Everyone’s a ‘Fed’ Now

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

Catch me on the right day and I’ll tell you that the Republican who best epitomizes the right under Trumpism is former Rep. Trey Gowdy.

 

A strange choice, I know. Gowdy is intelligent, genial in public appearances, and was enough of a conservative to have endorsed Marco Rubio for president in 2015. He also had the good sense to retire from Congress in 2019, not long before supporting coup plots became the litmus test for being a member of the GOP in good standing.

 

Intellectually, temperamentally, and ideologically, he’s an outlier. How can a guy like that, who hasn’t held office since halfway through the president’s first term, be an avatar of Trumpism?

 

In this way: Better than most Republicans, Gowdy grasps that the ethical lines separating government, media, and business functionally don’t exist under postliberalism. You can work for all three, in practice if not officially, at the same time.

 

Gowdy did work for the president officially—or nearly did. He was tapped to join Trump’s impeachment legal team as outside counsel in 2019 but ultimately did not; Fox News, where he worked as a contributor at the time, initially fired him to avoid a conflict of interest before welcoming him back when his new job fell through. He now hosts his own eponymous Sunday-night show on the network, the latest episode of which featured a very special interview with … Donald Trump.

 

And given how softball that interview turned out to be, it’s not a stretch to say that it doubled as volunteer work for the government.

 

But that’s not all. Gowdy has also resumed practicing law since leaving Congress and now represents white-collar criminal defendants. One of his clients was sports executive Tim Leiweke, whom the Justice Department was after for allegedly rigging the bid for the University of Texas’ extravagantly expensive new basketball arena. Last December the Wall Street Journal revealed how the case against Leiweke was resolved:

 

In an interview, Gowdy said that after playing a round of golf at Mar-a-Lago on Nov. 16, Trump asked Gowdy if there was anything he needed. Gowdy, a former prosecutor who had a 3.4 golf handicap in 2023, according to Golf Digest, brought up his client’s case, first asking for help getting a meeting with one of the federal prosecutors handling it.

 

…

 

Over the next few weeks, Gowdy advocated for Leiweke to be granted his own nonprosecution deal. Trump instead issued a pardon.

 

The head of the government did Gowdy a business favor. And last night Gowdy, wearing his media hat, repaid it. Et voilà: postliberalism.

 

All of this is context for today’s Washington Post scoop about the Pentagon having “secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.”

 

It’s not known if those influencers are being paid or what their mission consists of, although some have “been assigned to civilian roles that could lead to changes in policy,” the Post cryptically alleged. If you’re foolish enough to consume right-wing content on Twitter, you’ll likely recognize their names: Rob Maness, Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas “Cynical Publius” Anderson.

 

A fourth influencer, Jennica “DataRepublican” Pounds, was also exposed last week as a special government employee secretly working for the Pentagon, although, unlike the other three, she isn’t a veteran. And a fifth, Adam “InfantryDort” D’Ortona, isn’t secret at all: He’s an active-duty lieutenant colonel with a “regular presence” at the Pentagon, according to The Bulwark’s Will Sommer.

 

D’Ortona posts political content frequently during working hours, defending Hegseth and attacking the left—activity that, per Sommer, “has long baffled military reporters because it appears to break with traditional standards of military nonpartisanship.”

 

In an America led by a postliberal administration that perceives no lines separating government, media, and business, how big of a scandal is this?

 

Ethics.

 

I think the ethics of this chud-era twist on Operation Mockingbird are less interesting than the strategic mindset that’s driving it. But for the record, and hopefully needless to say, it’s unethical for someone in a position of influence to conceal an affiliation that might reasonably raise suspicions about their integrity.

 

In any sphere that involves mass persuasion, the influencer’s opinion is assumed to be wholly their own unless otherwise indicated. That’s what made payola a scandal in the 1950s. Radio listeners assumed that the music being played had been selected for merit, only to learn that disc jockeys were being paid under the table by producers to spin their records. The daily playlist was effectively advertising masquerading as disinterested recommendation.

 

If you’re a mouthpiece on another’s behalf, ethics requires letting your audience know so that they can assess your credibility accordingly.

 

Postliberals understand all of this and have no objection to it with respect to their enemies. If it came out that The Dispatch had an undisclosed arrangement with the Democratic National Committee to post content critical of the president, it would be treated—properly—as a momentous ethical scandal. We present ourselves as a journal of news and original opinion; in the scenario I described, we’d be guilty of laundering another entity’s opinion and deceiving readers about its origin. That would be fraud.

