Right-wing influencers shape nation and Trump’s understanding of Portland protests

Benny Johnson, a pro-Trump social media personality from Florida, announced to his followers on X that he had arrived.

“Yo, what’s up!” Johnson said Tuesday as he strolled into the airport. “We are on the ground in Portland, Oregon.”

Johnson was in town to meet with three other social media influencers and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to tour the city’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, where protests had been taking place since June.

“The Trump administration is here today. Follow along. The Trump administration ain’t gonna have any of this,” Johnson said. “This is going to be a rowdy day.”

From there, the influencers packed into SUVs and followed Noem, passing through police lines that had been established around the ICE facility and eventually behind its gates.

Standing on the building’s rooftop, Johnson and the other influencers filmed Noem for their millions of followers online. But the day was less than rowdy.

On the street below, around 20 reporters from local and national outlets stood behind yellow caution tape, along with a handful of protesters. It was a sunny fall day in Portland, far from the burning hellscape portrayed online.

Still, influencer Nick Sortor warned Noem that she wasn’t seeing the real story.

“This is absolutely nothing as to what it is at night though. It’s really bad at night,” Sortor said. “That sun goes down and it gets totally lawless.”

Social media personalities like those who joined Noem are increasingly shaping the public’s understanding of events in Portland, where the Trump administration has been trying to deploy the National Guard in recent weeks.

While partisan online posting about protests in the Northwest is nothing new, right-wing media influencers are now being welcomed into the federal government to promote its messages. This kind of media access shows a deepening alliance between the administration and an online world willing to misrepresent facts if it means furthering political goals.

The influencers’ personal content is blended with interviews on Fox News, Newsmax and other outlets, and reposted by federal agencies at times. Sortor and another media personality on the ICE tour, Katie Daviscourt, appeared on a panel at the White House on Wednesday with President Trump, where clips were similarly repurposed and spun out to broader conservative media.

Local media like OPB and The Oregonian/OregonLive have not been given the same access to the ICE building when they requested it. In response to requests to tour the ICE building, DHS officials have asked OPB – a century-old media organization that has covered newsworthy events at the protests since their earliest days – to share links to OPB coverage of the protests before considering access.

‘Counter-protesters themselves’

The current Trump administration is working with these influencers to justify the president’s actions, according to A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor who studies media activism in the University of Alabama’s journalism department.

“The streamers are actually counter-protesters themselves who are going and documenting the protests that they disagree with. The government is actually working hand-in-glove with those folks in order to promote the government’s message,” Bauer said. “That is a new development.”

There are many examples over the years of mainstream journalists embedding with the government to cover major events, like during the Vietnam or Iraq wars. But those reporters were largely free to be critical of the government.

Bauer said right-wing influencers don’t follow the journalistic norms of balance, independence and not personally participating in stories. Instead, he said, they start out with an ideological vision of the world and then narrate what they see in a way that fits that vision.

“The consequences are that we have two competing visions of reality,” Bauer said.

There have been almost nightly protests outside of Portland’s ICE facility for months. Since June, the Portland Police Bureau has made at least 47 arrests, and federal officials have arrested dozens more, though not everyone has been charged with a crime.

Still, the protests span just one or two city blocks. Many nights, there are fewer than two dozen people. Dancing and whimsical costumes have been a frequent protest tactic since the Trump administration has expressed a desire to send in military troops to suppress the demonstrations.

But these influencers tell a story that chaos is rampant. And now, they are having the biggest impact possible by shaping how President Trump views the protests. They repeated a vision of Portland to him at a White House roundtable on Wednesday that many residents wouldn’t recognize.

“The amazing thing is you look at Portland and you see fires all over the place. You see fights. I mean, violence, it’s so crazy,” Trump said during the televised round table. “And then you talk to the governor and she acts like everything is totally normal. It’s almost like, are you waking up from a dream or something?”

A history of clashes

Right wing presence at protests in Portland is not a new phenomenon.

During the president’s first term, counter-protesters were a regular presence in the Rose City when residents and left-aligned demonstrators took to the streets. Provocateurs like Joey Gibson would frequently show up at protests between 2015 and 2020 to film and engage in conflicts with what they described as antifa mobs.

At times, those provocations turned violent, with people being shoved, maimed and even killed as dueling political factions took to the streets.

Those protests also launched the careers of streamers and media personalities who focused on the conflict with a particular political view, such as Andy Ngo, a former Portland resident who now edits for the Canadian conservative outlet the Post Millennial.

With around 1.7 million X followers, Ngo is an influential voice on the right who appeared at Wednesday’s roundtable with President Trump. He also helped pave the way for the people aligning with the Trump administration against the current Portland protests. That includes Daviscourt, who brands herself on X as an investigative reporter for the Post Millennial.

While activists like Gibson have appeared at the protests outside the ICE building in recent days, the content being produced by the streamers is not restrained to their own feeds and fans, as it largely was during the first Trump administration.

On Thursday, Ngo made a post to his X account warning of an impending attack on federal law enforcement.

“Antifa in Portland have been plastering flyers around the city urging people to try and crash the DHS helicopter flying over ICE,” Ngo wrote just before 9 p.m., sharing an image of a flyer with lasers pointing at a helicopter.

Around three hours later, DHS posted a similar version of the flyer to its X account.

“Antifa domestic terrorists WILL NOT overrun our cities,” the post stated.

Facts on the ground

Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson and most other state officials have rejected the need for the Trump administration to send the National Guard to the city. But their views seem to have little influence on the White House’s stated plans and rhetoric.

On a recent night outside the ICE facility, conservative podcaster Matt Tardio was live-streaming the Portland protests. Tardio said he’s trying to capture everything that’s going on, not just the clashes between protesters and police.

“I do know that I’ve caught some coming-up streamers or whatever they were, legitimately trying to start problems and having hidden cameramen off to the side trying to capture those problems starting so that they could have their viral clips,” Tardio said. “That’s messed up.”

Tardio, who is a veteran, agrees that the situation on the ground is being exaggerated online.

“I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve said I don’t think the National Guard needs to come out here. I feel that the Portland Police Bureau can handle it,” he said.

But that hasn’t stopped other influencers from repeating the story about a war-ravaged city that gets amplified by Trump officials and repackaged across the media ecosystem.