November 15, 2024

Photo-Illustration: the Cut; Photos Getty Images

"It’s happening, I’m crashing out. I’m done! Okay?” the model and influencer Esha Javed says in a TikTok she posted earlier this week. Javed, who has more than 786,000 followers on her main account @vixenesha, tells the camera that since she joined the platform when she was a teenager, “life has hit me like a fucking truck,” and she is “no longer the stupid brainwashed liberal that I used to be.”

“I’m done. I’m so tired of my old fan base,” she concludes. “I don’t give a fuck about your identity politics. I voted for Trump. And” — she adds, inexplicably — “I hate fat people!”

Javed’s video was seemingly prompted by backlash she faced from her followers: Before posting her TikTok, she tweeted that she lost more than a thousand Instagram followers because she publicly supported Trump. (Javed, like most of the other influencers in this story, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) But among conservatives, the reaction to her TikTok was rapturous. The video was widely shared by thousands of Trump supporters, who viewed Javed’s rant as emblematic of a larger shift in the Gen-Z social-media ecosystem. They aren’t entirely wrong. Since Donald Trump won the presidential election last week, more lifestyle influencers like Javed — who until now has mostly posted Russian manicure vlogs, TikTok Shop spon-con, and pelvic floor workout videos — are revealing themselves to be full-throated Trump supporters.

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Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images

By Madame Clairevoyant

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A biweekly newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.