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    His socialist podcast became a surprise hit. Now he’s an uncommitted Democratic delegate

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    View image in fullscreenThe elected officials, party functionaries, staffers and donors descending on Chicago for the most rollicking Democratic national convention in more than half a century will welcome an unlikely guest. Daniel Denvir, who as host of the socialist podcast The Dig regularly criticizes the Democratic party from its left, will attend as an alternate Rhode Island delegate for the uncommitted movement, a nationwide effort to pressure the Democrats to change course on the war in Gaza.The movement has shifted its focus to Kamala Harris after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Denvir is a forceful voice on the topic, having spent the last 10 months honing and broadcasting a leftist perspective on the US role in the Middle East. The pivot to focus on Palestine has culminated in Thawra, a 16-part, 40-hour conversation with the historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti on Arab radical movements that has spanned five months of programming.The link between on-the-ground organizing and historical analysis is at the heart of The Dig’s political education project. “I had long thought that the academic left was far too cloistered from the activist left in the United States,” Denvir recalls of the show’s founding impetus, “and that activists and organizers outside of academia would greatly benefit from understanding the world better in their efforts to change it.”View image in fullscreenIn the show’s near-decade of life, it has become a crucial hub of the left media ecosystem, with political guests including Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders and the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis joined by Marxist academics such as David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Silvia Federici.In the aftermath of 7 October, listenership has leapt, with October downloads up about 150% from the month prior. That bump came thanks to episodes like one on the history of Hamas, Germany’s bizarre relationship with Israel, and historical tensions between Zionism and anti-Zionism within the Jewish diaspora, which together have been downloaded a quarter of a million times.The Dig was born into a moment of growth of the American left: the Democratic Socialists of America were expanding, American attitudes toward capitalism were cooling, and Trump’s presidency was propelling protests and resistance movements. It has matured alongside surging nationwide support for unions, rising labor militancy on campuses and youthful demonstrations against US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.The Dig’s listeners are “overwhelmingly sharp, interesting people, committed to doing important work to transform the world, all over the world. What do they need to know?” Denvir says, in explaining how he chooses his subjects. “I’m trying to map out the terrain.”Denvir’s visit to Chicago for the DNC will bring his intensive study of the history of the Middle East to bear on the current political moment. “We continue to witness constant massacres of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli military with American weapons. It’s clear that the administration’s policy is not only morally abhorrent, but also driving away large numbers of voters who Kamala Harris needs to defeat Donald Trump,” Denvir says. “Our uncommitted delegation will be inviting Harris delegates from across the nation to join us in calling for an arms embargo on Israel. We speak for the majority of Democratic voters who have long supported a ceasefire.”As he reminds listeners at the end of each episode, in a cheeky nod to Marx: while other podcasts aim to understand the world, The Dig aims to change it.‘It’s empowering to people’The Dig has been focusing primarily on the war in Gaza since last October – specifically on, as Denvir describes it, undoing the “reactionary, colonialist propaganda” fueling US support for the unfolding catastrophe.“This sense that the Arab world is full of backward fundamentalists who irrationally want to do violence unto us in the US is only possible if the actual history showing that things are precisely otherwise is thoroughly mystified,” Denvir says. “Thawra is a project aimed at the very heart of the mystifications that have sustained a century-plus of colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East and that has led to the current genocide in Gaza.”Early experience attuned Denvir to narratives emerging from outside Washington. He cut his teeth in media freelancing in Ecuador, where he lived in 2008 with his partner, the political scientist Thea Riofrancos. When they returned to the US, he worked as a staff reporter for the Philadelphia City Paper, and – after moving in 2015 to Providence for Riofrancos’s job – cobbled together piecemeal writing work in a hollowing-out digital news ecosystem. As an experiment, he made a scuffling effort to kick the podcast off in September of that year, without finding much direction: one of the guests on his first episode was an editor of the libertarian magazine Reason.During that election season, Denvir campaigned for Bernie Sanders and joined the growing Democratic Socialists of America. The podcast found its footing, Denvir recalls, amid “Trump’s election in the context of my own unemployment and lack of a clear path as a journalist”. It was soon picked up by Jacobin magazine, where it is still hosted.Denvir’s aim was to “translate the intellectual and academic left to a broader audience”, he says, addressing its persistent gap with activists