GoKawiilIn 2019, a 36-year-old Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), newly elected to Congress, was photographed for the inaugural Time 100 Next List, wearing a dashing eye patch and looking upwards with hope. A Harvard-educated Navy SEAL who’d lost his legs while fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, Crenshaw was in rarefied company, listed among the magazine’s candidates for tomorrow’s leaders: musicians like Billie Eilish and Bad Bunny; athletes like Coco Gauff and Alysa Liu; business leaders like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong; fellow political stars like Pete Buttigieg.
Crenshaw was, Time declared, “what the Republican Party might look like after Donald Trump.” At the time, MAGA was more of a slogan than a cohesive movement, the GOP still had moderates like Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), and Trump was still considered an anomaly, just a populist who’d managed to tweet his way into the presidency and used his account for political cyberbullying. But as Time and every profile of him in that era pointed out, Crenshaw could tweet, too.
Earlier that year, even before he was sworn into Congress, Crenshaw had broken into the pop culture zeitgeist — something that traditional Republicans could never do — by lambasting Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson on Twitter. The comedian joked about his eye patch, but the pair mended bridges during a Weekend Update appearance. “In his first year in office, Crenshaw has built a sizable social-media following — including more than 1 million Twitter followers — as the right’s leading warrior against what he calls ‘outrage culture,’” wrote Time, marveling that he could defend traditional Republican values without supporting Trump himself, or even stooping to Trump’s level of perpetual internet combat. In fact, he could out-combat Trump and MAGA, both verbally and visually, if this Avengers-style campaign video from 2020 indicates anything:
But by March of 2026, Crenshaw, once touted as the future of the party, couldn’t even hold onto his House seat. He lost his race by a whopping 15 points to a local state representative named Steve Toth during the Texas Republican congressional primaries.
Almost immediately, Crenshaw blamed social media, the very medium he was supposed to dominate. He told Face the Nation that he’d been the “target of online smears and conspiracies for a very long time” and his loss was “basically the product of that”; and told The Texas Tribune that “the power of clickbait” had caused his loss. “Memes became truth. Too many people are not discerning through the clickbait. People voting — one after the other — literally thought I was making millions in the stock market doing inside trading.”
Crenshaw was right, to a degree. Republican strategists who’ve watched his rise and fall agree that social media helped lead to his decline — but the heart of the problem was his own usage of it. “I think he did enjoy the back and forth,” Brendan Steinhauser, a Texas-based Republican political strategist who’d been Crenshaw’s campaign manager in 2018, told The Verge. He described Crenshaw as someone who genuinely enjoyed the work of legislation, and a hot-headed and a passionate debater in real life. This made him an easy mark. “Then people realized if they pick a fight with him and get under his skin, it would be good for them and good for clicks.”
If Crenshaw was savvy at the internet — and some say that’s debatable — he failed to see that the rules had changed. The Twitter he had spent so much time on had become something else, something new, something that had left him behind. It was, quite literally, no longer Twitter. This was X, the home of white supremacists, state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, MAGA influencers who’d been expelled for defamation but were now re-platformed, memelords who purchased blue checkmarks, and people (if they were people) who could lie nonstop about Crenshaw without suffering any consequences — except, maybe, for a boost in the algorithm if he engaged with their content.
On January 5, 2022, Crenshaw got into a fairly typical flamewar. He sent this 265-character burn, just below Twitter’s max character limit, to a MAGA follower posting about another Texas political candidate: “Wow. This ‘America First’ consultant @alexbruesewitz supports a candidate that wrote a master’s thesis supporting AMNESTY. No joke. Chances are, he knew about it too. Now trying to spin story, unsuccessfully. Sit down Alex. You’re not America First, you’re a fraud.”
That target, Alex Bruesewitz, didn’t appreciate the words. But he cared more about the number of retweets and replies, watching them steadily ticked upwards.
I first met Bruesewitz over text in 2021, when the organizers of the January 6th Stop the Steal rally delegated the 23-year-old influencer to handle my media requests. (He and Derek Utley, another MAGA influencer, had launched a boutique comms firm, X Strategies, in 2017.) When I finally met him IRL that October, at a MAGA candidate’s rally he’d organized in Tulsa, I watched him speak onstage. A self-described “nice Wisconsin boy,” Bruesewitz said all the correct MAGA things about stolen elections and how the incumbent had betrayed Trump and so forth. But visually, he just didn’t match the words coming out of his mouth.
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