Behind the unraveling of Dan Crenshaw

In 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.

This was October 2021, when the MAGA influencers were “Sloppy” Steve Bannon, militia election denialists, and people in QAnon T-shirts screaming at me for wearing masks indoors. Bruesewitz’s hair was neat but not meticulous, his blazer slightly more luxe and tailored. But his white leather sneakers immediately set him apart. “I bet you don’t see many MAGA influencers wearing Gucci sneakers,” he bragged later, showing off the iconic red-and-green stripe running down the quarter panel. Basically: he was a zoomer.

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 “Dan Crenshaw Action Figure” — a plastic white rhino toy wearing an eye patch — and I wondered if he had too much time on his hands.

As he told me later, he’d first gotten annoyed that Crenshaw had called him an “America First fraud” when he was trying to build his brand explicitly as a MAGA loyalist. You know what? I’m going to go after him, 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 “a hero archetype.”

“I’ll help you,” Crenshaw shot back. “Put a period after the word Jesus and don’t question my faith.” The crowd started booing. “Don’t say things like that to a 10-year-old girl!” says a person offscreen.

Bruesewitz retweeted it. The progressive account @MeidasTouch soon did as well, adding the caption “Dan Crenshaw got humiliated by a 10 year old girl.” The clip, now freed from MAGA Twitter quarantine, racked up millions of views, from Infowars to Rolling Stone, across the political spectrum. Crenshaw was now branded an asshole for yelling at a child. (The woman, it was later revealed, was actually 18.)

No matter. Bruesewitz kept retweeting outrageous content: a video of Crenshaw calling the Freedom Caucus “grifters and performance artists”; a claim that Crenshaw would spend more time criticizing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The narrative against Crenshaw was taking shape: the representative wasn’t the kind of Republican his voters wanted. By April, 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: “I love Rhinos like Henry. I hate RINOs like @DanCrenshawTX and @AdamKinzinger.” By May, he was shipping the Dan Crenshaw Action Figures to his enemy’s congressional offices. By September, he was doing War Room appearances, claiming to Bannon that Crenshaw had been trying to get his clients to drop him. He even held a rally in the congressman’s district to bash the candidate.

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’s peak Twitter era, when he was able to present himself as a conservative who voted with Trump’s positions, but was capable of going at top-level influencers like Dan Bongino over vaccine mandates (criticizing him under the genteel category of “conservative influencers”) and tussling with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene over whether to fund the Ukraine war (“Still going after that Russia Today spot huh?”). Just weeks prior, Politico had written an article praising Crenshaw’s Twitter acumen, saying that he was setting an example for the rest of the GOP: “As he sees it, his party needs to back up its rhetorical bombs with facts.”

But across the country, the GOP’s post-Trump future was looking a lot like Trump’s 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’t support Trump’s baseless claims that Joe Biden had stolen the election, Trump would endorse their opponents during the primaries and end their political careers. That didn’t stop Crenshaw, though. He was constantly admonishing MAGA Twitter on their continued “stolen election claims,” going so far as to endorse Rep. Liz Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, at the time the lone Republican in the Congressional committee investigating the January 6th attacks.

Defending these positions was a “fool’s errand,” 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 “free speech” 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.

“Trump is just far more compelling [on these platforms] for what he stands for,” he noted, than what Crenshaw had been trying to push. Add in Crenshaw’s voting record on supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia — a heretical move to the isolationist MAGA wing — and his brand was set. “Dan 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.”

In August, Harriet Hageman, who’d won Trump’s endorsement and used her campaign to bash the Jan. 6 commission, beat Cheney by 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 Ken Webster, a Texas-based MAGA-leaning radio host, who’d constantly been razing Crenshaw on his show. “I remember asking him, ‘Why do you hate Dan Crenshaw so much? He’s essentially the same as Don Bacon,’” he said, referring to a moderate Republican House member from Iowa. “And he says, ‘Who’s Don Bacon?’ The reason that people would use Dan is because they got clicks. People knew who Dan was.”

By the time Congress was sworn in January 2023, Crenshaw’s 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.

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. “Different congressmen would send me messages saying things like, ‘I love your feud with Crenshaw, keep it up, the dude sucks.’ And I’m like, ‘Wait a second. Other people in Washington are paying attention to me now.’” (Ironically, he built a solid relationship with McCarthy by trolling him online: “When I would tweet things that were negative about Kevin, there’d be people who’d pick up the phone and say, ‘Alex, you should really meet Kevin.’”)

Just days after McCarthy was sworn in, the Texas congressional delegation was watching in horror as Crenshaw’s 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’s real names. (By the time I began reporting this article, Bruesewitz had deleted his tweets.)

