In 2019, a 35-year-old Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), newly elected to Congress, was photographed for the inaugural Time<\/em> 100 Next list, wearing a dashing eye patch and looking upward with hope. A Harvard-educated Navy SEAL who\u2019d lost an eye while fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, Crenshaw was in rarefied company, listed among the magazine\u2019s candidates for tomorrow\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Crenshaw was, Time <\/em>declared, \u201cwhat the Republican Party might look like after Donald Trump.\u201d 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\u2019d managed to tweet his way into the presidency and used his account for political cyberbullying. But as Time <\/em>and every profile of him in that era pointed out, Crenshaw could tweet, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Earlier that year, even before he was sworn into Congress, Crenshaw had broken into the pop culture zeitgeist \u2014 something that traditional Republicans could never do \u2014 by lambasting Saturday Night Live<\/em>\u2019s Pete Davidson on Twitter. The comedian joked about his eye patch, but the pair mended bridges during a Weekend Update appearance. \u201cIn his first year in office, Crenshaw has built a sizable social-media following \u2014 including more than 1 million Twitter followers \u2014 as the right\u2019s leading warrior against what he calls \u2018outrage culture,\u2019\u201d wrote Time<\/em>, marveling that he could defend traditional Republican values without supporting Trump himself, or even stooping to Trump\u2019s level of perpetual internet combat. In fact, he could out-combat Trump and MAGA, both verbally and <\/em>visually, if this Avengers-<\/em>style campaign video from 2020 indicates anything:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But by March of 2026, Crenshaw, once touted as the future of the party, couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Almost immediately, Crenshaw blamed social media, the very medium he was supposed to dominate. He told Face the Nation<\/em> that he\u2019d been the \u201ctarget of online smears and conspiracies for a very long time\u201d and his loss was \u201cbasically the product of that,\u201d and he told The Texas Tribune<\/em> that \u201cthe power of clickbait\u201d had caused his loss. \u201cMemes became truth. Too many people are not discerning through the clickbait. People voting \u2014 one after the other \u2014 literally thought I was making millions in the stock market doing inside trading.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Crenshaw was right, to a degree. Republican strategists who\u2019ve watched his rise and fall agree that social media helped lead to his decline \u2014 but the heart of the problem was his own usage of it. \u201cI think he did enjoy the back and forth,\u201d Brendan Steinhauser, a Texas-based Republican political strategist who\u2019d been Crenshaw\u2019s campaign manager in 2018, told The Verge. <\/em>He described Crenshaw as someone who genuinely enjoyed the work of legislation, and a hotheaded and a passionate debater in real life. This made him an easy mark. \u201cThen people realized if they pick a fight with him and get under his skin, it would be good for them and good for clicks.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If Crenshaw was savvy at the internet \u2014 and some say that\u2019s debatable \u2014 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\u2019d been expelled for defamation but were now replatformed, memelords who purchased blue checkmarks, and people (if<\/em> they were people) who could lie nonstop about Crenshaw without suffering any consequences \u2014 except, maybe, for a boost in the algorithm if he engaged with their content.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n On January 5th, 2022, Crenshaw got into a fairly typical flame war. He sent this 265-character burn, just below Twitter\u2019s max character limit, to a MAGA follower posting about another Texas political candidate: \u201cWow. This \u2018America First\u2019 consultant @alexbruesewitz supports a candidate that wrote a master\u2019s thesis supporting AMNESTY. No joke. Chances are, he knew about it too. Now trying to spin story, unsuccessfully. Sit down Alex. You\u2019re not America First, you\u2019re a fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The target, Alex Bruesewitz, didn\u2019t appreciate the words. But he cared more about the number of retweets and replies, watching them steadily tick upward.