New York’s Young Republicans Beg for More, But Fret About a ‘MAGA Civil War’

NEW YORK – One year in, and the club of young Republicans that touts itself as the most MAGA of them all isn’t happy. They’ve gotten what they’ve wanted, and it still isn’t enough. If last year’s iteration of their annual gala was a preview for what life under a second Trump administration would be — ubiquitous authoritarian gestures, Christian nationalism ascendant, and a growing global far-right front with Washington at the center — then this year’s event showed how even some of the president’s most die-hard supporters are pushing for even more.

But if last year’s celebration was exultant at the oncoming second Trump term, this year’s was far more anxious. Infighting over the role of prominent anti-semites like Nick Fuentes burst into the open (he was outside the venue). Between the fallout from leaked racist texts that demolished a related, state-level New York Young Republican group and a growing realization that the sheer scale of Trumpian corruption suggested they hadn’t been in on the con all along, the cracks are starting to show.

The New York Young Republican Club, a more than 100-year-old group that casts itself as ultra-MAGA and ultra-American, held its annual gala on Saturday evening. The group, which serves New York City, bestowed awards named for former members President Richard Nixon and CIA Director Allen W. Dulles on Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), who reupped a promise to deport Zohran Mamdani, and Markus Frohnmaier, an emissary from Germany’s far-right AfD party, respectively. Attendees mingled; several joked with each other that they were “neo-Nazis,” a veiled reference to the “I Love Hitler” texts that brought down the group’s state-level equivalent. Journalists were mostly cordoned off to an area on the side of the event; the New York Young Republicans assigned TPM a minder to “chaperone” this reporter throughout the evening.

The evening began with Matan Even, an 18-year-old YouTube star who spent part of his time onstage singing the theme to SpongeBob SquarePants. Even, introduced as a “landlord activist,” first gained fame in 2022 by storming the stage of a video game awards show and offering a prize to his “Reform Orthodox rabbi Bill Clinton.” His set at the gala did not go over well: the SpongeBob rendition, as well as a play on words involving Rep. Ogles’ last name, were met with boos and silence. One line, in which Even called the club “rich kids” born into families “protecting money” from those who need it, before asking, “Why should they eat when you can have another car?” got laughs and applause.

What followed Even was the core of much of what the Trump administration has been trying to accomplish this year: setting out a hierarchy of American citizenship, with an old core at the top. Several speakers talked about forming and protecting a real America, based, in the words of one, on a common, European heritage. The idea has become a common refrain among not just activists and influencers but the decision-makers of the MAGA movement: Vice President JD Vance, who was not at the gala, expressed it clearly in a speech over the summer to the Claremont Institute; the administration is also fighting to codify the idea through a Supreme Court battle in which it’s asking to end birthright citizenship.

Benny Johnson, the former Buzzfeed news reporter who is now a right-wing influencer, gave a speech in which he recounted, several times, how many children he has fathered, how many other conservatives have fathered, and how many others, like the deceased Charlie Kirk, intended to father. At one point, Johnson cast these observations as part of the world’s least enticing political strategy.

“We can defeat the left by outbreeding them,” he said. “It’s the first commandment of God. The first commandment of God is to go forth and multiply throughout. God says, go make babies. Go have sex. And we’re the only ones that anybody ever wants to have sex with. You ever met a lib? They are hideous, and they’re making it easy on us.”

Last year’s gala featured boldfaced name attendees like Stephen K. Bannon, Nigel Farage, and a video appearance from then-President-elect Donald Trump; this year’s gala tried to suffice with online influencers such as Even and Johnson. Members of Congress, including Reps. Ogles and Mike Collins (R-GA), attended and spoke, but others, like Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), apparently snubbed their invite. Jared Taylor, a white nationalist leader, was reportedly in attendance; Vish Burra, a former Rep. George Santos (R-NY) staffer recently in the news after being fired from a job producing former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)’s show for posting a video that showed Jews as roaches, was there.

That degraded guest list may have been partly related to a series of scandals that have riven the MAGA movement in recent months, largely concerning what role anti-semitic streaming superstars like Nick Fuentes will play. Fuentes himself said that he was invited, but then had the invite rescinded — he reportedly lingered on the sidewalk outside during the event.

Club leader Stefano Forte tried to set some ground rules during an address in which he endorsed Trump for a third term to chants of “Trump 2028” — a precedent set by Bannon during last year’s event — but then called for unity against an enemy that is trying to “destroy our MAGA.”

Forte said that Republicans must “abandon this MAGA civil war,” remain “unabashedly America First,” and keep an eye on a key “goalpost”: “We will know we have won when we feel American again, when our country feels American again.”

It’s hard to take some of this talk of restoring American greatness and “America first” seriously at any level, in part because of the administration’s unabashed, foreign-linked corruption scandals. There’s another reason, too. The movement’s orienting principle is quite literally foreign: the idea, long held in Europe and elsewhere, that there’s an old stock of native citizens who form the country’s privileged core. It’s a vision of citizenship rooted in “heritage,” not a belief in shared values.

That may be why the speakers who addressed this goal most eloquently at the gala were not from the United States. They were foreigners: Frohnmaier, the AfD speaker, talked about preserving and fighting for “our proud Christian and European heritage.”

The group had two Afrikaner nationalist activists deliver a toast early in the evening. One, Dr. Ernst Roets, said that the toast was in part to honor Kirk, and in part to “honor the many people down in the southern tip of the African continent who are preserving our outpost of Western civilization.”

Another Afrikaner, Joost Strydom, put a year of the administration’s lawlessness in context.

“It is not the Constitution that makes a people, it is a people that makes a Constitution,” he said.

The line got loud applause.