How Breitbart became legacy MAGA media

Boyle moved back to St. Augustine, near Jacksonville, Florida, after Trump’s 2020 defeat, where he still spends as much time as he can with his family. The web traffic service Comscore estimated at one point that Breitbart’s traffic had nosedived by 94% between 2020 and 2024 — a lot even by the standards of a general collapse in web traffic after Facebook pulled away from news. Marlow says that number is a “fake news hoax” and that their traffic has been steady, though he did not supply details. (He notes, accurately, that Comscore’s figure is an estimate because Breitbart doesn’t participate in its measurement system.)

Whatever Breitbart’s traffic, the shadow it cast on politics shrank in the Biden years. Boyle could be found among regulars at a trivia night at an upscale local pizza joint, hidden under a Red Sox cap, his friend Mara Macie, a former Republican congressional candidate, said.

When Trump won in 2024, Boyle returned to Washington and got an apartment in Chinatown. Now he and Breitbart are the MAGA Establishment, with more than a decade of experience covering Washington, an edge newer outlets lack.

But Breitbart is also still primarily a website, a text-based medium in a landscape increasingly dominated by podcasters and social media influencers — including the old Breitbart boss Steve Bannon and his War Room show. At times, the site, whose founder’s slogan was “#war,” has been a relatively restrained, reliable alternative to the new new right-wing media.

The media rating service NewsGuard (itself under fierce attack from the right) gives Breitbart a similar rating to MSNBC, saying that it “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” but dinging the site for blurring the lines between fact and opinion.

When the Trump administration launched an unexpected attack on USAID, for instance, and conservatives on X started excitedly confusing normal subscriptions to publications like Politico with secret subsidies, “we didn’t fall for what everyone else did,” Boyle said. “Our story understood it wasn’t just USAID funding money to these media outlets.” (Breitbart even republished an AP story about misleading attacks on USAID, though it doesn’t appear to have promoted it.)

So is this, in some sense, the MAGA New York Times, and Boyle its pugnacious, nationalist, Trump-loving Peter Baker?

“We’re the same people we’re always been here at Breitbart,” Boyle said. “Washington’s changed.”

And Breitbart, so far, is still betting it all on Trump. At the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort in Maryland last month, I sat in the back while the Breitbart journalist, his big head inclined forward in curiosity, interviewed White House deputy chief of staff James Blair. The questions were straightforward, even easy, and the interview ended with a request to “give our best to President Trump.” Afterward I asked Boyle why he doesn’t challenge his sources more.

“I don’t see the point right now,” he said, adding that in the aftermath of Trump’s 2024 victory his job is just “getting them to explain this is the story.” He’ll come after Trump and his aides “if they veer from that agenda and start doing globalist stuff.”

Then Boyle headed downstairs for an appearance on Bannon’s War Room. The conservative impresario still treats his old employee with a bit of friendly condescension: “Boyle ,you’re starting to bore people, man,” he interrupts, as Boyle starts to outline the state of play in Washington politics. “You’ve been in Florida too long.”

“I’m back, I’m back,” Boyle apologizes, pivoting to telling the audience what they want to hear, without a hint of irony: President Trump is “100% right on everything.”

I’m a bit surprised to find myself seeing a bright side of the Breitbart ascendance, given my own history of sparring with its staff. My minor role in Boyle’s journey came in 2014, when I was the editor of BuzzFeed News and sent a reporter, McKay Coppins, out to profile Trump’s would-be campaign. Coppins wound up at Mar-a-Lago with the future president, and after his amused, dismissive profile appeared, Trump wanted to push back. The reporter he called was Boyle, who he’d met at CPAC the previous year.

The result was a classic Breitbart hit piece full of too-good-to-be-true quotes about Coppins: “Trump: ‘Scumbag’ Buzzfeed Blogger Ogled Women While He Ate Bison At My Resort.” That, Boyle said, “definitely was a key moment” in his relationship with Trump.

Now Breitbart contains competing influences. Despite Marlow’s Timesian musings and Boyle’s straight interviews, it has hardly shed its over-the-top style. Personal attacks on reporters who anger Trump and his circle remain a feature of Boyle’s repertoire, often carrying a kind of humorless, smeary absurdity.

An anonymously sourced claim that the chairman of the White House Correspondents Association, Eugene Daniels, tried to get hired by the Harris campaign, for instance, included an odd quote from a “former White House official” that the reporter “was a joy to work with and whenever we needed a story written, he would always come through.” The piece doesn’t say whether the official had formerly worked in the Biden White House, however. (“I’m not going to ever answer questions about sources,” Boyle said when asked. Daniels denied the report.)

Breitbart’s current position mirrors the MAGA movement’s. Trump is now governing, and he has intimidated the Washington Republican Establishment into something like submission. His outside allies now have to decide whether they’ll enter what progressives in the Obama era used to describe as the “veal pen” of well-compensated compliance — or whether they’ll attempt to establish some independence. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and Bannon’s War Room, for instance, have emerged as outlets of dueling movements willing to criticize the White House when it strays from the right.

I wouldn’t bet on it, but I’m always an optimist. Journalism that merely serves power can get, among other things, quite boring.

Boyle and I were standing outside the area restricted for speakers at CPAC when the MAGA influencer Benny Johnson approached him with a broad smile and clap on the shoulder. He paused when he saw me — I fired him from BuzzFeed in another era — then gave me one, too.

Later, I asked Boyle which of us he identified with more — a right-wing influencer or a Semafor editor.

That prompted a rant from Boyle on a favorite subject: “The objectivity lie,” and the importance of all journalists being open about their politics. That failure, he believes, is what opened the worrisome floodgates to the social media figures on Breitbart’s right flank.

He concluded: “I’m a journalist at the end of the day. I’m not an influencer.”

Breitbart sometimes still looks more like a political operation than anything else, as Oliver Darcy reported for CNN in 2023, after he received leaked internal messages from Boyle “instructing staffers at the far-right outlet to pause stories on the Florida governor ahead of an expected 2024 run. … The terse command led to suspicion inside Breitbart that Boyle, who had already confessed he viewed DeSantis negatively, was trying to wield his power at the outlet to tilt the scales against the Sunshine State governor and in favor of Trump in the lead up to the 2024 contest.”