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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\u2019s rally he\u2019d organized in Tulsa, I watched him speak onstage. A self-described \u201cnice Wisconsin boy,\u201d 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\u2019t match the words coming out of his mouth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This was October 2021, when the MAGA influencers were \u201cSloppy\u201d Steve Bannon, militia election denialists, and people in QAnon T-shirts screaming at me for wearing masks indoors. Bruesewitz\u2019s hair was neat but not meticulous, his blazer slightly more luxe and tailored. But his white leather sneakers immediately set him apart. \u201cI bet you don\u2019t see many MAGA influencers wearing Gucci sneakers,\u201d he bragged later, showing off the iconic red-and-green stripe running down the quarter panel. Basically: He was a Zoomer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Over the next several years, Bruesewitz would often send me links to his latest anti-Dan Crenshaw content, mostly about his disloyalty to Trump and the America First agenda, always with a request for a retweet. One day, he sent me a photo of a prototype \u201cDan Crenshaw Action Figure\u201d \u2014 a plastic white rhino toy wearing an eye patch \u2014 and I wondered if he had too much time on his hands.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As he told me later, he\u2019d first gotten annoyed that Crenshaw had called him an \u201cAmerica First fraud\u201d when he was trying to build his brand explicitly as a MAGA loyalist. You know what? I\u2019m going to go after him<\/em>, he thought. Within days, a contact of his (who actually hated Crenshaw) sent him a video from a Texas town hall. In it, a short young woman reads a quote from an old podcast interview Crenshaw had given and questions why he called Jesus \u201ca hero archetype.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019ll help you,\u201d Crenshaw shot back. \u201cPut a period after the word Jesus and don\u2019t question my faith.\u201d The crowd started booing. \u201cDon\u2019t say things like that to a 10-year-old girl!\u201d says a person offscreen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Bruesewitz retweeted it. The progressive account @MeidasTouch soon did as well, adding the caption \u201cDan Crenshaw got humiliated by a 10 year old girl.\u201d The clip, now freed from MAGA Twitter quarantine, racked up millions of views, from Infowars to Rolling Stone<\/em>, across the political spectrum. Crenshaw was now branded an asshole for yelling at a child. (The woman, it was later revealed, was actually 18.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n No matter. Bruesewitz kept retweeting outrageous content: a video of Crenshaw calling the Freedom Caucus \u201cgrifters and performance artists\u201d; a claim that Crenshaw would spend more time criticizing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The narrative against Crenshaw was taking shape: The representative wasn\u2019t the kind of Republican his voters wanted. By April 2022, Bruesewitz had acquired a live rhinoceros named Henry, slapped a MAGA hat on him, and published a photo blasting the new breed of Republicans in Name Only: \u201cI love Rhinos like Henry. I hate RINOs like @DanCrenshawTX and @AdamKinzinger.\u201d By that May, he was shipping the Dan Crenshaw Action Figures to his enemy\u2019s congressional offices. By September, he was doing War Room <\/em>appearances, claiming to Bannon that Crenshaw had been trying to get his clients to drop him. He even held a rally in the congressman\u2019s district to bash the candidate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cDifferent congressmen would send me messages saying things like, \u2018I love your feud with Crenshaw, keep it up, the dude sucks.\u2019 And I\u2019m like, \u2018Wait a second. Other people in Washington are paying attention to me now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Publicly, to the best of my knowledge, Crenshaw never mentioned Bruesewitz at this time. (Though Bruesewitz did have a moment where he claimed that Crenshaw had created a burner account to attack him.) This was in Crenshaw\u2019s peak Twitter era, when he was able to present himself as a conservative who voted with Trump\u2019s positions, but was capable of going at top-level influencers like Dan Bongino over vaccine mandates (criticizing him under the genteel category of \u201cconservative influencers\u201d) and tussling with Greene over whether to fund the Ukraine war (\u201cStill going after that Russia Today spot huh?\u201d). Just weeks prior to Crenshaw tweeting at Breuesewitz, Politico<\/em> had published an article praising Crenshaw\u2019s Twitter acumen, saying that he was setting an example for the rest of the GOP: \u201cAs he sees it, his party needs to back up its rhetorical bombs with facts.