and organizers – a gap he found less pronounced in Latin America. “There shouldn’t be a hard divide between organizing and analysis or theorization,” Denvir says. “Organizing is a way to test those theories and see what works and what doesn’t.”Initially, Denvir invited journalists, scholars and organizers to discuss “American class warfare” in the form of its punitive immigration system, mass incarceration, and social and labor movements. In the years since, Denvir began doing more interviews with book authors, becoming something of a socialist Terry Gross.The show has also become more international: even before the turn to Palestine, Denvir conducted multipart interviews on the history of Iran, China, and the relationship between Cuba and southern Africa. Though he lacks formal graduate education, he evinces a professor’s comfort with critical theory and its vocabulary. His voice is schoolboyish and bright, his delivery considered, and he occasionally breaks out in small fits of laughter in reaction to his interlocutors’ – and his own – just-so points.View image in fullscreenIf its themes seem at first blush seem disparate, the show coheres by finding the connectedness of sundry struggles for liberation. “Labor or housing or immigrant rights or anti-carceral or anti-cop organizing, all of that is at its best when it’s systemically aligned with a broader struggle for socialist transformation, and a broader understanding of the capitalist order,” Denvir says.“Everything he does he brings the same care to. That itself is part of his political analysis that everything matters,” says Riofrancos of Denvir. “Every person’s important, every issue is important, everything requires care and attention, everything has a history. Everything has a struggle behind it.”His urge toward comprehensiveness means that episodes often run above the two-hour mark, occasionally approaching three. “I’m pushing the boundaries of what people think is possible, or reasonable, on a podcast,” he says. But anything less would mean for a fundamentally different podcast. I pointed out to Denvir that this length puts him in league with Joe Rogan. The difference, he says, is that “I don’t smoke weed until after I get off air”.The show’s great success is in achieving a scholarly rigor that’s accessible to the masses. Riofrancos, who as senior adviser to The Dig consults with Denvir on question lists and the show’s direction, says guests regularly thank Denvir for his especially close reads, often comparing the experience to their dissertation defenses.Yet “you can be someone that does not have academic formation and listen to his podcast and become more intellectual and knowledgeable. I think that’s empowering to people,” says Riofrancos. “When you listen, you feel like you’re getting smarter, you feel like you’re touching something that’s new to you.‘I’ve learned something I can use’Astra Taylor, a film-maker, writer and co-founder of the Debt Collective debtors’ union, first appeared on The Dig in 2018 to discuss a book she’d co-authored on Hannah Arendt. She was won over by Denvir’s close attention to the art of interviewing, they became friends, and she has since come to guest-host the show, including interviewing Denvir about his own book All-American Nativism in 2020. Like Riofrancos, she sees the show as being “not just smart” but also “empowering”.“You exit a Dig interview and you’re like: ‘I’ve learned something I can use to be a part of this bigger socialist movement, that over the course of history has changed the world,’” Taylor says. “We might be losing right now, we might be in an electoral morass, but when I take this long perspective I see that people have made it through similarly complicated, fraught periods, that people have transcended their circumstances, that people have been unrelenting in their quest to build power.”The Dig’s backlog of episodes reads as an index of how the left interpreted crucial political events over the last eight years. A two-part episode on higher education in crisis and university unionism closely followed my own graduate workers’ union’s six-week strike in the winter of 2022, helping me to contextualize that charged experience. The late Mike Davis, whose The Monster at Our Door analyzed the threat of a global virus outbreak, came on for an episode at the outset of the Covid pandemic to situate the moment; when the George Floyd protests broke out three months later, he came back to discuss Prisoners of the American Dream, his treatment of the destructive effect of racism on US socialist and labor politics. Adjacent episodes more directly spoke to demands to defund police and the context of the uprising.As the show has become more popular, Denvir has himself turned more directly toward building power. In 2020, after throwing himself into the Sanders campaign, Denvir argued for retooling that campaign’s infrastructure to fight more lastingly for social and economic justice. At the state level, he and other veterans of the campaign co-founded Reclaim RI, which has become a vehicle for tenant organizing and pursuing housing justice in Rhode Island.Joe Shekarchi, speaker of the Rhode Island house of representatives, credits Reclaim RI with playing an important role in addressing the state’s housing woes, including authorizing $10m toward launching a first-of-its-kind public housing developer at the state level. “Dan is a gentleman. He’s polite,” says Shekarchi. “I consider myself a moderate; I’m sure he would consider himself a progressive, but he’s someone I can sit down and have a productive conversation with, come to an agreement and work collaboratively to get whatever the issue is over the goal line.”View image in fullscreenThis summer, Denvir is taking his productive conversations on the road. On 26 July, he co-hosted a live episode in London interviewing the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the political scientist Laleh Khalili, on Palestine and international politics. This month, he will travel to the DNC; two weeks later, he will tape a live episode at the Socialism 2024 conference, also in Chicago, on the geopolitics of energy transition.Each of these disparate geographies and themes is of a larger piece. The world as interpreted by The Dig is deeply interrelated, comprehensible through close study and changeable insofar as it can be understood. The convention is the next opportunity to put that framework into action.