MAGA influencers losing audiences after defending Trump's Venezuela invasion

Several prominent commentators within the MAGA movement have ignited an uproar among their audiences for supporting President Donald Trump's invasion of Venezuela.

That's according to a Monday article in The Bulwark, which reported that far-right figures like Nick Fuentes, Tim Pool, Alex Jones and Gavin McInnes are all getting blowback for defending the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Fuentes (an outspoken defender of Adolf Hitler) posted over the weekend to Telegram: "TAKE THE OIL. THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE IS OURS." His post garnered more than 5,500 thumbs-down emoji responses, outperforming the 4,600 heart emoji responses.

Pool was similarly ecstatic in the aftermath of the attack, writing on X: "The US economy about to boom. Tons of free oil heading our way." One of his followers responded: "It does not matter how much oil Venezuela has if you can't get it, and we can't get it."

"They don't have the drilling equipment, they don't have the workforce, they don't have the supplies, they don't have the security, they don't have the storage, they don't have the roads, they don't have the pipelines, they don't have the power grid, they don't have the ports," the X user wrote. "And thats the short version of this, theres a much much longer version where things get even worse."

Bulwark writers Will Sommer and Andrew Egger also observed that pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Alex Jones – was sued for falsely claiming on his InfoWars show that the Sandy Hook mass shooting in 2012 was staged — "tied himself in knots after the raid to defend the president." While Jones has frequently spoken out against "neocon war" efforts in the past like former President George W. Bush's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, he claimed that Trump's attack on Venezuela was different as it was against the "globalist rules-based order."

"Thomas Jefferson would’ve gone to war with Venezuela!" Jones said in a video posted to X.

Jones' competitors weren't buying his argument. Far-right influencer Stew Peters (an avowed antisemite) implied Jones had been compromised by Israeli propaganda. Former InfoWars host Owen Shroyer called MAGA "slop-eating sheeple" for supporting the Venezuela invasion. Jones' former attorney Robert Barnes lamented that his ex-client had been "suckered into regime change support."

Click here to read the Bulwark's full article.