Before becoming FBI director, Kash Patel didn’t usually wear a tie, but if you paid attention during his Fox News hits, you would have seen a shiny piece of metal on his suit jacket that made him pop: It’s a pin that reads “K$H: Fight with Kash.” And you can buy it for $10.
Patel has spent most of his career as a lawyer and a political operator, but he’s also scraped out a side gig as an influencer in the vein of Kylie Jenner or Dave Portnoy. It isn’t style he’s offering: It’s conservative politics — and the credibility that comes from being one of President Donald Trump’s lieutenants and defenders. And like Jenner and Portnoy, he and his affiliates have products to monetize that.
For example, there is the book — Government Gangsters ($15.99 on Amazon) and the documentary that goes with it. There is the “Orange Man Bad” he wore at CPAC last year — it was embroidered with a comic book rendering of Trump’s face as a human skull ($35 at Based Apparel). Finally, there are the products he’s endorsed on Truth Social: Patriot Mobil (“Use Promo code: KASH For A FREE Month of service!”), Revere Payments, the Coign credit card (“Get the woke out of your wallet”) and Nocovidium, the dubious supplement that Patel claimed will “rid your body of the harms of the vax.”
“Quackery,” grumbled Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, as he criticized Nocovidium and Patel’s other side businesses as he prepared to challenge Patel’s nomination to be FBI director. He failed to move his Senate colleagues.
That’s because Patel is at the vanguard of something bigger: Following in the lead of Donald and Melania Trump — who monetized their images with matching meme coins — Patel and dozens of others in the MAGA movement are making politics a lucrative sales opportunity. While Durbin and others warn of unsuspecting customers buying worthless or even harmful products out of their allegiance to Trumpism, others celebrate the creation of a new, deeper way of asserting one’s political allegiance, and an alternative path to power in Washington.
“This is a time when people are very proud of expressing their conservative identity,” Cait Lamberton, a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said. “Any action of expressing that identity adds a value that goes above and beyond.”
But the story of MAGA influencers getting busy with their personal brands is about more than just money. It’s about the products and the people who make them too. Insiders now refer to the source of these items as the “Parallel Economy,” the marketplace for many of the conservative products that Patel has endorsed. It is an ecosystem of Republican-aligned businesses that are pushing ETFs, credit cards, payment processing systems, asset management solutions, private equity placements, consumer packaged goods, coffee, diapers and really just about anything else they can think of.
The people behind the Parallel Economy are some of the most wired personalities in Trump’s Republican Party. JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, Peter Thiel, Kelly Loeffler, Joe Lonsdale, Blake Masters and Howard Lutnick’s firm of Cantor Fitzgerald have all invested in or helped to incubate a cluster of MAGA companies that are on a mission.
“We want the silent majority to not be so silent anymore,” said Michael Seifert, founder of PublicSquare, an Etsy-meets-Amazon for conservative goods. “A big way to force that change is through the power of the economy.”
But the creation of companies that exist to channel Trump’s worldview summons some of the same questions as critics raise about Trump’s presidency itself: Is the point to give a voice to millions of Americans who feel forgotten? Is it to make some highly connected people rich? Or both?
“There were only a few of us for a few years. But we quickly grew and we quickly scaled,” said Nick Ayers, former chief of staff to Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence.
Ayers is now something of a go-between who connects conservative investors, wired Mar-a-Lago types and mission-driven entrepreneurs. He has also joined the action himself as both a board member of Public Square and a co-founder with Seifert of EveryLife, a diaper company for parents who “unapologetically choose to celebrate life.”
Ayers’ origin story aligns with many of the founders in the space.
During the first Trump presidency, he sensed corporate America’s urge to distance itself from the president’s controversial style. In Ayers’ eyes, the GOP’s longtime allies in Big Business wanted “to destroy an agenda” — Trump’s. The culture was moving that way too. Curb Your Enthusiasm memorably summarized Trump’s standing in polite society when its curmudgeonly star, Larry David, started wearing a MAGA hat to get out of social obligations. The inference was clear: Loving Trump made you too repulsive for elite society.
But the annoyance of being talked down to wasn’t enough to incite wealthy conservatives to invest millions of dollars in companies that would take their side in the culture war. For that to happen, the MAGA movement had to strike a different rock bottom. It did so in the depths of the pandemic.