“We can’t win social democratic reforms on the domestic front without challenging US power abroad,” Denvir says. “We are confronting climate change, the genocide in Gaza and increasingly violent great power rivalries: we need a global program that acts in concert with progressive forces around the world.” More

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    Stephen Bannon Plans to Record His Podcast and Then Report to Prison

    The recording will be his last for four months, but the longtime adviser to Donald J. Trump has no intention of surrendering his influence.Immediately before reporting for a four-month sentence in federal prison on Monday, Stephen K. Bannon, the longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, will host the two final hours of his podcast from just outside the low-security facility in Danbury, Conn.“We’ll be as close to the prison as we can possibly get,” said Mr. Bannon in a high-spirited interview over the weekend. And when the taping, which he cast as an unsubtle troll pointed at the Justice Department, is concluded, “I’ll walk across the street and surrender.”Mr. Bannon on Friday lost his last-ditch bid to avoid incarceration, after the Supreme Court denied a request to postpone the sentence while he appealed a jury verdict that found him guilty of contempt for ignoring a congressional subpoena. As a result, the very public figure will remain out of view — and off the air — until just a few days before the Nov. 5 election.But the right wing firebrand insists that swapping his studio mic for a prison job, and his trademark double-collared shirts for government khakis, will have little impact on his influential “War Room” podcast. In fact, he claims, it will “only get bigger and more powerful” while he’s in custody.He has prepared for this moment for months, Mr. Bannon said, enlisting a team of nearly 20 guest hosts to continue pumping out the show, which streams its distinctive stew of unvaryingly pro-Trump political patter for four hours a day, Monday through Friday, plus two additional hours on Saturdays.That group includes Andrew Giuliani, the son of Mr. Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani; Mr. Bannon’s daughter, Maureen; Noor bin Laden, the niece of Osama bin Laden, who is known for her belief in conspiracy theories; and Jeffrey Clark, who served in the Justice Department under Mr. Trump and faces criminal charges in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss there. They’ll be responsible for managing the stream of Republican politicians, consultants, media figures, pollsters, policy wonks, donors, intellectuals and economists who use “War Room” as a bullhorn aimed directly at what is arguably Mr. Trump’s most loyal and engaged base of support.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Says He Would Give Green Cards to Foreign College Students After Graduation

    Donald J. Trump said he would push for a program that would automatically give green cards to foreign college students in America after they graduate, a reversal from restrictions he enacted as president on immigration by high-skilled workers and students to the United States.Appearing with the host David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor who backs the former president’s 2024 campaign, on a podcast that aired Thursday, Mr. Trump repeated his frequent criticism of high levels of immigration as an “invasion of our country.” He was then pressed by Jason Calacanis, another investor who hosts the podcast, to “promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America.”“I do promise, but I happen to agree,” Mr. Trump said, adding “what I will do is — you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges.”Mr. Trump suggested that he had wanted to enact such a policy while in office but “then we had to solve the Covid problem.” The Trump administration invoked the pandemic to enact many of the immigration restrictions that officials had wanted to put in place earlier in Mr. Trump’s term.Mr. Trump also lamented “stories where people graduated from a top college or from a college, and they desperately wanted to stay here, they had a plan for a company, a concept, and they can’t — they go back to India, they go back to China, they do the same basic company in those places. And they become multibillionaires.” Mr. Trump’s comments stood in contrast to the immigration policy he adopted while in office and were a direct overture to wealthy business leaders whom he is courting as donors and supporters of his campaign. Mr. Sacks hosted a fund-raiser this month for the former president in San Francisco, the beating heart of the liberal tech industry, that raised about $12 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump tells Logan Paul he used AI to ‘so beautifully’ rewrite a speech

