn't alone. Under the Influence is an insider account of the conservative media influencers who helped rewrite America's common sense, and, with it, its political reality. Chronicling a six-year journey through the parties, protests, social media, and minds within Steve Bannon's media milieu, Danielle Lee Tomson reveals that "the influencers" perform their roles sincerely, rendering an alternative vision of America both on- and offline. From the inside, Tomson explores how they do their work, crafting Hollywood worthy storylines and a participatory plotline replete with heroes, villains, costumes, and shibboleths that constitute an entire lifestyle--not just a politics. As Tomson shows, the influencers are not simply "disinformers" but political agents and political performers who offer followers a distinct worldview and a sense of purpose: a secular faith that promises revelation and retribution. Drawing on her uniquely Trumpian upbringing and entrance into elite academic circles, Tomson reflects on how the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy is also a crisis of imagination. When institutions lose credibility because they lose sense of the real plot, the most carnivalesque storytellers take the stage and remake reality. The first step to national narrative recovery is admitting that the problem isn't just "them," it's all of us.