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But across the country, the GOP\u2019s post-Trump future was looking a lot like Trump\u2019s positions, which required a lot of cognitive dissonance to support. The 2022 midterms were defined by the president testing the loyalty of the Republican Party: If candidates didn\u2019t support Trump\u2019s baseless claims that Joe Biden had stolen the election, Trump would endorse their opponents during the primaries and end their political careers. That didn\u2019t stop Crenshaw, though. He was constantly admonishing MAGA Twitter on their continued \u201cstolen election claims,\u201d going so far as to endorse Rep. Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, the first Republican appointed to the congressional committee investigating the January 6th attacks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Defending these positions was a \u201cfool\u2019s errand,\u201d a seasoned GOP operative with two decades of political warfare under his belt told me. Facebook and Instagram were hotbeds for election and vaccine disinformation. The deplatformed MAGA influencers were all quietly migrating to TikTok. Elon Musk was about to purchase Twitter, where Crenshaw thrived, promising to turn it into the \u201cfree speech\u201d paradise that internet trolls and MAGA loyalists had long desired: no content moderation, no built-in brakes to halt the spread of disinformation, no consequences for anyone who harassed users under the guise of political debate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cTrump is just far more compelling [on these platforms] for what he stands for,\u201d he noted, than what Crenshaw had been trying to push. Add in Crenshaw\u2019s voting record on supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia \u2014 a heretical move to the isolationist MAGA wing \u2014 and his brand was set. \u201cDan Crenshaw decided when he got into elected politics, he was in the Bush-Cheney wing with these military leaders. And that ended up being evident online.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In August 2022, Harriet Hageman, who\u2019d won Trump\u2019s endorsement and used her campaign to bash the January 6th commission, beat Cheney by more than 30 points. Though Crenshaw had handily won his primary back in March, his reputation was now starting to crater. Matthew Wiltshire, a Texas GOP political consultant, recalled a conversation he had during that cycle with Kenny Webster, a Texas-based MAGA-leaning radio host, who\u2019d constantly been razing Crenshaw on his show. \u201cI remember asking him, \u2018Why do you hate Dan Crenshaw so much? He\u2019s essentially the same as Don Bacon,\u2019\u201d he said, referring to a moderate Republican House member from Nebraska. \u201cAnd he says, \u2018Who\u2019s Don Bacon?\u2019 The reason that people would use Dan is because they got clicks. People knew who Dan was.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n By the time Congress was sworn in in January 2023, Crenshaw\u2019s new colleagues included election denialists like Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, Rep. George Santos, and Sen. Markwayne Mullin, while a slew of his former moderate Republicans had either retired or been primaried out of office. And Bruesewitz was on Capitol Hill, too, taking meetings with Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Though the J6 consultant had been primarily retweeted by minor MAGA celebrities, maybe scoring a photo op with MTG here and there, he had learned that his Crenshaw content was reaching powerful eyeballs. \u201cDifferent congressmen would send me messages saying things like, \u2018I love your feud with Crenshaw, keep it up, the dude sucks.\u2019 And I\u2019m like, \u2018Wait a second. Other people in Washington are paying attention to me now.\u2019\u201d (Ironically, he built a solid relationship with McCarthy by trolling him online: \u201cWhen I would tweet things that were negative about Kevin, there\u2019d be people who\u2019d pick up the phone and say, \u2018Alex, you should really meet Kevin.\u2019\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Just days after McCarthy was sworn in, the Texas congressional delegation was watching in horror as Crenshaw\u2019s chief of staff, Justin Discigil, began a multiday flame war with Bruesewitz online about how only 30 percent of his America First clients had won their elections. The feud was no longer hidden behind burner accounts and DMs, but in public view under people\u2019s real names. (By the time I began reporting this article, Bruesewitz had deleted his tweets.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n None of the political operatives I spoke to understood why Bruesewitz had put so much effort into his flame wars with Crenshaw that year \u2014 especially since, by all accounts, he seemed to be doing it for free. Then again, political operatives with close insight into the career of a US representative tend to be over 40, and don\u2019t view viral content as networking. Bruesewitz, on the other hand, grew up playing NBA 2K<\/em> and Madden <\/em>with his high school friends over Xbox Live, during the peak of the gaming platform\u2019s toxic harassment culture \u2014 an experience, he said, that helped him develop an oddly zen approach to internet trolling.