    Donald Trump has said he used a speech generated by artificial intelligence (AI) after being impressed by the content.The former US president, whose oratory is noted for its rambling, off-the-cuff style but also for its demagoguery, made the claim in an interview with Logan Paul’s podcast in which he lauded AI as “a superpower” but also warned of its potential dangers.He said the rewritten speech came during a meeting with one of the industry’s “top people”, whom he did not identify.“I had a speech rewritten by AI out there, one of the top people,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Oh, you’re gonna make a speech? Yeah?’ He goes, click, click, click, and like, 15 seconds later, he shows me my speech that’s written that’s great, so beautifully. I said, ‘I’m gonna use this.’ I’ve never seen anything like it.” Trump did not say at what event he had used the AI-generated speech.He predicted that AI’s oratorical gifts could sound the death knell for speech writers, long a part of Washington’s political landscape.“One industry I think that will be gone are these wonderful speechwriters,” he said. I’ve never seen anything like it, and so quickly, a matter of literally minutes, it’s done. It’s a little bit scary.”Asked what he said to his speech writer, Trump jokingly responded, “You’re fired,” a line associated with The Apprentice, the TV reality show that helped propel his political rise.Trump, the Republican presumptive 2024 presidential nominee, also acknowledged that AI had dangers, especially in regard to deepfakes. He warned of an imaginary situation where a faked voice warned a foreign power that a US nuclear attack was being launched, possibly triggering a retaliatory strike.“If you’re the president of the United States, and you announced that 13 missiles have been sent to, let’s not use the name of a country,” he said. “We have just sent 13 nuclear missiles heading to somewhere, and they will hit their targets in 12 minutes and 59 seconds, and you’re that country.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe said he had asked the entrepreneur Elon Musk – referring to him by his first name – if Russia or China would be able to identify that the attack warning was fake and was told that they would have to use a code to check its veracity.“Who the hell’s going to check. You got, like, 12 minutes – let’s check the code,” he said. “So what do they do when they see this? They have maybe a counterattack. It’s so dangerous in that way.” More

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    Before ‘S-Town’ Made Him Famous, Clock Lovers Knew Him Well

    John B. McLemore, the brilliant and quirky star of the hit podcast “S-Town,” is the center of a show highlighting his work in the art of clock restoration.John B. McLemore, a profanely outspoken, brilliant and troubled restorer of antique clocks, emerged a national figure in 2017 with the podcast “S-Town.” As a horologist — a repairer of devices that measure time — he restored intricate and rare pieces in a workshop at his family homestead in rural western Alabama.But that was just part of the story.In short order, “S-Town” hit 40 million downloads, and has since surpassed 100 million, making it among the most downloaded podcasts.For those who missed this unusual tale, there will be no major spoilers here. It’s enough to say that McLemore, and many in his orbit, were vaulted from obscurity to sometimes painful visibility.(Tyler Goodson, a prominent character in the podcast, was killed in a police shootout in December. Jeff Dodson, the mayor of Woodstock, the hamlet where “S-Town” takes place, said he hasn’t received an update on the police investigation of the shooting.)Before “S-Town,” McLemore was known to collectors of rare clocks, earning fame as an unlikely genius who could diagnose mechanical trouble and revive one-of-a-kind antique timepieces.One of those collectors, William R. Tatum, was close to “John B.,” as friends called him. Tatum — referred to only as Bill in the podcast — entrusted McLemore with many of his prized clocks. An exhibition of 34 of those pieces, all restored by McLemore, runs through April 30 at the National Watch & Clock Museum in Columbia, Pa. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Family Meeting

    On This Week’s Episode:Your mother and I have something we want to talk with you about.Anna PariniThe New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling and provides news, depth and serendipity. It is available to Times news subscribers on iOS. If you haven’t already, download the app and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Our new audio app is home to “This American Life,” the award-winning program hosted by Ira Glass. New episodes debut in our app a day earlier than in the regular podcast feed, and we also have an archive of the show. The app includes a “Best of ‘This American Life’” section with some of our favorite bite-size clips, so you can enjoy the show even if you don’t have a lot of time. More

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    True-Crime Podcasts About Trump Are Everywhere