“It was watching what Big Tech did to a political leader and his supporters during the last six months of his presidency,” as Ayers put it, referring to the period in which tech companies were quick to stamp warnings and fact-checks on content. He described an “explosion of ESG [Environmental Social Governance] and DEI,” which provided a moral justification for “deplatforming” people or businesses that defied corporate norms that he perceived as being openly hostile to conservatives. The problem was that seemingly everyone was a renter in this new internet-based economy. And when a few large companies in Silicon Valley controlled key chokepoints, such as cloud computing, payment processing, social networking and e-commerce support, being deplatformed could be fatal.
One person who learned how potent this form of justice could be was Donald Trump himself. For his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify and Stripe all deplatformed him. Most Americans took this to mean that they could no longer look forward to the president’s thoughts about Rosie O’Donnell and election fraud. But some Republicans saw something more ominous: a Pearl Harbor-level attack that had severed their party’s leader from his communications and fundraising infrastructure.
“Do you really want a few people to have the power to do that?” Ayers asked.
For a powerful group of entrepreneurs and investors, the answer was no.
It wasn’t long before Ayers crossed paths with a future star who would emerge out of the Parallel Economy: a then-obscure investor named Vivek Ramaswamy.
“Vivek is the godfather figure of this movement,” said Matt Cole, who is the CEO of Strive, an asset management firm that Ramaswamy co-founded in 2022 to fight “value-destructive agendas” of “ESG, DEI, and other stakeholder-focused initiatives.” Though Cole insists that his company exists to promote “meritocracy” and “unapologetic capitalism” — and not the agenda of a political party — his company’s values, investors and origin story track with the wider space.
For him, it started in 2017. Cole recalls being a portfolio manager at CalPERS, the nation’s largest pension fund, and suddenly feeling pressure to pick investments with the right social goals rather than just optimizing for financial returns. That trend became national news in 2021, when BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street — the nation’s largest asset managers — assisted activist investors in replacing three board seats at Exxon Mobil over the issue of climate change.
Cole had seen enough. He believed that the leaders in his field wanted to “push for social changes with the money of everyday Americans” and to do so “without their consent.” He found Ramaswamy on his mission to give them another choice.
They were two of many entrepreneurs and investors who were building a network of businesses that could provide safe harbor for conservatives to fight the culture war. And whether they knew it or not, they were also helping lay the groundwork for the 2024 election.
“Even though MAGA didn’t occupy the White House from 2021 to 2024, the people who built that movement, and the people who built the free speech, anti-cancel culture movement really stuck together,” said Seifert, the founder of Public Square.
According to Seifert, his early media appearances introduced him to an underground of conservative investors who were eager to register their disapproval with woke America by backing companies that would counter it.
“I’d meet someone like Nick [Ayers], and he’d introduce me to three other people. I’d meet someone like Don Jr. and he’d introduce me to five,” he explained.
What these investors were buying into were enterprises that used the free market to fight back in the culture war. There were ancillary benefits too. Having a product that voters could use to express their outrage was a cheat code for getting booked on TV and podcasts and it was also a conduit for meeting well-placed investors and Trump confidants, or even launching your own political career. Indeed, the Parallel Economy’s early backers are a veritable Who’s Who of today’s MAGA movement.
For example, Strive’s seed investors included arch Trump supporter Thiel as well as Cantor Fitzgerald, and Narya Capital, an investment firm that Vance co-founded and then departed before assuming his office in the Senate. Ramaswamy is currently running for governor of Ohio and Lutnick is now Trump’s secretary of Commerce.
Seifert’s Public Square now counts Ayers, Donald Trump Jr., former Georgia senator and current SBA Administrator Loeffler, and ex-senate candidate Blake Masters of Arizona as board members. It has since launched a payment processing system.
Rumble, the conservative video platform, received funding from Vance’s Narya and Peter Thiel in 2021. In 2022, Cantor Fitzgerald took it public through a SPAC. Today, it offers a cloud computing service that powers Trump’s Truth Social.
Azoria ETF will launch this spring and will offer investors the opportunity to buy an S&P 500 index fund without what it bills as the worst DEI offenders. Its founder, James Fishback, is a protege of Ramaswamy’s, is widely credited with giving Trump the idea for a “DOGE dividend,” and recently tried to assert himself as a possible replacement for Marco Rubio in the Senate.
“It’s such a ripe moment for these types of investments,” Fishback said.
And at the enterprise level, private equity fund 1789 Capital is investing in verticals like the “Replication/Parallel Economy,” “Deglobalization” and “Anti-ESG,” according to its website.
1789’s president, Omeed Malik, explained that “the absurdity” of the DEI era “helped formulate our thesis years ago that there is a thirst for financing that is focused solely on entrepreneurship, innovation, and growth.”
Malik and 1789’s co-founder, Chris Buskirk, are running their book of business alongside one notable new partner: Donald Trump Jr.
