In February, Marjorie Taylor Greene shared a video, on Twitter, of a conservative activist testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee, on which the Georgia congresswoman sits. The activist was speaking about her two sons, who had both died, in 2020, from fentanyl poisoning. In the tweet, Greene proclaimed that the deaths were caused by “the Biden administrations refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel’s from murdering Americans everyday by Chinese fentanyl.” As many people subsequently noted, the woman’s sons had died when Donald Trump was President. The CNN reporter Daniel Dale asked Greene’s office about the misleading statement, and got a response from a staff member named Nick Dyer. Dyer replied, Dale later noted, “by saying lots of people have died from drugs under Biden and ‘Do you think they give a fuck about your bullshit fact-checking?’ ” Dale followed up to ask about Greene’s false insistence that Trump had won the 2020 Presidential election. “Fuck off,” Dyer answered.
It was a fairly typical performance from Dyer. “He’s unusually belligerent, even among flacks for right-wing members,” a reporter who has dealt with him and with many other point people in D.C. told me. “Other spokesmen will ignore you, try to spin you, give you a ‘No comment’ or a perfunctory comment—or they might even be quite helpful. Dyer is just pure, non-strategic contempt.” The reporter added, “Even Trump’s team is much more polite and professional.” (Dyer declined to be interviewed for this story.)
In some respects, at least, the approach has served Dyer well: the day before his exchange with Dale, he had been promoted, by Greene, to the role of deputy chief of staff. “The culture on the Hill has just changed completely,” Austin Weatherford, who served as the chief of staff to the Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger from 2013 until earlier this year, told me recently. Weatherford attributed the change “to members like Greene and the staff they bring on.” But people who knew Dyer when he was getting started in politics told me they never thought he’d be one of the people bringing that sort of change to Washington. It’s possible that Dyer’s style says less about him than it does about where the conservative movement is headed.
Dyer grew up in Cumby, a tiny blue-collar town an hour northeast of Dallas; a former schoolmate described him as a straitlaced kid, and told me that he “never saw him at the pasture parties.” After graduation, Dyer enrolled at Texas A. & M., where he studied what he has called “bad Keynesian economics,” and began watching videos of Ron Paul. He dropped out in 2011, and got a communications internship with Young Americans for Liberty, formerly known as Students for Ron Paul. The libertarian organization is active on hundreds of college campuses—over the years, its members have passed out pocket Constitutions, protested the national debt, and opposed COVID-vaccine requirements. Dyer appeared in the group’s annual report, along with a quote: “YAL convention was one of the best experiences of my life and it literally has changed it,” he said, adding, “I look forward to changing everything.”
Dyer also took courses that year at the Leadership Institute, a nonprofit founded in 1979 by the onetime Republican operative Morton Blackwell. Blackwell, who has said that “moral outrage” is “the most powerful motivating force in politics,” was elected by Barry Goldwater as a delegate at the 1964 Republican National Convention, and worked later for Ronald Reagan. He founded the Leadership Institute to teach organizing, fund-raising, and communications to young conservatives. Its students pay only a nominal registration fee; alumni include Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell, and James O’Keefe. Among its past faculty is Ted Cruz, who, in 2012, ran for Senate. Dyer went to work for him, doing youth outreach. Eventually, he became Cruz’s deputy state field director, helping to manage what he would later call “a grassroots army the state has never seen.” (A former staffer suggested to me that the job title, which Dyer had repeatedly pushed for, may have overstated his role.)
Despite Dyer’s training, communications were not his strong suit, according to multiple people who worked with him. Josh Perry, the campaign’s digital director, told me that, when Dyer spoke to potential voters, “he’d get into arguments with them. It was the weirdest back-and-forth. We’d hear it from across the office, drop whatever we were doing, and listen in.” A fellow-staffer recorded the audio of one such call, then auto-tuned Dyer’s voice to a hip-hop beat and looped it over a photoshopped image of Dyer wearing a “Ron Paul 2012 Liberty Kid” I.D. tag. “Government mandates on labelling is not libertarian,” Dyer repeats, over the beat from Tyga’s “Rack City.” “We’re in this because we want to advance liberty, and I know that you agree with me.” Sounding exasperated, he adds, “Ma’am, I am on the paleo diet. I don’t eat corn because I’m smart.” The video is a little cruel, but Perry chuckled recalling it. “Nick was following his own playbook,” he said, “certainly not the playbook of a campaign that wanted to win.”
Cruz won anyway, and Dyer went to D.C. to work for him, sorting mail and working on press briefings. He didn’t stick around long: Perry said that Cruz gave Dyer “very little face time,” and suggested that Dyer’s lack of a college degree may have limited his prospects with the Texas senator, who, though he frequently rails against the élites hurting America, attended Princeton and Harvard. Dyer also seems to have alienated most of his colleagues. “He’d gone on a self-promotion campaign, getting the Leadership Institute blogger to write him up as M.V.P. of the campaign or whatever,” the former staffer recalled. “That’s when things began to really sour with all of us.” They had a going-away party for Dyer, but he didn’t show up. Nonetheless, he told a reporter that he was “proud to have been a part of a team who came to Washington, as Senator Cruz notes, to kick down the door, tear down the curtains, and auction off the silver.”
Toward the end of that summer, Dyer became the political director for an ob-gyn named Greg Brannon, who was running in the Republican primary for Senate in North Carolina against an incumbent, Thom Tillis. Brannon had the backing of the Tea Party and an endorsement from Rand Paul. “Not only does Nick bring a great deal of experience and talent to our team but an intense commitment to the core principles of our campaign,” Brannon said. At the time, Brannon was facing a civil suit alleging that he misled investors in a tech company he directed; a jury found him liable, and he lost in the primary a few months later. Dyer fell off the map for a bit. He stayed on Twitter, where he would occasionally express his enthusiasm for Rand Paul and for the TV miniseries “Sons of Liberty.” His bio identified him as a “@TedCruz alum.” Then Cruz ran for President and was defeated, in humiliating fashion, by Trump. Some time after the election, Dyer changed his bio to “WE DID IT! #MAGA – Political Operator.”