    MSNBC, NPR, Vox Media and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution are all aiming to capitalize on interest in the criminal cases against President Donald J. Trump with the shows.True crime is among the most popular genres in podcasting. One of the biggest stories in the coming months is the wave of criminal charges facing former President Donald J. Trump.The result: a boomlet of podcasts dedicated to the criminal cases against him.MSNBC, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, NPR, Vox Media and The First TV, an upstart conservative media company, have all introduced or are about to start new shows examining Mr. Trump’s courtroom travails as he campaigns to win back the White House.On MSNBC’s “Prosecuting Donald Trump,” the legal commentators Andrew Weissmann and Mary McCord offer analysis gleaned from their years serving as prosecutors. A recent episode of “Breakdown,” from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, includes a newsy interview with Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Recently on “Trump’s Trials,” the NPR host Scott Detrow discussed whether Mr. Trump could claim presidential immunity.The criminal charges against Mr. Trump — brought by state prosecutors in New York and Georgia, as well as in two federal indictments — involve allegations of election interference, his role in the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol, his handling of sensitive documents and payments to cover up a sex scandal. Mr. Trump denies any wrongdoing.Many of the hosts interviewed by The New York Times cited the newsworthiness of the story — a former president and a leading candidate for the office is facing a legal onslaught while battling for the White House — as the impetus to go wall to wall with dedicated podcasts.“He is the far and away front-runner to the nomination and has a real chance of being president again,” Mr. Detrow said. “That, to me, is an enormous legal story, an enormous political story.”But there is a significant potential economic upside as well: capturing a slice of the $2.4 billion that advertisers are expected to spend on podcasts in 2024, according to the data firm eMarketer. For years, news organizations have benefited financially from the public’s interest in Mr. Trump — colloquially known as the “Trump bump.”“The number of users is up, but the number of people vying for those users in terms of dollars is also way up,” said Chris Balfe, founder of The First TV.Mr. Trump’s legal challenges present an unusual twist on the true-crime genre, which often focuses on grisly murders or dramatic heists. “Serial,” a podcast from the creators of “This American Life,” was a pioneer of the category, which has also included entrants like “Exit Scam” (about a vanished cryptocurrency mogul) and “Last Seen,” a suspenseful yarn about the theft of 13 irreplaceable artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. (The New York Times Company now owns Serial Productions, maker of “Serial.”)The Trump cases, by contrast, involve complicated questions about the Constitution and democracy. Adding to the complexity: They span state and federal jurisdictions in Florida, Georgia, New York and Washington, D.C.Podcasts are an ideal format to explain the nuances to the public, because they give journalists the time and space to examine complicated issues at length, Mr. Balfe said. They also allow news organizations to create a listener destination for coverage quickly and relatively inexpensively, with two mics and a simple distribution feed for Spotify and Apple Podcasts, he said.“You don’t have to go lease a beautiful studio on Sixth Avenue and hire a crew and all this other stuff,” Mr. Balfe said. “A podcast is a low-floor, high-ceiling way to start a new product. And if it works, it can be very successful, very quickly.”Last year, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the largest newspaper in Georgia, dedicated the latest season of its true-crime podcast, “Breakdown,” to the criminal investigation. Since then, it has been all Trump, all the time, with 22 episodes on the topic since August.This year, the podcast garnered more than one million downloads, making it the newspaper’s most popular, finding audiences in Florida, California and New York, according to a spokeswoman for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The newspaper also has three full-time reporters covering Mr. Trump’s case in Fulton County, where he faces 13 felony charges, including racketeering.Tamar Hallerman, one of those reporters, co-anchors the podcast. She describes herself as a “recovering Washington correspondent.” (She was previously a reporter at Roll Call.)The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the largest newspaper in Georgia, dedicated its latest season of its true-crime podcast, “Breakdown,” to the Trump criminal investigation.Wulf Bradley for The New York Times“All of these legal cases that Trump is in the middle of are already creating a unique set of circumstances for a leading presidential candidate,” said Ms. Hallerman, who covered the 2016 presidential campaign. “This is absolutely not business as usual for the campaign press corps.”Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, has dedicated much of one of his three podcasts for Vox Media to the criminal investigations facing Mr. Trump. Mr. Bharara has covered Mr. Trump’s legal issues since 2018, saying, “There’s really been no shortage of legal-based news.”Yet “the dam broke” in April, he said, after Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, brought the first criminal charges against Mr. Trump.“Every month or two, there was another one,” Mr. Bharara said. “And it became clear that that was going to be a central focus.”Political coverage of Mr. Trump should focus on the criminal investigations into the former president, rather than traditional horse-race coverage, said Timothy Crouse, whose 1973 book, “The Boys on the Bus,” about the media’s coverage of the previous year’s presidential campaign, became a classic of the genre.Investigative reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, not campaign reporters, did the most enduring political journalism of that era, Mr. Crouse said. At the time, many campaign reporters were skeptical of those stories. He added that sustained exploration of Mr. Trump’s criminal charges would probably follow the same pattern.“Fewer political reporters might be OK, but only if that decrease were to be balanced by an increase in investigative reporters,” Mr. Crouse said. More

