This past Saturday night, a thousand or so gleeful, tuxedoed, and fur-swaddled conservatives — some toting actual plutocrat-style canes as if costumed to play villains in a Tim Burton–era Batman movie — descended on Cipriani Wall Street for the annual New York Young Republican Club gala. Despite the very recent eviction from Congress of one of the club’s own hatchlings, George Santos, things seem, on the whole, to be swinging their way. A Trump restoration is looking more likely than ever, and they even managed to secure the once and perhaps future president himself as the headliner for tonight. The protesters chanting out front might as well have been hired for the occasion to add to the apocalyptic drama and self-importance of it all.
Just hours earlier, a Wall Street Journal poll put Trump ahead of President Biden for the first time, concluding that Biden’s “political standing is at its weakest point of his presidency.” Only 38 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the economy, and he has abruptly stopped referring to “Bidenomics” in his speeches. The Israel-Hamas war is dividing the Democrats, and Muslim voters in the key swing state of Michigan have lost enthusiasm for Biden. (Hell, even the Irish have turned on him.)
Sure, there’s all manner of chaos on the other side of the aisle, what with the guillotining of Kevin McCarthy (now retiring early!) and resulting weeks-long leadership standoff. But for this crowd — and it ought to be recognized that the New York Young Republicans are not, despite the location of this gala, sensible, patrician pro–Wall Street Rockefeller Republicans, but rather revanchist firebrands with a collective crush on Viktor Orbán (and, possibly, Mussolini) — it has all turned out well in the end: They finally have a solid January 6er as Speaker of the House, have succeeded in blocking aid to Ukraine, and are hunting down Hunter Biden. Iowa is just weeks away, and the Republican Party’s primary system has never been as rigged to favor the front-runner as it is now.
If you needed any more evidence that things are going their way, last week the liberal mainstream media began banging the gong about how, if Trump gets back in the White House, this time he’ll really be a dictator. There was that op-ed by Robert Kagan in the Washington Post, the big piece about “Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First” in the Times, and an entire issue of The Atlantic about it. Trump, the master troll, got the joke, telling Sean Hannity that he wouldn’t abuse his power “except for day one.” It was a neat soundbite that seemed almost designed to keep the panicky jaw-jaw on cable news going for another couple of cycles.
In the past, this gala was a smaller affair, thrown uptown at a space on Park Avenue. But Trump’s presence has doubled the head count. “They are the fascist stronghold in New York, and I don’t use the word fascist lightly,” says Jamie Bauer, a 59-year-old protester outside the venue who uses they/them pronouns and does admittedly seem like the type who might use the word lightly. I asked Bauer if they think Biden is really the best Democrat to run. “I’m not here to talk about that,” they say. The Republicans shuffle merrily past the picketers and into Cipriani’s cavernous, Corinthian-columned ballroom.
The galagoers, many of them not particularly young, seem quite pleased by all this dictator discourse. Hopeful, even. “I think he might obscure some rules in the very beginning to do what needs to get done,” says Elizabeth Haney, 29, standing on the VIP line in satin Manolo Blahniks. She’s the director of major gifts at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, and says there is absolutely nothing about Trump’s rhetoric that scares her. “He knows exactly what needs to be done to get rid of the deep state.”
“No, there’s nothing that scares me,” says Nicholas Prytherch, a D.C. lobbyist in a bow tie a few paces ahead in the line. I ask what goes through his mind when he hears his preferred candidate refer to other human beings as “vermin.” An uncomfortable pause. “We’re all human, hah. I’m sure, as we all have, I bet, have called people names in the past, or used terms. But, yeah,” he shrugs. “We’re all human.” Howard Feldman, an 80-year-old former banker, similarly waved off the verminous remark: “He just does that to irritate people, to get into their craw, but, it’s meaningless, really.” Is there anything Trump has done that has made Feldman waver? “Not really,” replies his 49-year-old wife, Kelly.
Inside, members of the press get stuffed around a table in the corner. I wiggle free to make my way to the VIP balcony for cocktail hour. There, I see Queens councilmember Vickie Paladino, tanned and leathery as a handbag, and Rudy Giuliani’s son, Andrew. A creepy, bespectacled German man who says he’s part of Germany’s, uh, historically fascist right-wing party, AfD, is holding forth, like some kind of Bond archfoe, about “destroying” his political “enemies.” Trumpy presstitutes like Jack Posobiec mingle alongside Representative Lauren Boebert and assorted Ivanka lookalikes. A circle of gay right-wingers forms. “We’re one George Santos short of a royal flush,” jokes David Leatherwood, otherwise known as @thebrokebackpatriot on social media.
Santos, who was a member of this Young Republicans club in good standing, isn’t here tonight — “our queen is busy raking it in on Cameo,” remarks one person; another tells me he wasn’t even invited — but Santos’s former top aide Vish Burra is drinking a “Nixon Martini” by the bar. “I’m looking for my next hot project,” he says. (According to “Page Six,” Santos after-partied at the Beach Cafe with his “bestie” Boebert.) Many in the room are disgusted with the Republican Party for throwing out Santos. “If they can’t stand up for one of their own,” says Burra, “there’s no reason to call them a party.”
To these Republicans, Santos’s expulsion is the perfect encapsulation of why they feel they must cling to Trump. What would he care about some kind of ethics report? Which is to say: Even on this dark night of MAGA triumphalism, there are still obstacles in the way. One young woman, who like many here has contempt for a lot of Republicans in congress, puts it this way: “They get the majority in the House, and what have they done? Funded fucking Ukraine and expelled a Republican from Congress, and the border still is not secured?” Nobody I talk to here much trusts Ron DeSantis, and don’t even get them started on Nikki Haley.
