Russia, Iran Boost Accounts ‘Masquerading As MAGA Loyalists’ To Sow Division In U.S.

Russia and Iran are attempting to sow division among President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement by amplifying deceptive voices and opinions “masquerading as MAGA loyalists,” according to a new report.

The report comes around high-stakes talks the Trump administration has had with Russia on ending the war in Ukraine and Iran on ending its nuclear enrichment capability.

The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) report, titled “False Flags and Fake MAGA: How Foreign and Inauthentic Networks Use Fake Speech to Destabilize the Right from Within,” states that Russia and Iran’s “coordinated playbook delegitimized every fresh headline as a false narrative, amplified Tehran’s lines, and accused Donald Trump of complicity and moral corruption.”

Those efforts exploited what the institute called a “false flag reflex,” a “conditioned response that turns every major atrocity into a trigger for trending conspiracy claims.” The report listed the Uvalde, Texas, shooting, the October 7 Hamas massacre of more than 1200 people in Israel, the attempted Trump assassinations, as well as other domestic attacks.

“In the days following these crises, Kremlin-affiliated propagandists and Iranian state-linked media are able to rapidly inject narratives that are taken up by MAGA-impostor influencers, who then inject them into MAGA-branded spaces, often within minutes of breaking news,” the report asserted, “During one such activation window, 650,000 posts supporting false flag conspiracies drew nearly four million interactions, powered by a pipeline of Kremlin-affiliated propagandists, spam-bot networks, and domestic influencers such as Nick Fuentes, Jake Shields, and Jackson Hinkle.”

“These figures, who have long been associated with right-wing cultural commentary, first used their platforms to propagate Kremlin-seeded narratives; these influential accounts then turned on Trump himself in a coordinated assault following a public break between Elon Musk and the president,” it continued. “In the lead-up to the war with Iran, this network then pivoted outward and amplified false Iranian claims that the International Atomic Energy Agency was operating under foreign control, echoing Tehran’s strategic messaging.”

NCRI added that their “findings suggest that what appears to be grassroots disillusionment may in fact reflect foreign-directed efforts to fracture American identity from within.”

“If you talk to Republicans right now, more than 80% of them support the war against Iran,” an NCRI analyst stated, according to the New York Post. “But if you go on Twitter you get the sense that there is a civil war raging. This is exactly the purpose of the psychological operation — to destabilize people’s perceptions of institutions that are supposed to protect us.”

An analysis of the main accounts driving such narratives appears to show a coordinated effort, according to the report.

“To identify key narrative drivers, NCRI analyzed X accounts with the highest audience engagement on ‘foreign flag’ posts,” the report stated. The report added that “he leading amplifiers split into two dominant clusters,” breaking them down as “foreign-linked actors” and “US-based influencers with MAGA branding…who gave the campaign domestic legitimacy.”

“Despite differing origin points, the accounts converged in timing, tone, and target, suggesting coordinated amplification across aligned ecosystems,” the report said.