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019m a Gen Z guy who would spend his hours after school not doing homework, but going on Xbox Live and talking crap to my best friends and random kids on the internet,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then when you have to get off the Xbox, you say, \u2018All right, guys, see you tomorrow,\u2019 after saying the most heinous things together. And you go back on the next day, and you do it again, and you do it again, and you do it again.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s no wonder he saw Twitter as a video game \u2014 \u201cYou could see real-time results as winning and losing based on retweets and likes and ratios\u201d \u2014 and Crenshaw not as an elected official, but as a faceless player in the lobby screaming insults at him, albeit one who could be triggered more easily than a 12-year-old. \u201cThese other people, they took it a little bit more personally and emotionally, because perhaps they had more riding on it than I did.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Back when Crenshaw first ran for Congress in 2018, Steinhauser, the former campaign manager, noticed that he\u2019d be particularly incensed whenever a lie about him popped up online. \u201cThe other guy [in the runoff election] was just totally making ridiculous attacks against Dan and we\u2019re like, \u2018Ignore it, ignore it, ignore it.\u2019 And he did a pretty good job. He was pretty disciplined. But he sometimes wanted to be like, \u2018This guy\u2019s just lying about me.\u2019 We\u2019re like, \u2018Of course he\u2019s lying about you. It\u2019s politics.\u2019 But we definitely were encouraging him not to punch down.\u201d The Saturday Night Live <\/em>incident was an anomaly, a moment where Crenshaw was able to take the high road. \u201cIf he would have kept doing that, I think he would have avoided a lot of this,\u201d said Steinhauser.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Instead, Crenshaw was a one-man Streisand effect, creating internet drama on every platform where someone was lying about him. There were only so many ways that Crenshaw could explain how he had not engaged in insider trading \u2014 a meme that had popped up earlier in his career that would not go away \u2014 though he tried everything from aggressive Instagram stories to long podcast appearances on The Free Press (which resulted in headlines describing him as \u201ctriggered\u201d). \u201cYou\u2019re a fucking clown desperate for clickbait,\u201d Crenshaw posted on Instagram in January 2024, after Fox News host Jesse Watters repeated the latest claims that had proliferated on Twitter. (He added that Watters was \u201cthe type of dude who pees sitting down.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It leaked into new formats and new online communities, too. In 2023, Crenshaw got into a podcaster flame war with fitness influencer and fellow SEAL David Goggins, after he\u2019d found an old 2020 clip of Crenshaw saying Goggins, an ultramarathoner, wasn\u2019t actually \u201ctough\u201d for a SEAL. Each of them posted several hours\u2019 worth of video bashing each other, with Crenshaw calling Goggins \u201cunhinged\u201d and Goggins calling Crenshaw \u201cslimy.\u201d (This was a progenitor of \u201cSEAL on SEAL\u201d internet drama, which culminated when Crenshaw sent a cease and desist letter to influencer Shawn Ryan.) Around this time, too, Crenshaw signed up for X Premium, and with his character limit uncapped, he would end up in long, long fights against influencers like Catturd. (\u201cSorry I was guy fighting the wars that little bitches like you would never dare to.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe was pretty disciplined. But he sometimes wanted to be like, \u2018This guy\u2019s just lying about me.\u2019 We\u2019re like, \u2018Of course he\u2019s lying about you. It\u2019s politics.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But it went nationwide, into the homes of his constituents, after Crenshaw reignited a feud with Tucker Carlson. Though the two had already been beefing for years \u2014 Carlson called him \u201ceyepatch McCain\u201d and Crenshaw retorted with \u201ccowardly, know-nothing elitist\u201d \u2014 the former Fox News primetime host had become the most popular MAGA podcaster in the United States. Without Fox corporate hovering over him, no one from Rupert Murdoch\u2019s corporation legally could restrain Carlson from making dubious claims about Crenshaw being involved in insider trading, promoting gun safety laws, or being weak on the border.