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    Inside the Troll Army Waging Trump’s Online Campaign

    The video, called “Let’s Get Ready to Bumble,” is a slick mash-up of President Biden’s verbal slip-ups and his stumbles set to a thumping 1990s dance track. And when it was played on a big screen at Trump rallies late last year, it consistently drew laughs and jeers from the crowd.But Donald J. Trump thought he could improve it.So the former president asked an adviser to pass along a few notes to one of the video’s creators: It should include a clip of the president falling off a bicycle, he suggested, and another of him flubbing a line in a recent speech.The video’s co-creator — Bryan Heestand, a product engineer in Ohio who goes by the anonymous handle C3PMeme — rushed to incorporate the former president’s edits. He was delighted, he said later in a podcast interview, to see Mr. Trump play the new version at his final rally before the midterm elections, pausing his speech to watch it with well over a thousand supporters gathered at Dayton International Airport.“He had some suggestions. We made it happen,” Mr. Heestand said.Mr. Heestand doesn’t work for Mr. Trump, but he belongs to a small circle of video meme-makers who have effectively served as a shadow online ad agency for his presidential campaign. Led by a little-known podcaster and life coach, this meme team has spent much of the year flooding social media with content that lionizes the former president, promotes his White House bid and brutally denigrates his opponents.Much of the group, which refers to itself as Trump’s Online War Machine, operates anonymously, adopting the cartoonish aesthetic and unrelenting cruelty of internet trolls.Cheered on by Mr. Trump, the group traffics freely in misinformation, artificial intelligence and digital forgeries known as deepfakes. Its memes are riddled with racist stereotypes, demeaning tropes about L.G.B.T.Q. people and broad scatological humor.Their most vulgar invectives are often aimed at women, particularly those seen as enemies of Mr. Trump. In one video, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley’s face is pasted on the body of a nearly naked woman, who kicks a man with the face of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the groin. Another depicts Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, as a porn star. Women with ties to Mr. DeSantis are often shown with red knees, suggesting they have performed a sex act.The former president and his inner circle have celebrated the group’s work and helped it reach millions. Dan Scavino, Mr. Trump’s social media adviser; Steven Cheung, the campaign’s spokesman; and Donald Trump Jr. frequently share the memes on their social media accounts.Since March, Mr. Trump has posted videos made by the team to his Truth Social and Instagram accounts — which have more than 30 million followers combined — at least two dozen times. He tends to share the group’s less crude content, favoring memes that feature him in a positive light.But Mr. Trump and his campaign have also taken a more active role in the group’s activities, a New York Times review found. Over the past year, he and his campaign have privately communicated with members of the meme team, giving them access and making specific requests for content. In at least one instance, the campaign shared behind-the-scenes footage to be used in videos, according to members of the team.Late last month, Mr. Trump sent personalized notes to several of the group’s members, thanking them for their work. In September, Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, posted that the meme team was “single-handedly changing the landscape of politics and social media.”Asked by The Times about the group, the Trump campaign on Tuesday cast them as mere volunteers.“Every campaign in politics has volunteers and shows appreciation to their volunteers,” said Mr. Cheung, the campaign spokesman, adding that the group had done a “masterful job” highlighting Mr. DeSantis’s “insecurities and blunders.”Viral memes have played a role in presidential races since Barack Obama’s first run for the White House in 2008. But the meme team’s work — blessed by Mr. Trump, polished and substantially scaled up — represents an evolution with the potential to transform campaigning online.In an age of social media, the power of memes is rising as the influence of traditional television ads fades. Cheap to make and free to distribute, they are largely unconstrained by regulations about accuracy, fairness and transparency that apply to television and radio advertising. And they are proliferating just as fewer internet platforms try to police political content.“It’s ominous,” said Saurav Ghosh, a former Federal Election Commission lawyer who now works at the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog nonprofit.Mr. Ghosh said the meme team’s activities appeared to fit the definition of a super PAC — an entity that can raise and spend unlimited sums to support a candidate or issue but must report its donors and spending. Yet because the group operates outside the campaign finance system, its finances and funders remain unknown.The lack of transparency “creates an avenue for lots of money to be spent in coordination with a campaign and having a serious impact on races without the public having any sense of what’s really going on,” Mr. Ghosh said.‘It Doesn’t Have to Be True’At the center of Mr. Trump’s meme militia is Brenden Dilley, a 41-year-old podcaster, failed congressional candidate and self-described social media and political influencer. Mr. Dilley doesn’t create the memes himself, but he provides the organizing force and smash-mouth ethos driving the crew.