Anonymous Pro-Trump Influencer Account Is Run By White House Rapid Response Staffer, WIRED Finds
Just hours after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis, the Trump administration moved quickly to control the public narrative. Official White House social media accounts flooded platforms with clips of burning American flags and violent confrontations between local residents and federal immigration agents, framing the unrest itself—not the killing—as the main headline.
One of the most prominent accounts pushing that framing was Johnny MAGA, a pro-Trump X account with nearly 300,000 followers. Operating anonymously, the account shared a clip pulled directly from the White House’s official rapid response feed and posted: “They’re burning the American flag right now in Minneapolis. And they really expect you to believe that ICE shot an innocent civilian.”
To its audience, Johnny MAGA presented itself as an independent grassroots voice—just another passionate supporter active within the broader MAGA media ecosystem. The account regularly amplifies Trump’s Truth Social posts, defends the administration’s policy choices, and targets high-profile Democrats including California Governor Gavin Newsom.
But the account is far from the independent voice it claims to be. A WIRED investigation of public records, corroborated by a source close to the White House with direct knowledge of the arrangement, confirms Johnny MAGA is run by Garrett Wade, a sitting White House employee who serves as a rapid response manager for the Trump administration. In that official role, Wade helps manage the exact White House official account that his anonymous MAGA account regularly amplifies. A phone number registered to Wade matches contact information linked to the Johnny MAGA account.
Wade and the White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Per Johnny MAGA’s X profile, the account launched in September 2021, originally under a different username that directly referenced Wade’s birth year, WIRED’s review of records shows. Though the account’s earliest public posts centered on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), it has maintained a steady, unapologetically pro-Trump presence on the platform since at least 2022.
At no point has the operator of Johnny MAGA disclosed their official White House employment. Multiple major U.S. media outlets—including Mother Jones, TownHall, and the New York Post—have linked to posts from the account, treating them as unplanned, organic expressions of public opinion on political debates.
Since Trump took office last year, the account has repeatedly backed the administration’s top policy priorities, including stricter immigration enforcement, and promoted pro-Trump conservative groups such as Turning Point USA. Earlier this month, after Trump shared a racist AI-generated video that depicted former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes on Truth Social, Johnny MAGA amplified the White House’s defense that Trump never watched the full clip before posting. The account wrote: “the most obvious tell that Trump's Truth Social post wasn’t intentional is that he would’ve posted the entire thing if he had seen it. It’s a masterpiece.”
The Trump administration has spent years cultivating a large network of conservative online creators to distribute its messaging to broader audiences. But having a sitting White House staffer moonlighting as an anonymous, grassroots-branded MAGA influencer blurs the already thin line between official government communications and seemingly authentic organic public support, disinformation researchers warn. This lack of disclosure poses a direct threat to public trust.
“People have a right to know who is trying to manipulate public opinion, and they have a right to know whether or not they’re experiencing astroturf politics,” says Samuel Woolley, a University of Pittsburgh professor who specializes in disinformation and media ethics. “This lack of transparency and the conflict of interest surrounding this account and the lack of disclosure all amount to a breach of public trust.”
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makenakelly.32. |Little personal information about Wade is publicly available online, but Federal Election Commission (FEC) records connect him to senior Trump White House communications leadership. FEC filings show 2023 WinRed donations from a Garrett Wade based in suburban Philadelphia, where Wade graduated high school. In March 2023, he listed his employer as “tech school”; by December of that year, he listed his employer as Opinion Architects, a digital consulting firm.
The donations also list his residence as Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which matches public records of Wade’s previous address. The phone number linked to both Wade and the Johnny MAGA account (which has previously listed its location as Philadelphia) is also geolocated to the Bucks County area.
White House ethics records show Opinion Architects is owned by Taylor Budowich, who served as Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications until September 2025. While the full scope of Opinion Architects’ work is not public, Wade remained employed by the firm through the entire 2024 election cycle; a June 1, 2024 WinRed donation from Wade still lists Opinion Architects as his employer.
The firm has received more than $325,000 from Make America Great Again Inc. (MAGA Inc.) for “research” and “communications” consulting. Budowich also served as executive director of MAGA Inc., the pro-Trump super PAC that was one of the Trump campaign’s largest outside spending groups during the 2024 presidential cycle. MAGA Inc. was also a client of Conservative Strategies Inc., another consulting firm led by Budowich. As WIRED previously reported, after Trump took office, MAGA Inc. hosted private candlelit dinners that offered donors one-on-one access to Trump for contributions of $5 million or more.
Wade is married to Allison Schuster, a White House press assistant, who follows the Johnny MAGA account on X. Schuster’s Instagram account, which she recently changed to private, shows the couple attended multiple pro-Trump events after the 2024 election, including an election night watch party, where both were photographed wearing “Make America Great Again” hats.
Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign leaned heavily on outreach to young male voters online, partnering with a network of influencers just like Johnny MAGA—and Budowich was a key leader of that project. In August 2024, Budowich co-launched the “Send the Vote” initiative with John Shahidi, president of the media network that partners with NELK Boys’ Full Send media brand, to register young men to vote.
The effort was framed as nonpartisan, but the audiences of the creators and celebrities the group worked with—including NELK and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)—overwhelmingly lean conservative. Trump appeared as a guest on the Full Send podcast in October 2024, shortly before election day.
The broader right-wing digital media ecosystem has become a key recruiting ground for the Trump administration across multiple federal agencies. Last year, when Dan Bongino was tapped to serve as FBI Deputy Director, his most recent full-time role was hosting a popular conspiracy theory-filled podcast on platforms like Rumble. The U.S. Defense Department, led by former Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth, has at least two former independent right-wing creators on its official digital media team.
Graham Allen, a right-wing podcaster, was hired by DOD to lead its social media accounts while continuing to host his independent podcast Dear America. Amjed Yacu also works for the Defense Department while running the @snowflake.tears Instagram meme page, which has more than 330,000 followers. Unlike Wade’s Johnny MAGA account, Yacu openly discloses his Pentagon role on both his meme page and personal profile, pinning a photo of himself taking his oath of office to the top of both accounts.
Transparency issues around political influencer work are not unique to the right. The Democratic Party has also faced controversy over failing to require paid influencers to disclose their ties to political groups. Last August, WIRED reported that the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a liberal dark money group, funded a project that quietly recruited more than 90 progressive content creators, paying them between $250 and $8,000 a month to push Democratic-aligned messaging online.
While the U.S. Federal Trade Commission requires content creators to disclose paid commercial endorsements, no equivalent federal rules mandate disclosure for paid political influencer work. In 2023, the Federal Election Commission declined to adopt a rule that would formally require creators to disclose when they are compensated by a political entity.
“People often treat digital spaces as if it requires a novel set of transparency rules,” says Woolley. “The reality is that we need the same kinds of transparency that are required for traditional media.”
Matt Giles contributed reporting.
Update: 3/2/2026, 2:35 PM EDT: WIRED has clarified the Sixteen Thirty Fund's role with the project that recruited progressive content creators.