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 2025, Crenshaw was caught on a hot mic calling Carlson \u201cthe worst person\u201d and saying, \u201cIf I ever meet him in person, I\u2019ll fucking kill him,\u201d seemingly serious. The moment it went live, Greene accused Crenshaw of threatening to \u201ckill [her] friend\u201d Carlson, and the suggestion that Crenshaw wanted to physically harm Carlson went viral (even when Crenshaw\u2019s answer was \u201clol no.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Carlson invited Crenshaw onto his show. Crenshaw apparently did not respond. And months later, Carlson posted a 90-minute interview with Toth, his rival for the 2026 midterm election, wherein they bashed Crenshaw for his (unsubstantiated) wealth and his support of Ukraine. \u201cI\u2019m so happy you\u2019re running against Dan Crenshaw,\u201d said Carlson, saying that while he felt bad for Crenshaw and thought he was a \u201ctroubled guy,\u201d he ultimately believed that \u201cthe Republican Party shouldn\u2019t have a Dan Crenshaw in it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Bruesewitz, for his part, had been tweeting unsubstantiated accusations about Crenshaw\u2019s insider trading since April 2022. But by the time that Crenshaw was feuding with Carlson in early 2024, Bruesewitz had joined the Trump campaign as a senior adviser, and had convinced the president that the path back to the White House went through Gen Z. He would eventually launch Trump\u2019s TikTok account, book him on all the podcasts that spoke directly to disaffected young men, and connect the campaign with the influencers that could mainstream him: Shane Gillis, Saquon Barkley, the Nelk Boys, Jake and Logan Paul.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n To twist the knife of irony even harder, Bruesewitz made the Time<\/em> 100 Next list in 2025, six years after the magazine had called Crenshaw the future of Republican internet. Described as the \u201cunlikely architect of Donald Trump\u2019s political revival\u201d and a member of the president\u2019s inner circle, Bruesewitz, wrote Time<\/em>, \u201crepresents something potent: a next-\u00adgeneration influencer expanding MAGA\u2019s reach.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In short, Bruesewitz was too busy to troll Crenshaw as often as he\u2019d like. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t need to tweet things like, \u2018Dan, how\u2019d you get so good at being a stock trader? Dan, why are you a RINO?\u2019\u201d he recalled. \u201cThe entire internet would do that for me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There is an elusive, intangible quality that political figures have tried to demonstrate ever since Barack Obama got on Twitter in 2007: that they are \u201cgood at the internet\u201d \u2014 that is, they can use social media to sway public opinion, win elections, and upend the establishment. Democrats have chased this distinction (Gavin Newsom), with some succeeding wildly (Zohran Mamdani) and others failing miserably (Kamala Harris). Republicans, even the hard-right ones, are not inherently better at the internet. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis famously tried to out-internet Trump during the 2024 presidential primary, investing millions of dollars in his relationships with MAGA influencers and announcing his campaign during a livestream with Elon Musk, only to drop out after the Iowa caucuses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Crenshaw in the present day seemed to understand that the internet had both nurtured and nuked his career. I\u2019d been told that Crenshaw was thoughtful and philosophical, and was eager to see how his outlook on content had evolved over time. Did he notice any changes in his online fights when Musk took over Twitter and it turned into X? Was his support of the TikTok ban preventing him from using the platform to fight disinformation? Did he think hard truth could be defended and promoted within the infinite fringe of the modern media ecosystem? Would he advise other elected officials against calling their critics \u201clittle bitches\u201d?