Buskirk, Lonsdale, Loefler, Lutnick, Masters, Ramaswamy, Rumble, Thiel, Trump, Trump Jr., the Trump Organization and Vance all declined to comment.
Those looking for a playbook on how to brand yourself for profit and political gain need only look to Donald Trump, who, during his interregnum between presidential administrations, licensed his name to everything from watches to sneakers, cologne and digital trading cards. He even offered strips of fabric from his “knockout suit” — so named because he wore it during the presidential debate that ended former President Joe Biden’s political career — for top customers.
But Trump exceeded his own gaudy standards on Jan. 17, when he and his affiliates launched the $TRUMP meme coin, which mooned to a nearly $15 billion valuation. It is unclear how much of that value Trump and his affiliates have captured, but, according to some experts, investors might be getting the short end of the $TRUMP coin.
“There obviously is no underlying value whatsoever,” said Nic Carter, founding partner of Castle Island Ventures, a blockchain venture fund. Carter, who is an avowed Trump supporter, has been a frequent critic of meme coins generally, but is willing to entertain the idea that $TRUMP has some benevolent intentions.
“We just don’t know whether it was a naked cash grab or to meet crypto people on their own terrain,” he said.
The same might be said for the growing list of products which replicate those already on the market. What exactly is being sold when consumers buy MAGA coffee, anti-woke razors or pro-life diapers? Is it the product or the validation of one’s beliefs?
“If a brand says to me that ‘I see you, I understand the experience you have had in a market that doesn’t accept your views,’ that’s powerful,” said Lamberton.
It’s also a way to bypass the usual skepticism about new dubious products and claims. According to Lamberton, shoppers can be slow to realize that they’re buying questionable goods when their marketing taps into their feeling of rejection.
Those concerns are reinforced by a small number of products that are designed to address fringe ideas, like conspiracy theories about Covid vaccines or Federal Reserve-backed currency. While some critics contend that the dangers of supplements like the Patel-endorsed Nocovidium are unknowable because they don’t go through FDA testing, Dr. George Fareed, a medical adviser to its manufacturer, insists that the drug is all about “helping the body eliminate damaged cells” via natural processes. But other experts disputed whether there was any actual need for a cure like this to begin with.
Thus, what Patel is really selling is trust in himself. And doing that at scale has never been easier, thanks to the large network of MAGA-friendly podcasts whose hosts can vouch for you before your show segment. Political entrepreneurs have used that approach to vault upwards in the MAGA pecking order.
“JD Vance, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Donald Trump — these are all personal brands,” Joelle Ayala, founder of Minting House, a Los Angeles-based podcast and creator consultancy, and the former CMO for Jordan Belfort, said. He was making a point that’s obvious to many people outside of the Beltway: that millions of Americans are making their voting decisions the same way that they shop for lipstick — by looking to influencers.
Patel declined to comment on this piece. But in Ayala’s view, he, too, is an influencer.
“If you took this guy out of being a government official, you’d just say he built an audience, he knows what they like, and finds the right opportunities to match his audience to maintain revenue,” Ayala said. Those opportunities included merch sold through Based Apparel, an online store where he was a “Managing Member” until December 2024; a consulting deal with Trump’s media company; as well as books, movies, podcasts, speaking tours and product endorsements on his Truth Social account. The Kash Foundation, Patel’s nonprofit, which has drawn media scrutiny for its business practices, frequently acts as an intermediary for these ventures.
Trump built his influencer brand around a TV show and a lifestyle. So too did the Kardashians. What Patel’s case shows is that in 2025, that same path to power is available at a much lower price point.
“It’s all teeth on the same gear,” said Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan political watchdog group. “In D.C. you are used to the idea of leaving the government and then cashing in. This is cashing in, then using the profile from cashing-in to get a spot in government.”
Should Washingtonians get used to it? After all, the influencer economy is going nowhere. And with the likes of Patel, Ramaswamy and Trump as alumni — and Azoria’s James Fishback waiting in the wings — there’s reason to believe that these individuals have stumbled on a new path to power. The irony is that their greatest impediment might be MAGA’s recent successes. Indeed, the culture war that many of these companies were founded to fight seems to be over. Many of Trump’s enemies in places like Silicon Valley are now cozying up to him. Even Mark Zuckerberg is dressing like an MMA fighter now.
“Everybody wants to be my friend,” Trump told reporters in December after a summit with tech CEOs. Many of them attended his inauguration inside the Capitol Rotunda.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Seifert grumbled about Big Tech’s retreat from progressive politics.
