In 2025, people who built their careers by being some form of Very Online are now some of the most powerful people in the world.
Topping the list—as we predicted he would last year—is Donald Trump. The 79-year-old president of the United States quite literally rules by decrees posted to his social network, Truth Social. The US government, meanwhile, is run by a ramshackle crew of former conspiracy theory podcasters, TV hosts, vaccine skeptics, and entertainment moguls. A decade ago, the prevailing advice was to never read the YouTube comments. Today, the human embodiment of YouTube comments are setting federal policy.
Beyond members of the Trump administration (fair warning, there are quite a few on this year’s list), you’ll find some of the usual suspects: China’s state-backed hackers, chaos-making members of “the com” internet underworld, prolific online scammers, and of course, Elon Musk.
Each year, we round up the people who have an outsized role in making the internet era feel like life itself is a relentless, unavoidable comments section—and who cause real-world harm from their digital perch. Here is our list for 2025.
Donald Trump
Donald Trump in 2025 reached what may well be his final form. Unleashed from the shackles of norms, decorum, and checks and balances, Trump’s second administration is defined by a relentless pursuit of whatever it is Stephen Miller and Russell Vought think will Make America Great Again. But Trump is still the Poster-in-Chief, spewing an endless stream of attacks, insults, conspiracy theories, and AI slop on Truth Social.
During one particularly prolific night in early December, the president of the United States posted 169 times between roughly 7 pm and midnight at the White House. They included calls for Congress to “TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER” and missives about Honduras’ presidential election. Weeks prior, he’d posted that a video reminding US troops that they have a duty to disobey illegal orders was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.” When the president posts, it’s news—which means virtually everyone in the US must absorb the chaos Trump creates online.
Every day under Trump is like this, just as it has been for the better part of a decade. Cracks in Trump’s social media armor have begun to show; Republicans notably pushed back on his callous comments after filmmaker Rob Reiner after he and his wife were found stabbed to death in mid-December. Still, Trump dominates nearly every news cycle and wields ever-expanding power to shape and ruin the lives of people in the US and abroad with a single Truth Social missive. If there’s one principle Trump reliably holds, it’s this: Never. Stop. Posting.
The Border Czars
The Trump administration’s brutal, indiscriminate assault on people not born in the US (and even some who were) defined 2025 life in America: masked agents in riot gear lurking the streets, racially profiling pedestrians, and disappearing friends and loved ones into the bureaucratic tarpit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection custody. At the center of this profound remaking of America are White House adviser Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem.
As deputy chief of staff for policy, Miller is widely considered the “architect” of Trump’s anti-immigrant enforcement actions. He’s the person who said on television that federal agents would arrest 3,000 people a day—an alleged “quota” that the administration denied existed, at least when forced to confront it in court. Without Miller, it’s feasible your social networks—online and off—would be far less saturated with news and videos of lives being torn apart.
Noem, meanwhile, has become the face of the administration’s anti-immigrant enforcement policies. The DHS head oversees both ICE and CBP, and is thus directly responsible for how the crackdown on immigrants is conducted. This includes greater social media surveillance, a face recognition app that runs people through government databases, and casting public accountability of federal agents as illegal “doxing.” Under Noem, CBP has even proposed subjecting travelers to the US to a review of five years of social media posts.
DOGE
It sounds like the premise of a sleazy cyberpunk novel: A team of largely young, inexperienced operatives connected to some of the most powerful men alive bypass normal background checks to access some of the US government’s most sensitive systems. One of their apparent main goals? Wiring together datasets to create a master database that could be used for a surveillance tool of unprecedented scope.
This is, of course, what actually happened this year, as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seized control over much of the federal bureaucracy.
