A White House Staffer Appears to Run Massive Pro-Trump X Account

Hours after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, the Trump administration was already working to shape the narrative. Official White House accounts flooded social media with clips of burning flags and clashes between locals and federal immigration agents, casting protestors—not the killing—as the story.

Among the accounts amplifying that message was Johnny MAGA, a pro-Trump X account with nearly 300,000 followers. “They’re burning the American flag right now in Minneapolis,” the anonymous account claimed, sharing a clip from the White House’s official rapid response feed. “And they really expect you to believe that ICE shot an innocent civilian.”

To its audience, Johnny MAGA looked like an independent voice, another outraged supporter in the MAGA media ecosystem. The account regularly boosts Trump’s Truth Social posts and goes to bat for the administration, attacking Democrats like California governor Gavin Newsom.

But this isn’t just a regular account. Johnny MAGA appears to actually be a White House staffer named Garrett Wade who works for the Trump administration as a rapid response manager, helping to run the very same White House account his anonymous MAGA account amplifies. A phone number associated with Wade is linked to Johnny MAGA, according to a WIRED review of publicly available records, and the connection was confirmed by a source close to the White House.

Wade and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The Johnny MAGA account was created in September 2021, according to its X profile. (It originally used a different handle, which referenced Wade’s birth year, according to records reviewed by WIRED.) While the account’s earliest available posts focused on NFTs, it has been a consistent pro-Trump presence since at least 2022.

The operator of the Johnny MAGA account has not disclosed an official relationship with the White House while operating the Johnny MAGA X account. Multiple media outlets, including Mother Jones, TownHall, and the New York Post, have all linked out to posts on the Johnny MAGA account seemingly as organic reflections of public sentiment on political issues.

Since Trump took office last year, the Johnny MAGA account has supported administration priorities like immigration enforcement, and allies like Turning Point USA. After Trump posted a racist AI-generated video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes earlier this month, the Johnny MAGA account boosted the White House’s claim that the president didn’t watch the entire video, posting, “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.”

While the Trump administration has long cultivated a growing cast of conservative creators to spread its messaging online, a White House staffer moonlighting as an anonymous MAGA influencer would blur the already hazy line further, making it nearly impossible to distinguish between official government messaging and what appears to be organic digital support. This lack of disclosure risks undermining public trust, disinformation researchers suggest.

“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 studies 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.”

There is very little public information online about Wade, but Federal Election Commission records link him to former White House senior communications leadership. Donations from 2023 through WinRed made by a Garrett Wade from suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—where Wade graduated high school—list his employer as “tech school” in March 2023 and in December that year as Opinion Architects, a digital consultancy group. The donations also list Wade as residing in the Bucks County area of Pennsylvania, where he previously lived, according to public records. The phone number associated with Wade and with Johnny MAGA—who in the past has listed his location as Philadelphia—is also geolocated to the Bucks County area.

Opinion Architects is, according to White House ethics records, owned by Taylor Budowich, who served as assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for communications until September 2025.

While it’s unclear what exactly Opinion Architects does, Wade continued to work for the company throughout the 2024 election season, making a WinRed donation that listed it as his employer on June 1, 2024. Opinion Architects received more than $325,000 from Make America Great Again Inc. for “research” and “communications” consulting. Budowich was also the executive director of MAGA Inc, a pro-Trump super PAC that became one of the Trump campaign’s primary outside spending groups during the last presidential election cycle. MAGA Inc. was also a client of Conservative Strategies Inc., another firm led by Budowich. After Trump took office, MAGA Inc. held candlelit dinners that offered one-on-one meetings with Trump for upwards of $5 million, WIRED previously reported.

Wade is married to Allison Schuster, a White House press assistant, who also follows the Johnny MAGA account. According to Schuster’s Instagram account, which she recently set to private, she and Wade attended several Trump-aligned events, including an election night party, in which both are wearing “Make America Great Again” hats.

Trump’s 2024 campaign relied heavily on outreach to young male voters online through collaborations with creators similar to Johnny MAGA—a project that Budowich played a key role in executing. In August 2024, Budowich cofounded the “Send the Vote” initiative with John Shahidi, president of the media network that has partnered with the NELK Boys “Full Send” media company, to register young men to vote. The effort was penned as a nonpartisan initiative, but the audiences belonging to the creators and celebrities the group worked with, like NELK and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), typically lean more right-wing. Trump appeared on the Full Send podcast in October 2024.

The right-wing digital media ecosystem has served as a pool for administration hires in a number of agencies. When Dan Bongino was named FBI deputy director last year, his most recent job was hosting a popular conspiracy theory-laced podcast on platforms like Rumble. The Defense Department—led by former Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth—touts at least two former creators on its digital media team. Graham Allen, another right-wing podcaster, was poached by DOD to be its director of digital media social media accounts while he continued to host his podcast “Dear America.” Amjed Yacu also works for the department while operating the @snowflake.tears Instagram meme page with more than 330,000 followers. Yacu discloses his role at the Pentagon on his meme and personal accounts, pinning an image of himself taking his oath on both profiles.

The Democratic party has also struggled with influencers publicly disclosing their relationships to political groups. Last August, WIRED reported that a liberal dark money group called the Sixteen Thirty Fund had quietly recruited more than 90 progressive content creators, paying them anywhere from $250 to $8,000 per month to support Democratic online messaging.

While the Federal Trade Commission requires creators to disclose paid commercial endorsements, no such federal rules exist for political influencer collaborations. In 2023, the Federal Elections Commission declined to formally require creators to disclose when they receive money on behalf of 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.