In June 2026, a claim (archived) circulated on social media that the administration of President Donald Trump orchestrated the rise of the independent online journalist Nick Shirley.
Shirley's December 2025 investigation into alleged funding fraud by Somali-owned daycares in Minneapolis was shared widely and caught the attention of top figures within the Trump administration days after it published.
In the month after Shirley's investigation, the federal government froze childcare funding for the state of Minnesota and deployed thousands of federal immigration officers to Minneapolis. Such officers fatally shot two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in January 2026 during protests of immigration enforcement.
However, by June 2026, some social media users questioned whether Shirley's sudden popularity and his work's apparent influence on Trump administration policies was entirely organic.
On June 1, an X user posted, "Leaked documents: Nick Shirley's whole deal was manufactured and shaped by the White House."
Leaked documents: Nick Shirley's whole deal was manufactured and shaped by the White House
(this is not surprising to anyone who's followed his rise as a guy who can barely string together a coherent sentence and always looks miserable)https://t.co/xm1qan6INT— Talia Ben-Ora (@taliaotg) June 1, 2026
Other users on Facebook (archived), Reddit (archived) and YouTube (archived) spread similar claims.
The claim appeared to originate from Gabrielle Cuccia, a former Pentagon correspondent for the conservative outlet One America News Network. On May 22, Cuccia posted on X (archived) that a person who attempted to hire her to write scripts for a company that produced videos on behalf of the Trump administration suggested that the White House had a hand in orchestrating Shirley's journalistic work.
The person who approached Cuccia suggested that hiring a third party to amplify the administration's messaging had "worked out for them and Nick Shirley," she posted.
Snopes does not rely on anonymous sources. We contacted Cuccia to ask how that person knew the Trump administration had used Shirley to further its agenda and await a reply.
Shirley told Snopes via email on June 1 that Cuccia's claim was "completely false." He added that the Trump administration had never paid him "in any way, shape or form" and that it did not know about the Minnesota daycare investigation before it published.
We also contacted the White House Press Office to ask if it had ever paid Shirley for his work or a third party to promote it. Additionally, we contacted Vine and Fig Tree, the company that Cuccia claimed provided research, analysis and social media strategy to the Trump administration to ask whether it had ever worked with Shirley on behalf of the Trump administration. We await replies to our queries.
Because we could not contact Cuccia's anonymous source to establish whether their statement about Shirley and the Trump administration was speculation or based on credible evidence, and we found no other credible evidence to support the statement, we regard this claim as unproven and leave it unrated.
Shirley's rise
According to his YouTube channel, Shirley established an online presence before the second Trump administration. His first video from February 2019, titled "16 YR OLD FLIES TO NEW YORK WITHOUT TELLING PARENTS," was indicative of his early content, which was mostly prank-style videos but also included street interviews with "crazy" Bernie Sanders supporters and footage of Shirley among crowds at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
In late 2023, Shirley's videos became more overtly political as he returned from a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His first video back, posted Dec. 23, 2023, was titled "I Interviewed Illegal Immigrants at the U.S. Border."
By June 2024, Reuters reported that Shirley was part of a "new class of influencers supportive of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump" that helped shape the national immigration debate.
A little more than a year later, in October 2025, Shirley got the chance to speak with Trump during a White House roundtable on the decentralized political movement antifa, which Trump blamed for political violence at protests of immigration enforcement across the country.
The next month, the controversial journalist and conservative activist James O'Keefe awarded Shirley the "Citizen Journalism Award" for his reporting from inside CECOT, the mega-prison in El Salvador that Shirley described as "full of deadly gangsters."
Shirley published his investigation into alleged daycare funding fraud in Minneapolis the following month.
According to the Columbia Journalism Review reporter who attended the November 2025 awards ceremony at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Shirley's mother, Brooke, appeared to have been a central influence on his politics.
Brooke Shirley reportedly said she influenced her son to report on immigration at the U.S-Mexico border when he returned from his mission trip. Shirley reportedly had not been aware of the political climate in the U.S. while he was away in Chile, so his mother said her influence initially extended to telling her son what to ask and what to do for his videos.
MAGA officials accused of paying influencers
It was unclear at the time of this writing whether the Trump administration paid political influencers, either directly or through a third party, to support administration talking points through their work.
Paying influencers to promote or share political messaging is not illegal in the U.S., and influencers are not required to disclose if they are paid by political campaigns, candidates or groups. Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit organization that specializes in election law, has called for the Federal Election Commission to require influencers to disclose paid-for political content.
Cuccia's source's suggestion that the Trump administration had somehow supported Shirley's work appeared similar to accusations from Ashley St. Clair, a former conservative influencer who has a child with X owner Elon Musk, that Trump's MAGA movement was masterminding a network of influencers that it paid to help promote Trump's policies during his presidential campaign and in the White House.
According to St. Clair, officials would suggest specific language for influencers to use when amplifying Trump's policies online.
In April 2026, Snopes reported that 16 conservative influencers posted similar comments about the need for a White House ballroom after an alleged assassination attempt on Trump at the 2026 White House Correspondents' Association dinner. At the time, we found no direct evidence that the posts in question were a coordinated effort between the specific people to post at a specific time.
The Washington Post reported that St. Clair said she remembered many of those who posted near-identical ballroom messages also being members of a group chat organized by Trump administration officials and congressional Republicans to deliver talking points to influencers.
There was no evidence Shirley was part of such a paid network.
In sum …
Cuccia's allegation that the Trump administration orchestrated the rise or popularity of Shirley's content is unproven. Because Snopes could not speak to the source who Cuccia said made the claim, we could not verify whether it was speculation or based on credible evidence.
Shirley denied the allegation.
Meanwhile, Trump's MAGA movement faced allegations that it was paying conservative influencers to promote the administration's policies online. In the U.S., social media users can legally post paid-for political content online without disclosing that they are being paid. There was no evidence Shirley was part of such a network.