“It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to go viral,” he has said on his podcast.Brenden Dilley, a life coach and onetime congressional candidate, is the ringleader of the meme team. His podcast offers a running narrative of the team’s work and ambitions.The group’s more than two dozen members, posting under the hashtag #DilleyMemeTeam, convene in a private Telegram channel to share ideas and pick targets. Many also faithfully tune into Mr. Dilley’s daily podcast, where he talks at length about the group’s activities, interacts with a small but devoted audience and promotes his 2013 self-help book, “Still Breathin’: The Wisdom and Teachings of a Perfectly Flawed Man.”Most of the meme-makers post anonymously. The Times used podcast transcripts, photographs, news footage and public records to identify Mr. Heestand, who declined to comment.While some members have sizable followings, they have also been amplified by high-profile right-wing figures. Roger Stone, a longtime friend and adviser to Mr. Trump, hosted Mr. Dilley on his podcast last week, saying that he had “changed the course of history in this country.” The right-wing podcaster Jack Posobiec and the internet troll known as Catturd, who each have more than two million followers on X, regularly share the group’s work.But the team’s content isn’t just niche entertainment for the profoundly online; many memes have broken through to the mainstream.A video calling President Biden a “puppet candidate” and filled with conspiracy theories about election fraud went viral in July after Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, posted his criticism, calling it “the most alarming political ad I’ve seen this year.”In an interview, Mr. Luntz said he worried that such spots would soon become commonplace. “They have figured out how to manipulate the public,” Mr. Luntz said, “and they frankly don’t care about the consequences.”In August, when Mr. Trump was indicted on conspiracy charges related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, several team members produced a music video targeting the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis. A Kanye West parody, it used artificial intelligence to mimic Mr. Trump’s voice rapping lyrics that were peppered with racist dog whistles.The initial posting on social media, by the meme team member Ramble_Rants, logged 1.4 million views on X and was widely shared on other platforms.Nobody has borne the brunt of the group’s attacks more than Mr. DeSantis.Ron and Casey DeSantis have been mocked relentlessly by the Dilley Meme Team, which takes credit for some of its insults having broken into the mainstream media. Meg Kinnard/Associated PressThe meme team has produced hundreds of derisive posts attacking the Florida governor’s masculinity, demeanor, marriage and parenting, and his height.The group’s members have described the onslaught as part guerrilla messaging aimed at shaping coverage of the race and part psy-op aimed at the candidate himself. They take credit for catapulting “bootgate” — the unproven rumor that Mr. DeSantis wears lifts in his cowboy boots — into the mainstream media. (Politico published a 1,400-word investigation into the candidate’s footwear in October.) They also claim its barrage of mockery is the reason Mr. DeSantis wears the boots in the first place.“They all went straight to his head,” Ramble_Rants posted last month.The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Dilley has sworn to “destroy” the governor’s career and make him “unelectable,” even if he drops out of the 2024 race. A recent Christmas-themed meme directed at Mr. DeSantis ended with: “Forever you will be mocked.”The Dilley Meme Team’s work is often cartoonish and rife with mockery, savaging Mr. Trump’s opponents while lionizing the former president. A video that focused on President Biden was played at Trump rallies last year. A recent meme delivered a message to Mr. DeSantis. Another appeared to use behind-the-scenes images of Mr. Trump. Mr. Dilley declined to be interviewed for this article, and the team subsequently produced a video mocking The New York Times. Mr. Dilley told his podcast listeners that he planned to hang a copy of this article next to a signed letter from Mr. Trump.“Thanks to your efforts,” that letter reads, according to photos posted to social media, “we exposed Joe Biden’s failures and lies for the whole country to see.”Gratitude and AccessMr. Dilley has been a supporter of Mr. Trump for years, and in 2018 he unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Arizona as a “staunch believer in the Make America Great Again movement.” But until recently, his devotion always came from a distance.Today, Mr. Dilley, who now lives north of Atlanta, says he has visited Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort three times in the past year. He and his team have posted numerous photos of themselves posing with Mr. Trump, spending time with his advisers and attending events at Trump properties.During an episode of his show just before Thanksgiving, Mr. Dilley claimed to be texting one of those advisers, asking if he could join the former president at a football game at the University of South Carolina. That weekend, he and his wife were photographed by Mr. Miller in the governor’s box at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, S.C., along with Mr. Trump.A video that Mr. Dilley’s wife, Reanna, shot of Mr. Trump walking on the field at halftime was subsequently viewed millions of times online and reposted by the former president on Truth Social.Like many other influencers, Mr. Dilley appears to receive talking points from the campaign. He also claims more exclusive access, describing phone calls from advisers to Mr. Trump to discuss memes his team is producing and whether they strike the desired tone.In July, one of the group’s most prolific contributors — a musician from outside San Diego named Michael Beatty, who goes by the handle Miguelifornia — mentioned that Mr. Scavino and Mr. Miller “gave us tons of great video” shot at a Trump rally in South Carolina.Days later, the team released a clip that appeared to use behind-the-scenes footage of Mr. Trump at a rally. The moody meme, cast in blue monochrome and set to a Phil Collins song, cast Mr. Trump as a serious, heroic leader and concluded with information on how to text a donation to the campaign.