 

The fraud would be worse if money had changed hands and/or if we privately disagreed with the material we were posting. But even if we took no pay and endorsed the substance of the content, as I’m guessing is true of the military influencers working for Hegseth, the ethical failing would remain. Disclosure is the touchstone: To offer an opinion without disclosing an affiliation is to sabotage your audience’s scale for weighing how much to trust it.

 

The influencers in this case behaved unethically. And if their work for the Pentagon required them to post military-approved content (again, the Post is cagey about what their actual duties are), then Hegseth behaved corruptly by deputizing them to inject government propaganda into the public debate and pass it off as honest opinion.

 

Yet I find it hard to get too worked up about any of it. It’s really this simple: On the right, virtually everyone is a “fed” now.

 

Working for The Man.

 

“Fed” is shorthand for an agent of the federal government, of course. It’s been a dirty word within MAGA since the January 6 insurrection, when populist paranoiacs coped with the shame of that day by convincing themselves that it must have been perpetrated by “deep state” federal agents out to embarrass the president. As Sommer noted in his Bulwark piece, it’s deliciously ironic that populists like Pounds et al. have turned out to be honest-to-goodness undercover “feds” working for the Trump administration.

 

But … so what? Nearly every right-wing influencer in the country with a major following is functionally working for the Trump administration. What’s the difference between Kurt Schlichter and the average MAGA blowhard on Twitter who spends 16 hours a day defending the president, except that Schlichter has a Defense Department email address?

 

Apart from hardcore postliberal ideologues like Tucker Carlson, most of the online right not only expects but demands slavish pro-Trump spin from the media it consumes. That’s how Republican infotainment became so cultish: Anyone who shows “disloyalty” to the president risks losing their audience to more loyal outlets and influencers, which incentivizes everyone to swallow their qualms about his policies.

 

Much of the GOP base plainly views forums of political opinion less as intellectual spaces than as battlefields where “information warfare” is waged and won. If its generals aren’t willing to fight on Trump’s behalf, they’ll be replaced with ones who will.

 

But that creates an unusual ethical dilemma. Is it unethical for someone in a position of influence to push propaganda on an audience at the behest of a secret sponsor if the audience wants propaganda pushed on it? If radio listeners in the 1950s had had some bizarre ideological reason to prefer that DJs take bribes to play certain songs (“It’s capitalism at work, not like those damned Russkies!”), would payola still have been wrong?

 

When the federal government is led by Donald Trump, the right expects everyone on its side in a position of influence to behave like a “fed,” whether they are one or not. So why does it matter whether they are one or not?

 

Imagine that, the day after the Iran war began, Schlichter had begun posting this disclaimer at the top of his Townhall columns: “Because I support the president and our country and hope to see Iran’s evil regime ousted, and because I refuse to abet the Trump-hating mainstream media in its demoralization campaign, I will only write approvingly of the mission—whether or not I actually approve of how events unfold.” Would reaction on the right have been mostly negative, disgusted by the brazen intellectual dishonesty? Or mostly positive, applauding an admirable display of patriotism?

 

The question answers itself. So what would it matter if Schlichter was or wasn’t cheerleading for the war on orders from Hegseth? To his audience, the distinction is irrelevant. Their scale for weighing how much to trust any given political opinion has been damaged so badly over the past 10 years that no one blinks anymore when the president calls for government action against pollsters who post bad numbers for him or reporters who doubt his influence in Republican primaries.

 

The right, simply put, has been conditioned to see ethics as a form of weakness. I’m not sure it’s possible to “behave unethically” toward a cohort like that.

 

Strategy?

 

The obvious response to all of that is that it’s not just the postliberal right that consumes political news online. So does everyone else. How many swing voters might be unknowingly consuming Pentagon talking points that were laundered through influencers like “Cynical Publius” to try to sway public opinion?

 

The answer, I suspect, is not very many. That’s what I meant earlier when I said the more interesting part of Hegseth’s apparent sock puppetry is the strategic thinking, or non-thinking, behind it.

 

Figures like Schlichter and DataRepublican are located deep inside the MAGA swamp politically, far away from where they might put a meaningful dent in mainstream opinion. The sort of far-right audience they might realistically influence to support Trump is one of the few groups left in America that already support Trump. It’s the rest of the country that desperately needs persuading. Take a peek at this graph and tell me: After months of war cheerleading by Pentagon mouthpieces, known and unknown, do Americans look persuaded?

