The Great Pretender
Rep. Andy Ogles has achieved a difficult feat: In a GOP House caucus known for sycophancy, the second-term Tennessee Republican has become President Donald Trump’s most cloying lackey. Since January, Ogles has introduced a bill to “Make Greenland Great Again,” moved to amend the Constitution so Trump (but not Barack Obama) can run for a third term, and filed articles of impeachment against two federal judges who have ruled against the president. On social media, he defends Trump loudly, if poorly. The congressman told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after his contentious White House visit to head his “little a$$ back to Europe!!!”
From the perspective of Ogles’ dignity, the most charitable explanation for his behavior is that he is legislating with a gun to his head. During the 2022 run that brought him to Washington, Ogles reported making a $320,000 loan to his campaign, which he later admitted did not exist—a potential felony. Last summer, FBI agents seized Ogles’ cellphone from him at his home. The possibility of an indictment loomed. But a week after Ogles introduced his bill to let Trump seek reelection, the Trump Justice Department pulled prosecutors and put the case on ice.
Still, Ogles performs his loyalty with an enthusiasm indicating ambitions beyond legal protection. In interviews and on social media, he appears desperate to capture the fame of MAGA celebrities like Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).
In fact, it may be former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) who provides the clearest counterpoint. Both men are serial fabulists who have been investigated by the FBI. Yet, despite his best efforts to become a household name on the right, Ogles thus far has proven to be too boring, even for infamy. Over-the-top claims and obsequiousness from Trump foot soldiers used to surprise. But it’s a crowded marketplace now, and Ogles’ comparative anonymity shows how hard it is to stand out from the shitposter pack.
The day after the 2024 election, Ogles told a local radio show that he’d just called Trump, planning to leave a congratulatory voicemail. But Ogles added a gleeful twist: Trump, despite how tired he must have been, answered.
One week later, Ogles told the story again, this time on his own podcast, a low-budget affair whose video introduction features images of Jesus Christ, the Archangel Michael, and Michelangelo’s David. In the following week’s episode, titled “JUST CALLED TRUMP!,” the still-starstruck congressman retold the Trump-picked-up story a third time—and boasted of a second call with the president-elect.
Ogles didn’t say whether they discussed his federal case. But shortly after Inauguration Day, two lead prosecutors from the Justice Department left the case pursuing the congressman. Trump’s DOJ has not formally withdrawn its request to access Ogles’ communications, leaving the door open that he could still be indicted.
So it’s no surprise that Ogles continues to aggressively puff up Trump. In February, he went on Fox’s LiveNOW streaming channel to discuss his support for Trump’s efforts to turn Gaza into an American protectorate by offering a legislative counterpart, Ogles’ “Make Gaza Great Again Act.” Soon after, the congressman launched a futile effort to strip dozens of Democrats, including Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), of committee assignments for pushing back against Trump. (Green was removed from Trump’s joint address to Congress for interrupting the president.) House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries hit back. “Andy Ogles is a fraud, a complete and total fraud,” he declared in a video. “Don’t make me expose you to folks who don’t know you.”
The deceptions that Jeffries was hinting at are not hard to find. Two decades before arriving in Congress, Ogles, then entering his 30s, owned a restaurant and doughnut place in Franklin, Tennessee. When a local reporter showed up to write about his shop, Daylight Donuts, in 2001, Ogles was described as a student of German, Russian, and Japanese with international business ambitions who ended up selling doughnuts by chance. It would later emerge that Ogles only took an introductory college Japanese class, earning a B; there is no record of him studying or speaking German or Russian. While Ogles has asserted as a congressman, including during a meeting of the House Financial Services Committee, that he is an economist, the same transcript shows he took just one community college economics course, earning a C.
By 2004, following his first unsuccessful congressional run, the Tennessee Department of Revenue had filed a lien against Daylight Donuts and Ogles for failing to pay the business’s taxes. Later, on a 2009 résumé that Ogles submitted for a job—and that was later obtained by investigative reporter Phil Williams of Nashville’s NewsChannel 5—the future congressman omitted any mention of the shop. But that résumé did claim he’d been a vice president at Franklin Investment & Holding from 1995 to 2002, where he boasted of achieving Ponzi-like “continued growth of 18% to 25% annually” despite the concurrent burst of the dot-com bubble. The résumé also stated that he went on to become executive vice president at E.Net Media & Consulting. But according to the Washington Post, Franklin Investment & Holding existed for only one year, and there are no records to prove that E.Net ever did. The only other job listed was Ogles’ failed 2002 run for Congress.
The community work Ogles listed did not hold up, either. He claimed to be on the board of directors for the city of Franklin and the local branch of the YMCA. The city has no board of directors, and, according to the Post, he never served on the YMCA board.
In 2006, Ogles lost a state Senate primary, winning just 2 percent of the vote and finishing sixth of six. What he did next is unclear—he declined to comment for this story—but by 2013, he was the director of Tennessee’s chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-backed group. In 2018, after dropping out of a US Senate race, Ogles, the sole Republican on the ballot, became mayor of Maury County.
During his successful run for Congress four years later, any discrepancies in his biography went unnoticed. When Ogles described himself at a debate as a “former member of law enforcement,” voters had no reason to suspect that he’d just been a volunteer reserve sheriff’s deputy—who was kicked out for failing to show up.
Reporting questioning the Tennessee congressman’s claims about himself came out not long after the revelations about Santos. But compared to the gay son of Brazilian immigrants who seemed made for reality TV, Ogles largely got a pass in the court of public opinion for lies that in another era might have ended a career.
Federal prosecutors and congressional investigators took more interest. The trouble started after the congressman’s own financial disclosures strongly suggested he wasn’t wealthy enough to have loaned his campaign so much. In May 2024, Ogles bowed to the pressure by admitting in amended Federal Election Commission filings that the loan did not exist and that his campaign had never received the $320,000 from him or anyone else.
Why would he make up a loan to his own campaign? Ogles’ campaign treasurer, Thomas Datwyler, later explained to Office of Congressional Ethics investigators that a fake loan could still inflate the campaign’s war chest to “scare away the competition and buy the primary.” (Datwyler was also listed on FEC filings as the treasurer for Santos, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to submitting fake loan information to the FEC to inflate his campaign’s financial position.) Datwyler noted that Ogles had repeatedly refused to provide him bank records during the 2022 campaign. “I work with two dozen congressmen, five senators; he’s the only one that I don’t have access,” he said.
Questions about the fake loan and biographical fabrications did not stop Ogles from defeating a well-funded Republican primary opponent last summer. When FBI agents in Tennessee seized the congressman’s phone days after the primary, Ogles insisted that any investigation would yield only “reporting discrepancies” and “honest mistakes.”
In September, after Ogles petitioned a court to get his phone back from the FBI, DOJ attorneys submitted a 25-page brief arguing to keep it. While congressional ethics investigators released a report in early January that found Ogles had “omitted or misrepresented required information” in filings and “may have violated federal law,” the brief was the last public step government prosecutors made in the case before Trump took office.
Whether or not Ogles fears Trump might restart an investigation, he’s since proven willing to act as the president’s loudest defender. Take late February, when Ogles released a video about his bills to impeach judges who have ruled against Trump. In it, the congressman lectures in front of a poster board featuring seven judges marked “WANTED.” At least this once, Ogles broke through: Elon Musk saw it and shared it with his more than 219 million followers on X.