After the recent fatal shooting in Minneapolis, some far -right influencers raised the idea of banning American transgender consumers from buying firearms. There were some reports shortly after the administration of Donald Trump took this seriously, at least to some extent, and the White House unexpectedly confirmed these reports on Tuesday. NBC News reported:
Pressure secretary of the White House, Karoline Leavitt, said during her briefing … that officials of the Ministry of Justice had “preliminary” conversations on the possibility of prohibiting transgender people from having firearms.
The president-in-chief spokesman added: “It is a political decision, and it is far too early, or would be premature, inappropriate for me to weigh it at this stage.”
As a substantial, it is difficult to imagine such an idea advancing seriously. The effort would be almost certainly unconstitutional, and the defenders of firearms, including the National Rifle Association, have already pushed the Scuttlebutt.
But what struck me as interesting on this subject is less the merit of the discriminatory idea, and the more the direction of the political pipeline: the push to prohibit transgender Americans from buying firearms began with far -right influencers, and was then adopted by officials of the Trump administration.
In normal and modern administrations, the pipeline flows in the opposite direction: we normally expect to see the White House offer ideas, how the presidential aid hangs from the Allies to help get the word and get the message across. In 2025, however, it became more and more common to see the inverted model: influencers helped to direct federal agencies, as opposed to the opposite.
At the end of last week, for example, far -right influencers targeted a commander of the navy. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, dismissed her shortly after.
A few days earlier, the vice-president of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, was supposed to participate in a classified surveillance meeting in an intelligence agency, but the meeting was canceled after the right-wing activist Laura Loomer launched public attacks against the agency and its director. (The way Loomer has learned the planned rally is not yet clear.)
“This is the kind of thing that occurs in authoritarian regimes,” said the democrat of Virginia shortly after.
Two weeks earlier, CBS News reported that online conservatives had played a key role in helping FBI officials who had been deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump.
This news coincided with the publication of the White House of a list of Smithsonian exhibitions that the Trump team found reprehensible, not having noted that the list seemed to be largely copied from a recent online report of an extreme right influencer.
In July, the army canceled a job offer to a higher cybersecurity expert in response to the complaints of an far -right influencer. A few weeks earlier, the counter-admiral Michael Donelly, F-14 Tomcat and F / A-18 Super Hornet Pilot, was about to become vice-admiral and take command of the 7th Navy fleet. Then far -right influencers complained. Then Hegseth blocked the promotion of the Admiral de la Marine, who had already been approved by Trump.
And it’s just a few recent examples. In the past eight months, there have been many other cases in which eminent conservative activists and media personalities have played a direct role in the development of politics, the blocking of staff, the orchestration of fire and even forcing resignations.
This is a problem that there are so many amateurs in the White House and throughout the administration. But this is such an important problem which they take a direction other Amateurs with conservative media megaphones.
