Last month, the New York Times profiled what it called the "troll army" that is attacking former President Trump's enemies on social media as part of the campaign to get him elected to the White House in 2024. The leading figure behind this "army" is MAGA broadcaster and “life coach” Brenden Dilley, whose cultish devotion to Trump has gained him direct access not only to the Trump campaign, but to the candidate himself:
Mr. Dilley has been a supporter of Mr. Trump for years, and in 2018 he unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Arizona as a “staunch believer in the Make America Great Again movement.” But until recently, his devotion always came from a distance.
Today, Mr. Dilley, who now lives north of Atlanta, says he has visited Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort three times in the past year. He and his team have posted numerous photos of themselves posing with Mr. Trump, spending time with his advisers and attending events at Trump properties.
During an episode of his show just before Thanksgiving, Mr. Dilley claimed to be texting one of those advisers, asking if he could join the former president at a football game at the University of South Carolina. That weekend, he and his wife were photographed by Mr. Miller in the governor’s box at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, S.C., along with Mr. Trump.
A video that Mr. Dilley’s wife, Reanna, shot of Mr. Trump walking on the field at halftime was subsequently viewed millions of times online and reposted by the former president on Truth Social.
Like many other influencers, Mr. Dilley appears to receive talking points from the campaign. He also claims more exclusive access, describing phone calls from advisers to Mr. Trump to discuss memes his team is producing and whether they strike the desired tone.
Right Wing Watch has been covering Dilley since 2018 and given that he has now established such close ties with Trump’s campaign, it is even more important to expose how overtly racist, unapologetically misogynistic, and gleefully amoral he is.
The most important thing to know about Dilley is that he doesn't "give a fuck about being factual" and will "make shit up" if doing so furthers Trump's political agenda.
Dilley openly admitted it in 2020:
“I don’t give a fuck,” he continued. “My objective is to destroy Democrats, OK? To destroy liberals, liberalism as an idea, Democrats, and anything that opposes President Trump. That’s my goal. I’ve never made any bones about that.”
“You don’t have to fact check me because I don’t give a fuck,” Dilley added. “I fucking make up shit sometimes, from time to time. I don’t care. I don’t care. Democrats know it. Republicans know it. I don’t mind admitting it. I don’t give a shit … When I get a chance to shit on the left, I don’t mind making shit up. No, not at all.”
As Dilley explained in 2019, when it comes to attacking Trump's enemies, "it doesn’t have to be true; it just has to go viral."
Given Trump’s own well-documented habit of “making shit up,” his embrace of an admitted liar like Dilley is not shocking. But what is notable, even by the low standards of Team Trump, is that Dilley has repeatedly advocated for Trump's enemies to be executed, declaring in 2019 that Trump supporters had better "start developing a stomach for death."
“Develop a stomach for it,” he proclaimed. “Develop a will for it. You want to save your fucking country? This is what it’s going to take. It’s going to take you having the stomach and the spine and the fucking testicular fortitude to support the president of the United States and the Department of Justice firmly imposing the law of the land.”
"There is no room for mercy," Dilley has declared.
“I want to win and I won’t consider it total victory without destroying our enemies,” Dilley said. “I don’t want to hold your hand. I want to stomp you into the fucking ground. I want Donald Trump to bury you treasonous pricks under the prison. I don’t want to just win. Winning is a formality at this point. Destroying you motherfuckers is way more important.”
“I won’t consider it a total victory without destroying you, entirely,” he added. “Your entire fucking life. Everything you’ve built, I want to ruin it. I won’t be done, and this won’t be a job well done, and none of us will be satisfied until all of you pricks are gone. Not just gone; gone like totally gone.”
“There is no room for mercy,” Dilley continued. “We don’t have any time for weakness. I don’t want anybody on this team that wants to lift their foot off the throat of the Democrats right now. None of them. It won’t be enough. I want to win in November of next year and I want to keep curb-stomping these motherfuckers well beyond that.”
“You’ve got to destroy your enemy,” he said. “You have to make sure that your enemy can never play the game again and the only way you do that is with total annihilation … You have to lock up these treasonous motherfuckers and they all have to go to jail.”
Pointing to a photo of a noose, Dilley declared that “there is one solution and one solution only to save America and I think you know what it is. It’s a zero-sum game and if you don’t have the stomach for it, I don’t know what to tell you.”
So eager for bloodshed is Dilley that in 2020, amid protests over the killing of George Floyd, he warned that he and millions of other gun-loving Americans were just waiting until Trump “gives us the green light” to take to the streets and start murdering protesters.
“If for any reason the president of the United States feels that it’s not getting done the way it should and decides to put out the tweet that says, ‘My fellow Americans, my fellow 2A-loving Americans, it’s time to take up arms against these assholes,’ you are all fucked in under an hour,” he continued. “[We’re] waiting for that one tweet, that one emergency text message from the fucking president of the United States that gives us the green light to finish this entire thing in under an hour.”
“It will not be law enforcement. It will not be one of these slow, bureaucratic, justice system wheels of justice turning,” Dilley concluded. “It’ll be a group of people you didn’t even know fucking existed because we were at our houses, we got off work, we were with our families, but we were ready for that call. And if that call ever does come, you will be fucked seven ways from Sunday. So I suggest you back down.”
Following Trump's electoral defeat, Dilley lamented that Trump had not been “nearly as authoritarian as we hoped he would be” during his term in office. Given that Trump's entire 2024 campaign seems to be focused almost entirely on exacting revenge and retribution in pursuit of establishing an authoritarian dictatorship, it is alarming but unfortunately not completely surprising to see Dilley welcomed into the fold.