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Unfortunately, after agreeing to an interview with The Verge<\/em>, Crenshaw ghosted multiple times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I first reached out to Crenshaw\u2019s office for an interview request about those claims on March 13th, shortly after the election. We were scheduled to speak on March 24th, with his office saying he would call me at 2:30PM. Crenshaw did not call. We finally heard back the next day, March 25th, when his chief of staff attempted to set up a follow-up interview for that afternoon, but never confirmed a time. On March 26th, independent reporter Juliegrace Brufke wrote in her newsletter that she\u2019d taped a 45-minute podcast interview with Crenshaw out of his congressional office, on the topics that The Verge <\/em>had pitched, during which Crenshaw claimed that he was the victim of a massive, well-funded political disinformation campaign by his rivals. The Verge <\/em>has not heard back from Crenshaw\u2019s office despite multiple follow-up attempts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Earlier in the reporting process, my sources repeatedly emphasized to me that Crenshaw\u2019s internet usage was not the sole cause of death. \u201cWhat I can speak to is that in Washington, DC, among his colleagues, the Crenshaw self-centeredness really started to sour,\u201d the 20-year-veteran warned me. \u201cIt was pretty obvious why it was also souring within the district to make him vulnerable.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the interview with Brufke \u2014 briefly unlisted from her YouTube channel, and available only on her Substack, Sources Say<\/em>, if you knew where to look \u2014 Crenshaw certainly did not disabuse that notion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He dragged several of his former political allies: Michael Berry, a Texas conservative radio host \u201cwho\u2019s just this drunken cheating loser \u2014 but he did get me elected my first term, you know?\u201d and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who had reportedly fought Crenshaw at the airport the week before the primary and subsequently endorsed Toth. (\u201cThe only obvious reasoning is Cruz always viewed me as a primary threat.\u201d) He razed the National Republican Congressional Committee, which supports GOP House candidates, for spending heavily on ads to defend fellow Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales, despite the fact that Gonzales was facing numerous sexual assault allegations at the time and would resign from Congress within weeks. He bashed Speaker Mike Johnson for allowing him to lose the primary in the first place, and called Toth \u201ca huge loser of a Republican\u201d and \u201ca little IQ guy.\u201d He called half of his colleagues idiots: \u201cThe average [national] IQ is about 100, and the average IQ of Congress is 100. That\u2019s what I\u2019m saying.\u201d He lashed out at Punchbowl<\/em> cofounder and \u201cdweeb of a reporter\u201d Jake Sherman for publishing a \u201csalacious and ill-informed story\u201d about how he\u2019d been banned from international congressional delegation trips after a reported drunken incident in Mexico. He accused Texas donor Robert Marling, who\u2019d already funded an anti-Crenshaw super PAC, of paying Turning Point USA and the Freedom Caucus to endorse Toth. He accused Terry Lowry and Steven Hotze, two hard-right Texas radio hosts, of being paid for political endorsements. He accused Marling and Cruz of hiring \u201clittle MAGA influencers like Alex Bruesewitz\u2019s X Strategies [who] started this cottage industry of slandering me online.\u201d He said that \u201cgrifters\u201d seemed to be especially attracted to attacking him, \u201cbecause it gets them engagement, and when they get engagement, they make money.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sometime during all of this, Crenshaw mentioned that the baseless claims about insider trading had ended his time in Congress \u2014 \u201cHow can you be an inside trader if you\u2019re not trading for three years?\u201d \u2014 but blamed his own consultants for not putting in enough effort to \u201cget people these facts\u201d and change the narrative. \u201cDon\u2019t listen to consultants. Consultants will tell you, Don\u2019t repeat all the lies. It goes above people\u2019s heads.<\/em> That\u2019s bullshit.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Did he believe that his own internet behavior had anything to do with his loss? No, he replied; if anything, the \u201cgrifters\u201d and trolls were trying to emulate him. <\/em>\u201cI take some blame for opening the door for that, because people thought they were copying me and I was like, \u2018No, you\u2019re not. You\u2019re not copying me.