Someone points at a young man holding a wineglass and says with reverence, “He just got a major scalp.” He is Alex deGrasse, a longtime aide to Elise Stefanik, who grilled the Ivy League presidents on Capitol Hill last week. An hour before the party began, news broke that Penn president Liz Magill was out. “One down, two go,” says deGrasse with a smile. A young Republican grabs my elbow and pulls me in front of a big wall plastered with “Students for Trump” logos. A flashbulb starts to go off and, not knowing what else to do, I smile. Yikes.
Everyone heads downstairs to take their seats for dinner. At my table is Jim Hoft, founder of the far-right website Gateway Pundit, and Lucian Wintrich, a conservative media troll who for some reason once produced a photo series called “Twinks 4 Trump.” His young-seeming friend this evening looks like a malnourished Timothée Chalamet, shirtless under his double-breasted, pin-striped suit jacket. Next to him is Martin Shkreli’s ex-girlfriend, a start-up founder named Madison Campbell. There’s also Amanda Milius: She worked for Jared Kushner in the West Wing, then went to the State Department, and then directed a documentary about Russiagate called The Plot Against the President (her father is John Milius, one of the screenwriters of Apocalypse Now and Dirty Harry).
I ask if she believes the liberal media when it says Trump will behave as a dictator, or if she even cares. “I don’t believe it, and even if he does, I wish he would, because we actually needed him to do more of that,” she says. “People think there were loyalty tests and all of this, and actually there weren’t. That was the problem.” She says this time around he needs an empowered chief of staff (Devin Nunes, she suggests). I point out that there have been four former Trump chiefs of staff, most of whom, after attempting to work with him closely, agreed with many other former high-ranking Trump officials that he was entirely unfit for office. “Well, that’s because he kept hiring the wrong chiefs of staff,” says Milius matter-of-factly. Is Trump himself in any way at fault for this since he chose them? “I struggle with his personnel choices at times,” she admits. “I sort of think about it the way I think about my family. Sometimes I like the decisions they make, and sometimes I don’t. But I’m still onboard.”
A succession of speakers gets us through the first two courses — a mingy salad and a dollop of tepid risotto — with plenty of appetite-curdling laugh lines about the usual suspects: transgender people; Kamala Harris; the Chinese Communist party; Lizzo; air fryers, inexplicably; Hunter Biden; Ukraine, Queers for Palestine. And then there is the lighting of a menorah. Master of ceremonies Alex Stein jokes that the Democrats are screwing themselves by trying to send Trump to prison because that will only help him secure “the Black vote.” There is a toast made to the taste of “sweet liberal tears,” and a few people at the table turn to stare at me. Milius’s date, to my left, clinks his flute against my highball.
Our table is positioned feet from the entrance to the kitchen, where Secret Service agents loiter by a black curtain. Soon, a susurrus spreads through the security detail, and they stiffen. “Daddy Trump will be here soon,” says Milius. Her date laughs, pauses, points at my notepad, and then says in my ear, “By the way, I’ve never called anybody ‘Daddy’ in my life.” Noted.
Trump emerges from behind the black curtain. He’s standing in front of me, with no one else, not even an agent, between us. I’ve never been this close to him before. He seems both slenderer and splotchier than I imagined. He approaches the table, leans over, and shakes hands with Milius’s date. Then Trump turns and makes off for the stage to say hello before taking his seat so a Hungarian violinist named Zoltan can play in his honor.
Sitting at Trump’s left is Gavin Wax, the ambitious 29-year-old head of the New York Young Republican Club. He brought with him tonight a box of cookies especially for Trump — Keebler Vienna Fingers, the former president’s favorite — which he puts on the table alongside some ketchup he brought for Trump’s steak. “We could never have imagined in a million years we would be graced by the presence of the greatest president of all time,” Wax gushes in his speech, adding, “this is a man who understands loyalty.” (Or at least blind toadyism, as Bill Barr, Rex Tillerson, General Mark Milley, and many, many others discovered the hard way.) Other still-loyalists at Trump’s table: His lawyer Alina Habba, Cory Mills, Boris Epshteyn, Matt Gaetz, and Steve Bannon.
Trump gets up to speak. “Twunnytwunny-four,” he says in that sing-songy way that makes his supporters laugh but gives everyone else the shakes. “It’s happppeninggggggggg.” Thunderous applause clanging off the marble colonnade. He drags on for the next hour and a half with what seems to me the usual menacing doggerel. “I am being indicted for you,” he says. “These are not indictments in the traditional sense. These are Biden indictments against their political opponent.”
But even among the diehards, the never-not-Trumpers around me, there is an undercurrent of concern. What true right-wingers feel, and will sometimes say, especially when they’re liquored up, but almost never on the record, is that Trump has often been a flake and a disappointment. Many feel frustrated by how, Supreme Court aside, he squandered his time in office, allowing his administration to be hijacked by the go-go globalists from Goldman Sachs and his skinny son-in-law. Bannon got kicked aside pretty quick. As some in the room see it, Trump never went far enough, but instead got rolled by the deep state, then screwed up COVID and lost reelection. So while the MSM panics about a coming Trump dictatorship, the fear in this room is the very inverse of that. What if we get him to the finish line and he fumbles like last time?
Perhaps Trump senses this. It struck me how much he seemed to want the room to understand he has patched things up with Bannon, that they’re back to where they began, ready to rip the face off the Establishment forreal this time. Trump kept pointing from the stage down at Bannon and cooing. “You don’t mind if I go off teleprompter, Steve? … Remember, Steve? … Steve was there! … Steve! Steve! … Bannon, should we do it?”
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Rachel Marsden
Donald Low
Bradley Blankenship
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
Michael Kwet
visit website