By then, Josh Perry, the digital director for Cruz’s 2012 Senate run, had become disillusioned with his old boss and disgusted by Trump; he left politics altogether. He’d largely forgotten about Dyer, he told me, until a former colleague sent him an article “about Marjorie Taylor Greene and some weird response from her communications director. I didn’t think anything of it at first, then I looked again. And I was, like, Wait, is that the same Nick Dyer?” Dyer hadn’t been in the job long, but he was already building a reputation as an unusually aggressive aide with a loud contempt for journalists. Perry was taken aback. He’d found his former colleague a little odd and overzealous, but he regarded Dyer as a sincere libertarian who would have been repulsed by the know-nothing opportunism of Greene. “I still thought that he believed things that are entirely divergent from what he’s become,” he said.
Greene and Dyer seem to have little in common. She comes from a wealthy background, and, according to people who knew her when she was a CrossFit coach in the Atlanta area, showed little interest in politics prior to 2017, when she began writing Facebook posts about QAnon. Even so, when she ran for Congress in Georgia’s Fourteenth District, in 2020, she got support from the far-right Freedom Caucus, and, in the Republican primary, defeated a mild-mannered neurosurgeon named John Cowan. On Election Night, in November, the Floyd County Republican Party held a party at a restaurant in Rome, the district’s largest town. A G.O.P. official managed media access to the event. “All of a sudden, this guy Nick comes flying up the stairs and says, ‘What the hell is the matter with you letting Al Jazeera in here?’” the official recalled. “Nick got up in my face, hollering, yelling, ‘You’re out of here.’ ” He added, “If I hadn’t been representing the Party, I’d have punched him right smack in the face.” But Dyer’s histrionics have come to seem emblematic to the official. “That’s the way Marjorie and her staff are,” he told me.
Dyer had joined Greene’s team as a transition aide. He was connected with her by a political consultant named Isaiah Wartman, whose company, WAMA Strategies, provides digital-strategy-and-marketing services to Greene and other Republicans, including Matt Gaetz and James Comer. Wartman keeps a fairly low profile, though his name surfaced in the press recently when Rolling Stone reported that the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos had used Wartman’s credit card to buy a prospective campaign Web site for Kanye West. (Wartman called it “gross negligence made by a vendor.”) Wartman has also worked as a spokesman for the Illinois Representative Mary Miller, who, in 2021, called the overturning of Roe v. Wade “a victory for white life.” (Wartman, in his role as spokesperson, said that Miller meant to say “right to life.”)
“We ran in similar circles,” Wartman told me of Dyer, adding that he’d known him for more than a decade. “He’s good at pretty much everything that he does. He’s a good communicator. He’s a good writer. He has a good head on his shoulders. He’s very politically apt. He understands the current terrain of things. Anything you want in a comms-related person.”
After Greene’s inauguration, Dyer became her communications director. In the new role, he was responsible for contributing to her social media and writing her daily briefings and press releases about her attempts to impeach Joe Biden and her “Visits with Pretrial J6 Defendants in Patriot Wing of DC Jail.” He also responded to Greene’s press inquiries. In January, 2021, the CNN reporter Daniel Dale wrote about Greene’s tweeting of election-related misinformation, and asked Dyer whether Greene wished to comment. “Here’s our comment: ‘CNN is Fake News,’ ” Dyer replied. Around the same time, the Politico reporter Michael Kruse was working on a piece about Greene’s campaign. He contacted Dyer with a fact-checking query, and got a brief reply: “You are a scumbag, Michael.”
The former Cruz staffer, who still works in politics, suggested that the approach encouraged by representatives such as Greene makes a job like Dyer’s easy. Dyer “can say something incorrect or inflammatory for no reason, and, if he gets called out, it’s just ‘bad guys trying to get us,’ ” the former staffer said, adding, “Nick works for a truly bad person. He’s come quite a ways from the Ron Paul revolution.”
Or maybe not so far. Like many Paul supporters, Dyer gravitated toward the Tea Party, whose support both Cruz and Brannon courted. The Pew Research Center has found that Republicans who supported the Tea Party in 2014 were more likely to remain in the G.O.P. through the middle of Trump’s first term than those who didn’t support it or those who felt ambivalent about it. (“The Tea Party still exists—except now it’s called Make America Great Again,” Trump has said.) If one thinks of the Tea Party as a group mostly concerned with taxes and the size of government, a trajectory like Dyer’s may seem odd; if one sees it as an essentially reactionary movement that promoted birtherism, among other things, the path from Paul to Greene is perhaps a little less surprising. Wartman’s career, like Dyer’s, is illustrative in this regard: he did mail and digital fund-raising for Ron and Rand Paul before shifting to MAGA clients.
The political world view at the heart of this trajectory seems less related to an economic argument about freedom than to a cultural case for derision—or “moral outrage,” perhaps, very broadly defined. Lately, Greene has been calling for members of the Biden Administration to be impeached because too many migrants are crossing the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Last month, Dyer appeared in the front row of a press briefing that Greene gave as part of what she was calling “Impeachment Week.” The congresswoman introduced articles of impeachment against the Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, the F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray, the Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Joe Biden (again). There was no chance that any of these efforts would go anywhere, except on various Web sites, Twitter feeds, and front pages, plus cable news. A few days later, Wartman told me, “Nick’s impact on conservative politics will have an effect for decades to come.” ♦