\u2019 I do that stuff for a purpose, because I\u2019m trying to draw people into a serious policy conversation. I know I have to do that by marketing and entertaining them. You\u2019re just entertaining them to get more clicks for yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Brufke asked if he had any advice for other politicians trying to monitor their online brand. \u201cI\u2019m very unique in that sense. My name is just clickbait,\u201d he responded. \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s a lesson for politicians because I don\u2019t think politicians generally deal with what I deal with, unless your name is Donald Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n True, Trump has been the ultimate heat magnet for online hatred for over a decade, but comparing Crenshaw\u2019s internet presence to that of Trump\u2019s in 2026 is like comparing Texas\u2019 Guadalupe Peak to Mount Everest. Plus, Trump has an army of online defenders, a presence on every modern media platform that\u2019s existed since the 1970s (he even owns one now), and people will actually do things for him in the real world \u2014 from donating millions and gifting him gold statues to killing thousands of civilians halfway across the globe. Crenshaw, on the other hand, had no one to defend him, either online or off, compounding the problems he already faced in his race: His district was redrawn to exclude more moderate districts and include more hard-right voters, and his new constituents were more familiar with Toth, their current state rep. Republican primary voters tend to be the hardest of the hardcore, too, and Steinhauser observed that the influencers have \u201ca disproportionate impact\u201d on them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Did Crenshaw believe that his own internet behavior had anything to do with his loss? No, he replied; if anything, the \u201cgrifters\u201d and trolls were trying to emulate him. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201c<\/em>When you go out and talk to voters and you ask them, \u2018Where do you get your information from?\u2019 Fox News is still toward the top, if not the top by far. But then there\u2019s a huge gap there where it\u2019s very much: podcasters, YouTubers, influencer people.\u201d He listed Carlson, Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens, but acknowledged there were probably dozens of other influencers under the radar he didn\u2019t know of \u2014 perhaps influencers who\u2019d swayed other influencers who\u2019d swayed the voters of Dan Crenshaw\u2019s new district. \u201cSo when you have a candidate who is at odds with one or two or three of those folks, it just reverberates, and it reaches the voters in a way that an op-ed in a Wall Street Journal <\/em>just doesn\u2019t, or even a few appearances on talk radio just doesn\u2019t like it used to.\u201d Or, apparently, the terabytes of content Crenshaw has put online over the past six years, trying to push back the false claims about his record and ethics. Ultimately, it couldn\u2019t convince the tens of thousands of voters who went for Toth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One of those influencers, Bruesewitz, has been taking victory laps nonstop. \u201cDan was actually very helpful to my career, if you think about it,\u201d he said. \u201cHe probably doesn\u2019t want to know that.\u201d Bruesewitz still manages several Trump campaign accounts, including the TikTok account, which has 13.6 million followers and churns out content on a regular schedule. And X Strategies, which now produces podcasts for famous MAGA figures like Katie Miller, has never had so many clients.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Like any gamer prone to overcelebrating a victory, Bruesewitz was more than eager to keep trolling Crenshaw, even as he professed to be over the feud. \u201cFor me, I like to punch up. When I was 23 years old and a Twitter troll, fighting with a congressman who was very popular at the time was punching up. Now I\u2019m 28, an adviser to the president of the United States, and Dan is a backbench Congress member. That\u2019s punching down.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Old flame wars are hard to leave alone, though. When Breitbart clipped Crenshaw\u2019s comment about Bruesewitz from Brufke\u2019s interview, the clip went viral. Bruesewitz couldn\u2019t help but send me a meme he\u2019d just posted of himself and other MAGA influencers beating up Crenshaw.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Correction, April 22nd: <\/em><\/strong>Crenshaw lost his right eye, not his legs, as this story initially misstated in one instance. An earlier version of this article also misstated the home state of Rep. Don Bacon. It is Nebraska, not Iowa.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Correction, April 30th:<\/em><\/strong> An earlier version of this article stated that Crenshaw was 36 years old at the time the 2019 Time 100 Next list was published. He was 35. It also stated that he described Jesse Watters as \u201cthe type of dude who sits peeing down.\u201d The correct quote was \u201cpees sitting down.\u201d It also stated that Harriet Hageman beat Liz Cheney by 30 points in the 2022 Wyoming primary. At the time Cheney conceded the race, Hageman\u2019s lead was more than 30 points.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n