Many of the Florida Standard’s headlines read like press releases that come straight from the governor’s communications office: “Popular Congressman Explains Why He Prefers DeSantis Over Trump for President in 2024.” “First Lady to Help Furry Friends Find a Home in Tallahassee.” “Sarasota Memorial Hospital Pushing Radical LGBTQ+ Employee Training.”

But like many DeSantis superfans, Witt began as a Trump superfan. He spoke at a couple Stop the Steal rallies. He appeared on Lara Trump’s show, where she gushed that she had been a fan of his “for a long time” and he reminisced about the day in college that Trump won. “The only people who were on campus were a bunch of leftist students who were in circles, holding their arms together, crying and singing kumbaya,” he said, “and I’m there with my MAGA hat.”

Back when Witt was studying English at the University of Colorado Boulder, Trump’s first presidential campaign made him realize he was a conservative. His oft-repeated origin story goes like this: He had grown up as a liberal in Colorado, his mom raising him while his dad was stuck in prison. He liked Barack Obama and considered himself an atheist. Fox News was just something his grandparents watched.

But his left-wing professors and their lectures on oppression grated on him. He got into an argument with a woman he was dating at the time, a Hillary Clinton voter, over the refugee crisis in Europe. “She said, ‘Oh, you sound like a Trump supporter.’ And that was the first time I ever really thought about that,” he says.

Witt found himself watching videos made by PragerU, a conservative media behemoth that churns out 5-minute clips aimed at persuading young people to move rightward. Witt submitted his own man-on-the-street-style reel where he asked women about the wage gap, and was shocked when the organization liked it so much they asked if he wanted an internship. That eventually turned into a job.

“I personally remember walking into a CEO’s office and saying something like, ‘We gotta hire this kid,’” says Craig Strazzeri, chief marketing officer at PragerU.

Witt dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles, where the company is based, to troll campus progressives on camera. As his liberal notions fell away, his interest in religion rose. He ordered the Bible from of Amazon and realized “you have this free gift that God has given you — you should take it.” He got baptized.

“I see a lot of people come to the faith for different reasons. … He came intellectually,” says Jake English, Witt’s pastor at a nondenominational Christian church outside Tampa, whom Witt calls his best friend and something of a father figure. “He sat down, started reading the gospels … and had, obviously, an experience with God.”

His daily life was still filled with culture war combat. In one of his most famous videos, which racked up millions of views, Witt put on a fake mustache and sombrero and asked college students as well as older Latinos if they were offended (they were, and they weren’t, respectively). Other clips of the same genre include “Is It Racist to Require Voter ID?” and “What Is a Woman?”

On Twitter, where he has 152,000 followers, Witt is just as incendiary. Responding to a video of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) discussing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, he tweeted in November: “Great replacement is just a theory huh?” The next month, he took to the site to say “Guess I’m cancelled now” because Kanye West was his top artist on Spotify.

It’s all rather Trumpy. But on a recent morning at his lakefront home 30 minutes from Tampa, Witt says: “The way that I see Trump now is that he is not the same as he was in 2016.” He’s wearing aviator-style glasses and sitting on his deck, his laptop beneath his hands and his anxious Labrador retriever mix, Rocky, who was rescued from a dumpster, at his feet.

His aesthetic is right-wing hipster: Inside his house, there’s a big, graphic display of his upcoming book; a copy of Infinite Jest; many more copies of George R.R. Martin’s works; and Mrs. Meyer’s sustainable dish soap. He’s converted one of his rooms into a production studio where he appears on outlets like Newsmax. It’s decked out with vintage books, fake plants, a typewriter and a cheeky nameplate that reads “Will Witt Editor-in-Chief.”

The moment Witt changed his mind about the former president was when Trump helped get the Covid-19 jab into people’s arms — and then bragged about it. “The fact that Trump came out and said [100] million people would have died if it wasn’t for Operation Warp Speed and the vaccine that they pushed through, to me it was bananas,” he says.