“It’s happening, I’m crashing out. I’m done! Okay?” the model and influencer Esha Javed says in a TikTok she posted earlier this week. Javed, who has more than 786,000 followers on her main account @vixenesha, tells the camera that since she joined the platform when she was a teenager, “life has hit me like a fucking truck,” and she is “no longer the stupid brainwashed liberal that I used to be.”
“I’m done. I’m so tired of my old fan base,” she concludes. “I don’t give a fuck about your identity politics. I voted for Trump. And” — she adds, inexplicably — “I hate fat people!”
Javed’s video was seemingly prompted by backlash she faced from her followers: Before posting her TikTok, she tweeted that she lost more than a thousand Instagram followers because she publicly supported Trump. (Javed, like most of the other influencers in this story, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) But among conservatives, the reaction to her TikTok was rapturous. The video was widely shared by thousands of Trump supporters, who viewed Javed’s rant as emblematic of a larger shift in the Gen-Z social-media ecosystem. They aren’t entirely wrong. Since Donald Trump won the presidential election last week, more lifestyle influencers like Javed — who until now has mostly posted Russian manicure vlogs, TikTok Shop spon-con, and pelvic floor workout videos — are revealing themselves to be full-throated Trump supporters.
On Election Day, Jena Covello, the founder of Agent Nateur — a natural beauty brand that counts Emma Watson and Carolyn Murphy among its fans — posted an Instagram Story of herself wearing a Trump 2024 hat, as well as a slideshow featuring photos of Trump from the ’80s with the caption “Make America Dream Again.” Though Covello has gotten pushback for posting conspiracy theories before, including misinformation about the dangers of fluoride, her hard MAGA pivot shocked many of her followers. (“You’re a Trump supporter? WTF?” reads one aghast comment.)
Covello joins other prominent wellness figures like Vani Hari, known as the Food Babe on Instagram, who recently appeared on an RFK Jr.–sponsored panel about nutrition and has posted a photo of herself with a sign that reads Make America Healthy Again — RFK Jr.’s campaign to remove corruption from the food and drug industries. Jordan Younger, a wellness influencer and podcaster known as the Balanced Blonde, also posted a rant on Substack the day after the election calling for unity and railing against the “not-winning party,” though she did not specify who she voted for. “The name calling, the holier than thou attitude, the shaming, the virtue signaling, the complete unwillingness to see a viewpoint that doesn’t fit a specific narrative is … sickening,” she wrote.
The growing intersection between the wellness-influencer ecosystem and MAGA conspiracy theories has been well-documented. But public figures in other areas have also been slowly revealing themselves to be MAGA in the days after the election. On November 6, momfluencer and lifestyle TikToker Autumn Witbeck posted a triumphant video dancing in her car with the caption, “How I feel this morning as a woman who is supposedly losing her rights.” She later posted a tearful follow-up video alleging that some of her family members refused to speak to her after she voted for Trump. Even a handful of adult influencers, like model and OnlyFans creator Arad Winwin and gay porn star Devin Franco have come out as Trump supporters in the days following the election.
The overt MAGA messages from people with large platforms are a far cry from the social-media landscape post-2016 or post-2020. Lifestyle influencers have traditionally been very reluctant to post about their political views for fear of alienating followers or brands. “Pre-election, there may have been concerns about being MAGA/MAHA with respect to ‘brand safety’ and getting sponsors,” Lauren Lipsay, a marketing and brand consultant and author of the beauty newsletter Skin Type, told me. Now that Trump won, however, “that fear has been lifted.”
Part of the reason “all sorts of masks-off moments are happening,” as Lipsay puts it, is because being openly political is “not as much of a deterrent for brands as it used to be,” says Melissa Vitale, owner and founder of the Brooklyn-based Melissa Vitale PR. Influencers “who are flagrant with their political leanings, on all sides, are getting brand deals. I’ll be scrolling mindlessly and be like, ‘Oh, they got this brand deal? That’s interesting.’”
There’s also been a rightward shift on social-media platforms in general. Despite conservatives’ claims that social-media platforms tend to skew liberal, a number of studies show that right-wing content tends to garner far more engagement and visibility than content that promotes progressive values. And with the news and viral content cycle churning at a virtually unprecedented rate, it’s arguably more difficult than ever for influencers to attract eyeballs — but it also grants them more license to be incendiary without facing long-term consequences for it. “It’s so much harder to be canceled now,” the consultant told me. “People will always try to cancel influencers over minor things, but realistically, the culture moves so quickly that they just have to stay quiet for a few days and it blows over.”
And even if someone does get backlash, there are alternatives. Since billionaire (and recent Trump appointee) Elon Musk took control of X, and the emergence of streaming platforms like Kick and Rumble, there have never been so many options for right-wing posters. “All of these companies have popped up to be the ‘conservative version of X,’” says Lipsay. “Now, if a mainstream brand no longer wants to work with you, you no longer have to worry quite as much, since there are new, sketchy, MAGA-aligned companies ready to monetize that story.” Being a right-wing influencer also tends to be more of a moneymaker than it is for those who are left leaning — there are always supplements and merch to sell.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Trump was also a big factor in winning over influencers. Before suspending his own presidential campaign back in August, Kennedy, a prominent voice in the anti-vaxx space, had already garnered tremendous support from wellness influencers, many of whom had been primed to embrace far-right conspiracies thanks to the QAnon-adjacent #SaveTheChildren movement in 2020. When Kennedy got on board with Trump, many of his supporters followed him, adapting traditional MAGA messaging into the more palatable, brand-friendly Make America Healthy Again campaign that rails against Big Pharma and FDA corruption. (His endorsement apparently paid off: On Thursday, Trump announced that he was nominating Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services).
Courtney Swan, an integrated nutritionist who goes by Realfoodology, was convinced to vote for Trump after RFK endorsed him (and even thinks RFK’s support is what helped Trump win). When she posted in support of Trump, she was “very pleasantly shocked” by the reaction she received — people sent her supportive messages, and her following dipped only slightly. “If this had been 2020, I would never have done it,” she says about posting about her political affiliation. “But I think the political landscape has changed. In my opinion, people are fed up.” Even a few brands, she says, have slid into her DMs to offer messages of encouragement.
Above all else, however, it seems that the primary factor driving influencers to publicly embrace Trump has been the man himself. As someone who has proven, time and again, to be impervious to traditional shaming tactics, Trump has ultimately given legions of his supporters license to finally go public about their support for him, one prominent New York–based communications consultant told me. And though there has been some backlash to posts like Javed’s in the form of angry comments or Reddit threads documenting influencers who are also Trump supporters, the outcry has been relatively minimal.
“We’re in a different climate now. A different era,” the consultant told me. “Trump gives people permission to be the worst versions of themselves. And with him winning, we’re seeing that again on a much larger scale.” Still, she adds, there remain some talking points that have proven to be toxic for brands. “Honestly,” the consultant says, “people lose more brand deals talking about Palestine than anything else.”
This post has been updated with comments from Courtney Swan.
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