None of the political operatives I spoke to understood why Bruesewitz had put so much effort into his flame wars with Crenshaw that year — 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 Congressman tend to be over 40, and don’t view viral content as networking. Bruesewitz, on the other hand, grew up playing NBA2K and Madden with his high school friends over Xbox Live, during the peak of the gaming platform’s toxic harassment culture — an experience, he said, that helped him develop an oddly zen approach to internet trolling.

“I’m 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,” he said. “And then when you have to get off the Xbox, you say, ‘All right, guys, see you tomorrow,’ 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.”

It’s no wonder he saw Twitter as a video game — “You could see real-time results as winning and losing based on retweets and likes and ratios” — 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. “These other people, they took it a little bit more personally and emotionally, because perhaps they had more riding on it than I did.”

Back when Crenshaw first ran for Congress in 2018, Steinhauser, the former campaign manager, noticed that he’d be particularly incensed whenever a lie about him popped up online. “The other guy [in the runoff election] was just totally making ridiculous attacks against Dan and we’re like, ‘Ignore it, ignore it, ignore it.’ And he did a pretty good job. He was pretty disciplined. But he sometimes wanted to be like, ‘This guy’s just lying about me.’ We’re like, ‘Of course he’s lying about you. It’s politics.’ But we definitely were encouraging him not to punch down.” The Saturday Night Live incident was an anomaly, a moment where Crenshaw was able to take the high road. “If he would have kept doing that, I think he would have avoided a lot of this,” said Steinhauser.

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 — a meme that had popped up earlier in his career that would not go away — though he tried everything from aggressive Instagram stories to a long podcast appearances on The Free Press (which resulted in headlines describing him as “triggered”). “You’re a fucking clown desperate for clickbait,” Crenshaw posted in January 2024 on Instagram, after Fox News host Jesse Watters repeated the latest claims that had proliferated on Twitter. (He added that Watters was “the type of dude who sits peeing down.”)

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’d found an old 2020 clip of Crenshaw saying Goggins, an ultramarathoner, wasn’t actually “tough” for a SEAL. Each of them posted several hours’ worth of video bashing each other, with Crenshaw calling Goggins “unhinged” and Goggins calling Crenshaw “slimy.” (This was a progenitor of “SEAL on SEAL” 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. (“Sorry I was guy fighting the wars that little bitches like you would never dare to.”)

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 — Carlson called him “eyepatch McCain” and Crenshaw retorted with “cowardly, know-nothing elitist” — 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’s 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.

In 2025, Crenshaw was caught on a hot mic calling Carlson “the worst person,” and that “If I ever meet him in person, I’ll fucking kill him,” seemingly serious. The moment it went live, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Crenshaw of threatening to “kill my friend” Carlson, and the suggestion that Crenshaw wanted to physically harm Carlson went viral (even when Crenshaw’s answer was “lol no.”)

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. “I’m so happy you’re running against Dan Crenshaw,” said Carlson, saying that while he felt bad for Crenshaw and thought he was a “troubled guy,” he ultimately believed that “the Republican Party shouldn’t have a Dan Crenshaw in it.”

Bruesewitz, for his part, had been tweeting unsubstantiated accusations about Crenshaw’s 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’s 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.

To twist the knife of irony even harder, Bruesewitz made the Time 100 Next List in 2025, six years after the magazine had called Crenshaw the future of Republican internet. Described as the “unlikely architect of Donald Trump’s political revival” and a member of the president’s inner circle, Bruesewitz, wrote Time, “represents something potent: a next-­generation influencer expanding MAGA’s reach.”

In short, Bruesewitz was too busy to troll Crenshaw as often as he’d like. “I wouldn’t need to tweet things like, ‘Dan, how’d you get so good at being a stock trader? Dan, why are you a RINO?’” he recalled. “The entire internet would do that for me.”

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 “good at the internet” — 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.

Crenshaw in the present day seemed to understand that the internet had both nurtured and nuked his career. I’d 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 Elon 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 “little bitches”?

Unfortunately, after agreeing to an interview with The Verge, Crenshaw ghosted multiple times.

I first reached out to Crenshaw’s 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 followup interview for that afternoon, but never confirmed a time. On March 26th, independent reporter Juliegrace Brufke wrote in her newsletter that she’d taped a 45-minute-long podcast interview with Crenshaw out of his Congressional office, on the topics that The Verge had pitched, during which Crenshaw claimed that he was the victim of a massive, well-funded political disinformation campaign by his rivals. The Verge has not heard back from Crenshaw’s office despite multiple follow-up attempts.