“This is a campaign ad if I’ve ever seen one,” one team member, who goes by MAGADevilDog, wrote on X.A Plan to Avoid ‘a Ton of Oversight’Because the Dilley Meme Team’s content is shared on the internet, rather than on television or radio, it generally isn’t subject to laws requiring ads to include disclosure about who paid for them.“If it goes on the internet, there’s essentially no regulation,” said Richard L. Hasen, an elections law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. And without regulation, he added, it’s impossible to know who is paying for the content.But campaign finance experts pointed to two other unknowns about the Dilley Meme Team’s operations: coordination and compensation.If a group is receiving compensation to help a candidate get elected, then it could be considered a super PAC and should be registered and reporting its donors and spending.If it is not compensated but is coordinating with the campaign, then it may run afoul of strict limits on in-kind contributions, said Paul S. Ryan, who serves as deputy executive director of the pro-democracy group Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation.Mr. Ryan said receiving video footage that was not publicly available could be considered coordination.Memes created with input from the campaign, he said, “are just as good as a direct contribution to the campaign” and may be worth far more than the $6,600 individual limit per election cycle.Mr. Dilley and other members of the meme team often claim they receive no financial compensation for their efforts.“Everything they do, they do it for free and out of love of country,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a Republican strategist close to Mr. Trump, who frequently shares Dilley Meme Team posts.Mr. Dilley, who in 2019 was found to have failed to pay more than $24,000 in child support and interest, says he now makes “multiple six figures” a year. That income, he said on his podcast last month, comes from a combination of sources: podcast subscriptions and sponsors, sales of apparel, his life-coaching business and streaming revenue from the video platform Rumble, where the Dilley Show has more than 12,000 subscribers.“There’s nothing here that’s mysterious,” he said. “It’s all transparent.”Federal Election Commission records show no payments from any political committee to Mr. Dilley or other members of the meme team.Mr. Dilley has claimed to have received gifts from Mr. Trump. Last March, he posted video of a box filled with 28 Make America Great Again hats, each signed by the former president. The package was sent by the campaign in thanks for assisting with “rapid response” during President Biden’s State of the Union address, Mr. Dilley said.Signed MAGA hats can sell for as much as $1,000 on the secondary market.Mr. Dilley also said he got access to dozens of V.I.P. tickets to a Trump rally in Hialeah, Fla., on Nov. 8, which he gave to supporters of his show. It is unclear how much the tickets were worth, but tickets for other rallies have sold for as much as $1,500 apiece.Mr. Dilley has been clear that he is looking for more than just thank-you gifts.In October, he told his podcast audience that he wanted to use limited liability companies to receive money from Trump donors to fund his team’s work. The idea, he said, is to avoid “a ton of red tape” and “a ton of oversight” that come with operating as a super PAC or being paid by the campaign.“If you go super PAC or official campaign, you can get paid, but the problem is a lawyer has to watch every single thing you put out, and we don’t want that,” Mr. Dilley said on his podcast in October. “What we need is people that were going to give huge dollar amounts to the super PACs and the campaigns to just give directly to us.”“We already have L.L.C.s formed,” he added. “We’re ready to rock ’n’ roll.”Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer who advises both Democrats and Republicans, described that plan as “problematic” because it implies a clear goal of circumventing public disclosure as required by the F.E.C.“People can take advantage of those failures of the regulatory system to promote the interests of a candidate without the public ever being aware of it,” Mr. Kappel said. In that landscape, he added, “L.L.C.s have become the tool of choice” because they can be layered to obscure both the source and recipient of payments.The Dilley Meme Team was registered as a business in July, using the address of a UPS store outside Tampa, according to Florida business records. Mr. Dilley acknowledged being involved in its parent company, Counter Productions Digital Media L.L.C., which was registered at the same address in early 2022. He denies having said he set up any L.L.C.s to avoid campaign finance rules.On his podcast, Mr. Dilley has laid out his vision for his team, saying he hopes to hire all 27 meme team members full time through the 2024 election. “We need 12 months of everyone full time working to meme Donald Trump back into the White House while destroying Joe Biden,” he said.Jaymin Patel contributed research. More