Trumpian twenty-somethings are taking over Washington

Washington, DC

“What made you open a restaurant?” I ask Bart Hutchins, the owner of Butterworth’s, a French-style bistro turned Republican hangout, frequented by the youthful wings of the Grand Old Party, figures from the intellectual right such as Curtis Yarvin and darlings of New Right media such as Natalie Winters, the increasingly slim White House correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

“Have you read Death in the Afternoon?” Bart says. “No,” I say. “It’s by Hemingway.” “I know.”

Bart pulls his phone out and starts to recite a few lines: “In cafés where the boys are never wrong; in cafés where they are all brave; in cafés where the saucers pile and drinks are figured in pencil on the marble table tops among the shucked shrimps of seasons lost and feeling good because there are no other triumphs so secure and every man a success by eight o’clock if somebody can pay the score in cafés.”

Not the response I was expecting, yet Bart isn’t the first to get all lyrical about the change happening in Washington. Trump himself has said his second term would usher in a new era of opulence and glamour.

He told a crowd at Mar-a-Lago: “We’re hotter now than they ever were in the Roar- ing Twenties, I believe. We’re going to be a lot hotter.”

The contrast with Joe Biden’s DC could not be more stark. For Biden-era Washingtonians, to be cool was to be unpatriotic and pessimistic, and to believe that everybody else was bigoted, racist, misogynistic, dumb. The only people you would surround yourself with were people who thought like you. To argue with the other side was to enable or “platform” them. This served to make an already notoriously un-fun and politics-obsessed city even less cool. But the fog is lifting and Washington has changed. Millennial men in gray suits have been swept aside by blond Gen Z-ers with spray tans, still in suits but markedly more stylish and expensive. There are now right-wing bars and parties and MAGA hotspots.

Washington will always be a city that makes you, as they say, choose a side, so there are still lots of unnecessary outward displays of political tribalism. But the big difference is that the self-hatred has all but vanished — and fun is in the ascendancy. Out with happy hours, protests, girlboss coffee lunches. What’s in are decadent house parties, martini lunches and miniskirts.

It took less than one week of Trump’s second presidency for the world to notice that the new conservative is bohemian, aesthetically conscious and, dare I say, sexy. Last week, New York magazine ran a mocking cover story about the “young, confident, and casually cruel Trumpers” with the headline “The Cruel Kids’ Table.” The article somewhat backfired. Its author, Brock Colyar, accidentally made the young MAGA crowd look suave and jolly. It also later emerged the picture New York splashed on had been cropped to remove the black faces. The host of the event was named as Raquel Debono — a glamorous MAGA influencer and managing officer of The Right Stuff, a conservative dating app created by former Trump staffers and funded by Peter Thiel. Her black cohost, C.J. Pearson, wasn’t named once in the article. He has since claimed that New York tried to “insinuate that I was throwing some KKK kumbaya.”

But one can’t expect unfamiliar journalists to understand what is happening, blinded as they are by snobbery and revulsion. In the Free Press this week, Kat Rosenfield turned her nose up at the “vulgar and base” vibes of the millennial MAGAs, with their “porny” topless calendars. She ignored the more daring and adventurous set pushing boundaries in Trump’s Washington.

The avant-garde conservatives leading the shift are a combination of “MAGA hipsters” and Christian nationalists. Most of them were starting college in Trump’s first term, and were, by the end of their studies, radicalized by the wokeness of the Biden administration. “That was the college experience of most people I know,” a Butterworth’s patron tells me. “The fraternities were the only safe space where you could shield yourself from the insanity. It became tribal.”

From college, these young men and women entered a workforce stuffed with DEI initiatives and HR culture. They spent Sundays at church praying for change and raging at anti-family Democratic policies. For years, such conservatives were dismissed as freaks and outsiders, the butt of the jokes. This was worsened by the last set of MAGA talking heads; the conspiratorial and loopy Laura Loomers and Pamela Gellers and hysterical Facebook moms who delegitimized and embarrassed the movement. Who’s laughing now? This is MAGA 2.0, and the twentysomethings are steering the ship. Just look at the power the 27-year-old media consultant Alex Bruesewitz holds — through his social-media savvy alone, he became a key advisor to Trump.

It’s their America now. Two weeks in, house parties are serving hors d’oeuvres with mini-Trump flags. One party I went to on Embassy Row had MAGA hats on the fireplace as you entered, in all different color combinations. A whole range of people were there, from right-wing intellectuals to New York Times journalists to book publishers looking for the next crop of nonfiction hits.

At Butterworth’s, Nigel Farage’s former advisor Raheem Kassam, a partial stakeholder in the restaurant, gives me his impressions: “If the Obama era represented muscular liberalism, the second Trump term represents muscular populism. Alongside the dull chug of political change comes a piercing cultural shift, shown in the movement’s dining, drinking and sartorial sense. At least that’s the plan. Otherwise the revolution will be short-lived.”

As he offers this (possibly rehearsed) thought, a woman in a floor-length fur coat and huge hair comes in. Kassam pretends not to notice and continues: “It looks like conscious masculinity, unbridled femininity, and long, thoughtful evenings of natural wines by candlelight. Kamala’s campaign rallies were punctuated by chants of ‘We’re not going back.’ But whether it’s on the subject of immigration or proud Western cultural affections, our answer is: yes, you absolutely are.”

In the years leading up to this point, cultural conservatism has been a rump opposition dominated by apron-wearing tradwives, country music and the resurgence of free speech. I don’t think anybody quite expected the New Right to take the whip hand in Trump’s second term, when it feels like conservatism suddenly has the raunch and radical edginess or self-expression of the 1960s, or even of the prosperous and decadent 1920s.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.