Earlier in the reporting process, my sources repeatedly emphasized to me that Crenshaw’s internet usage was not the sole cause of death. “What I can speak to is that in Washington DC, among his colleagues, the Crenshaw self-centeredness really started to sour,” the 20-year-veteran warned me. “It was pretty obvious why it was also souring within the district to make him vulnerable.”

In the interview with Brufke — briefly unlisted from her YouTube channel, and available only on her Substack, Sources Say, if you knew where to look — Crenshaw certainly did not disabuse that notion.

He dragged several of his former political allies: Michael Berry, a Texas conservative radio host “who’s just this drunken cheating loser — but he did get me elected my 1st term, you know?” and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who had reportedly fought Crenshaw at the airport the week before the primary and subsequently endorsed Toth. (“The only obvious reasoning is Cruz always viewed me as a primary threat.”) 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 “a huge loser of a Republican” and “a little IQ guy.” He called half of his colleagues idiots: “The average [national] IQ is about 100, and the average IQ of Congress is 100. That’s what I’m saying.” He lashed out at Punchbowl’s cofounder and “dweeb of a reporter” Jake Sherman for publishing an “salacious and ill-informed story” about how he’d been banned from international Congressional delegation trips after a reported drunken incident in Mexico. He accused Texas donor Robert Marling, who’d already funded an anti-Crenshaw super PAC, of paying Turning Point USA and the Freedom Caucus to endorse Toth. He accused Terry Lowry and Steve Hotze, two hard-right Texas radio hosts, of being paid for political endorsements. He accused Marling and Cruz of hiring “little MAGA influencers like Alex Bruesewitz’s X Strategies [who] started this cottage industry of slandering me online.” He said that “grifters” seemed to be especially attracted to attacking him, “because it gets them engagement, and when they get engagement, they make money.”

Sometime during all of this, Crenshaw mentioned that the baseless claims about insider trading had ended his time in Congress — “How can you be an inside trader if you’re not trading for three years?” — but blamed his own consultants for not putting in enough effort to “get people these facts” and change the narrative. “Don’t listen to consultants. Consultants will tell you, don’t repeat all the lies. It goes above people’s heads. That’s bullshit.”

Did he believe that his own internet behavior had anything to do with his loss? No, he replied; if anything, the “grifters” and trolls were trying to emulate him. “I take some blame for opening the door for that, because people thought they were copying me and I was like, ‘No, you’re not. You’re not copying me.’ I do that stuff for a purpose, because I’m trying to draw people into a serious policy conversation. I know I have to do that by marketing and entertaining them. You’re just entertaining them to get more clicks for yourself.”

Brufke asked if he had any advice to other politicians trying to monitor their online brand. “I’m very unique in that sense. My name is just clickbait,” he responded. “I don’t know if it’s a lesson for politicians because I don’t think politicians generally deal with what I deal with, unless your name is Donald Trump.”

True, Trump has been the ultimate heat magnet for online hatred for over a decade, but comparing Crenshaw’s internet presence to that of Trump’s in 2026 is like comparing Texas’s Guadalupe Peak to Mount Everest. Plus, Trump has an army of online defenders, a presence on every modern media platform that’s existed since the 1970s (he even owns one now), and people will actually do things for him in the real world — 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 “a disproportionate impact” on them.

“When you go out and talk to voters and you ask them, ‘Where do you get your information from?’ Fox News is still toward the top, if not the top by far. But then there’s a huge gap there where it’s very much: podcasters, YouTubers, influencer people.” He listed Carlson, Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens, but acknowledged there were probably dozens of other influencers under the radar he didn’t know of — perhaps influencers who’d swayed other influencers who’d swayed the voters of Dan Crenshaw’s new district. “So 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 just doesn’t, or even a few appearances on talk radio just doesn’t like it used to.” 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’t convince 9,971 Texans — a tiny, tiny fraction of all of the district’s eligible Republican voters, and the true size of Toth’s margin of victory over Crenshaw.

One of those influencers, Bruesewitz, has been taking victory laps nonstop. “Dan was actually very helpful to my career, if you think about it,” he said. “
He probably doesn’t want to know that.” 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.

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. “For 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’m 28, an adviser to the president of the United States, and Dan is a backbench Congress member. That’s punching down.”

Old flame wars are hard to leave alone, though. When Breitbart clipped Crenshaw’s comment about Bruesewitz on Brufke’s interview, the clip went viral. Bruesewitz couldn’t help but send me a meme he’d just posted of himself and other MAGA influencers beating up Crenshaw.