These Trump shills will be the first to turn on him — and he knows it

When people ask why I’m still on Twitter (which I never call X, because that’s just stupid), I explain that it’s the only social media app I use where all of the Republicans in Congress post regularly. As a member of the indie media, it’s imperative that I know what kind of messaging is coming from MAGA via Moscow, especially when the Trump regime has a chokehold on most of the mainstream media.

2025 saw the rise of the “MAGA journalist,” which is an oxymoron for the ages. A whole group of them was invited to the White House and given their orders to spread lies and propaganda about blue cities as part of the Project 2025 effort to control the media narrative, and nobody paid much attention.

But I did.

Check that date. It’s one week after the government shutdown began, weird!

Some of those “journalists” are fresh out of high school. None of them holds a journalism degree. Apparently, anyone with a camera and a per diem from the Trump regime can call themselves a “journalist” now.

And some of them had already been sent to Portland, where I live, to start manufacturing violent and otherwise misleading videos at our ICE facility.

On Saturday, Oct. 4, Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-OR) was turned away from the Portland ICE facility after she requested a tour. Dexter was told she couldn’t gain access “because of the shutdown.”

Later that same day, paid MAGA agitator Katie Daviscourt was given a personal guided tour and even gained access to the roof to do an interview that was aired on Fox News, after she claimed she was “assaulted by Antifa.”

Several of the other MAGA “influencers” I named were also dispatched to Portland, but none more famously than Benny Johnson. He accompanied Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on her ill-fated visit, only to be run out of town by a guy in a chicken suit.

I spent a lot of time defending Portland by screaming into the abyss online, but it was especially fruitless on Twitter, thanks to Elon “Clarice Starlink” Musk suppressing my account.

And when I say a lot of time, I mean I stood on the roof of my building and filmed the Portland skyline for nearly two hours to prove the city wasn’t a bombed-out crater on fire.

Nothing makes me angrier than when people lie. I would rather hear the ugliest truth than the most beautiful lie. The truth is rarely something everyone likes, but it’s something we’re all supposed to be able to deal with. If you can’t cope with the reality that Trump is a criminal, by every possible definition, you have no place calling yourself a “journalist.”

And you definitely shouldn’t be making hundreds of thousands of dollars to spread lies and propaganda intended to make Americans not just feel less safe, but now is literally endangering our lives.

That seems egregiously unfair and illegal to me, but I’m not a lawyer, I’m just someone who constantly tells the truth. And no, George Soros isn’t paying me or anyone else to do that, thanks.

I’ve been voicing my concerns over Trump controlling the media narrative since well before November 2024, and it’s obviously gotten worse in this last year that we’ve somehow survived.

While the MAGA “influencer” accounts have exponentially more followers than I do, almost all of them are fake. They’re designed to create false engagement, so the MAGA propaganda merchants are always at the top of my “For You” feed, even though I don’t follow any of them.

Most Americans aren’t on Twitter (bless their lucky little hearts), so they’re not familiar with Nick Sortor, Cam Higby, Benny Johnson, and Tim Pool. But they were recently introduced to Nick “Baby Teeth” Shirley, the self-avowed 23-year-old virgin who can’t pronounce “benevolent,” thanks to his video allegedly exposing fraud at daycares in Minneapolis. Specifically targeting the Somali community, along with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Shirley’s video worked exactly as Trump hoped. He needed a new distraction from the Epstein Files Transparency Act, so Shirley was sent to Minneapolis to make one happen.

All of a sudden, the focus shifted from Epstein to yet another blue city where Trump could send in federal agents to foment violence on the streets. But unlike his attempts in Chicago and Portland, Trump’s arbitrary invasion of Minneapolis has come with a body count.

The MAGA smearing of the murdered Renee Good was bad enough, but the response to Alex Pretti’s execution by seven ICE agents has shown the world just how low MAGA is willing to go to protect their Dear Leader. A handful of Congressional Republicans have begun to push back but there are far too many still standing with the Epstein Bestie who hung a framed photo of himself with Vladimir Putin in the White House — above a photo of himself with one of his grandchildren, who I bet he couldn’t name if you asked him while standing right in front of the kid.

I dunno, seems treason-y to me.

There’s nothing you can say to the MAGA Agitator accounts to derail them from their false narratives, not even when Fox News reports the truth. There’s a direct line from the White House to these shills, which should then create another direct line straight to prison.

Trust me, Trump will throw these small, basement-dwelling fish under the bus first. They’re the most expendable of his loyalists, because none of them are in Congress or in his administration. But that means they’ll also be the easiest to turn against Trump, in exchange for immunity or a reduced sentence, because they know where the money is coming from — and they won’t acclimate well to Gen Pop.

And we’ll still never stop talking about the Epstein Files, no matter what manufactured distraction they come up with next.

• Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com