 

So why did Hegseth want to recruit these people as “feds” in the first place? How would he end up gaining more from this gambit than he’d lose if/when it was ultimately exposed by the press?

 

It’s possible that the defense secretary was nervous about right-wing support for the war potentially eroding under pressure from Tuckerites and wanted to make sure there were people with large followings pushing back on the White House’s behalf. But I suspect the explanation is simpler: More so than anyone else in the administration, Hegseth is a postliberal by instinct. He was going to eventually hit upon the idea of smuggling propaganda into forums for public debate because that’s just what fragile authoritarians like him do.

 

“One of the more notable features of the second Trump term has been the administration’s clear desire to build up an alternative pro-MAGA media ecosystem outside the traditional press,” Dispatch contributor Jeremiah Johnson noted recently in The Argument. Hegseth has been especially aggressive about it. Last year he demanded that the Pentagon press corps adopt new rules prohibiting the use of unauthorized sources, then replaced its reporters with toadies from right-wing house organs when they balked. In that case, he excluded private media from a federal forum; why wouldn’t he also think to do the opposite, sending secretly deputized federal agents into a private forum like Twitter to carry forth his message?

 

Governments always scheme to manage the flow of information, but postliberal governments want a chokehold on it. Last week, for instance, Hegseth dismissed the leadership of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes after the paper revealed, among other things, the extent of the chaos at America’s badly damaged naval base in Bahrain. Meanwhile, the Pentagon itself hasn’t held a formal briefing on the war and its challenges since, if you can believe it, May 5. Suppressing damaging truths on the one hand and promoting friendly voices that will overlook those truths on the other: et voila, postliberalism.

 

You’ll find postliberal impulses lurking in all of Hegseth’s stupidest managerial choices, in fact, as his instinctive contempt for liberal norms isn’t limited to his taste for propaganda (which was probably unavoidable for a former Fox News host). For instance, he’s notorious for promoting “friends” and punishing “enemies” in his personnel decisions, laying waste to the Army’s leadership by firing experienced generals and blocking promotions for numerous qualified officers. Of the latter, the New York Times observed that Hegseth “appears to be targeting officers who worked for generals he does not like.”

 

Unlike previous defense secretaries, who eschewed partisan politics to set an example for a military that aims to be apolitical, Hegseth has hit the campaign trail for Republicans this year. (Supposedly he’s eyeing a run for president in 2028 but has denied it, not very convincingly.) The idea that a government agency should serve the personal interests of its leaders, at least when those leaders are right-wing, is another postliberal shibboleth reflected in how Hegseth handles disciplinary infractions that flatter his politics versus those that don’t.

 

His contempt for legal restrictions on war isn’t just a matter of record, it’s a point of pride that he seems to regard as a sort of badge of “anti-wokeness.” Recently ProPublica reported that Hegseth polled military commanders last year on whether the Pentagon should scrap a program designed to protect civilians during U.S. military attacks and was surprised when all of them said he shouldn’t. He “gutted” the program anyway, slashing its funding and scaling its staff way back; his attitude, according to one source who spoke to the outlet, is “bombs away!” And that’s what the military did.

 

Meritocracy, military restraint, institutional neutrality: Is it any surprise that a guy who regards liberal ideals like those as sissy stuff might also reflexively disdain norms against the government using furtive means to try to influence public opinion in its favor? And is it further any surprise that that guy would be enough of a lunkhead to recruit a coterie of chuds as “feds” who are only capable of influencing people whose opinions are already in his favor?

 

The truth is that Hegseth doesn’t really “do” strategy. As the sort of postliberal who believes there’s nothing wrong with the U.S. military that can’t be fixed by making it more like the Russian military, he simply defaults to “more ruthlessness” when attempting to solve a problem. And in its own pitiful way, his secret-agent ploy is ruthless: Renormalizing Operation Mockingbird-style tactics will set a hair-raising precedent for a more competent administration down the road, which is basically this White House’s entire M.O.

 

The most one can say for the “fed” ploy is that it reflects Trumpism’s belief that there’s no conflict in working for the government, for the media, and for one’s own professional interests all more or less at the same time. Ask Trey Gowdy. He knows.