A Taxonomy of “MAGA Summer”
A year after "brat summer," the so-called MAGA "Cruel Kids" are declaring this season for themselves.
The night that Donald Trump won the 2024 election, he reportedly told his senior team, “You know, they made a big mistake. They could have been getting rid of us by now. But actually, we’re just beginning.”
How could this comeback happen? Former President Joe Biden blames Kamala Harris’s loss on “racism and sexism.” In the mainstream media, words like “populism” and “grievance politics” are used to explain Trump’s renewed appeal.
Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart and Trump’s chief strategist during the first months of his presidency in 2017—seen by many as the architect of Trump’s rise—believes that “politics is downstream from culture.” This “Breitbart Doctrine” stipulates that in order to deconstruct or reform the administrative state and establish a New Right more broadly representative of the majority and their concerns, MAGA must first take over the culture, and on its own terms.
Last November, an ailing President Biden and a candidate Harris—who were more focused on defeating Trump than promoting any agenda for the future—provided fertile ground for this cultural revolution. Trump not only carried more electoral votes than he did in 2016, but he also won the popular vote for the first time.
As a consequence, at no other point has MAGA been this mainstream, socially accepted, and organized. In July 2025, we find ourselves full-swing in “MAGA Summer,” and the so-called “cruel kids,” probably the most right-wing generation in 50 years, are back with a renewed sense of purpose. To better understand how young Republicans are revolutionizing our culture and politics, I interviewed Raquel Debono, an influencer and organizer of “Make America Hot Again” events to gather young conservatives together, and went to C.J. Pearson’s Cruel Kids Soirée event in Washington D.C. earlier this month.
“Making America Hot Again”
According to Debono, originally from Canada, she devised the “Make America Hot Again” campaign and parties because “everyone was basically embarrassed to admit that they were conservative. So it honestly just started being, let's just get a room of New York City conservatives together and show everyone that we're not these crazies that everyone paints us out to be.” She wanted to “find people with commonalities, like-minded people” in predominantly liberal New York.
Debono believes that if you take the average 25-year-old in New York, a place she lambasts as “liberal hell,” they don’t care so deeply about abortion or traditional femininity, but that “they're a little bit narcissistic.” She was raised religious but does not go to church on a regular basis. Talking to Debono, it seemed less as if she were a fundamentalist MAGA warrior, but instead someone who finds herself broadly represented in Republican politics and MAGA culture. She is proud of her conservatism, but otherwise, she is any well-dressed person that you’d encounter in the West Village, Palm Beach, or Los Angeles.
Debono says that as the parties have carried on, she has “been getting more and more of my desired target audience, which is exciting.”
Dominating MAGA Culture
Debono certainly does not agree with everything that goes on in the MAGA world. Her “city conservatism” is in stark contrast to the MAGA movement’s more alternative, so-called “trad” (newly popular slang for “traditional”) subculture.
Debono believes that the Republicans “are going to truly lose the [next] election, and lose so many normal people if they keep this.” She criticizes “trad” voices like Matt Walsh, star of the Daily Wire documentary, What is a Woman?, and the subsequent mockumentary, Am I Racist?, for saying things like, “You have to be a trad wife. You have to do this.” She thinks that if women do want to be “trad,” they can “go for it, be attractive; no one's stopping you. No one's saying it's bad. I do believe that it's extremely damaging, like me myself. I have three law degrees. Do you know what a slap in the face it is to hear someone say, ‘Oh, well, women should just stay at home, blah, blah, blah.’”
She also mentioned the “trad” girlboss and commentator Brett Cooper. According to Debono, Cooper is “beautiful, she's successful, whatever, but she's 24 and married, and she lives in Nashville on a farm, right? That's not anything that resonates with my life as a 29-year-old who's had a successful career early on in entertainment law. I think that what the womanosphere is missing is someone who says, ‘Okay, do whatever you want. I'm not going to tell anyone what to do.’” It’s fair to say that few New York-based “city conservatives” like Debono are dreaming of heading west, spending their days drinking raw milk and walking around barefoot in grassy fields.
Personally, Debono does think that “people should be wanting to have babies and get married and have children,” but that “the reality is that people do it later, right?” She calls out “people on the right who are female, who tell people that IVF is murder when there's 35-year-old women who are really excited about freezing their eggs because the reality is that they haven't met anyone.” Debono suspects that those on the right peddling this social extremism “are pushing away so many women who are like me. I look at this and I say, ‘You guys are nuts, truly nuts.’”
Here is the dialectical tragedy: “Trad” conservatives might want to claim all of MAGA for themselves. Debono, instead, speaks for the young, burgeoning “city conservatives.” They like edgy humor, and yes, jokingly berating others who aren’t skinny or sexy or “cool.” This is the crowd you might see shopping at Loro Piana and vaping on the sidewalk of Cipriani Downtown, not avidly reading The American Conservative.
Who Is The New Right?
Debono is not only a conservative social media personality, but like most people, holds her own, distinct political beliefs. She is an ardent supporter of the free market and feels “alienated” by Trump’s tariff policy. She pushes back on economic protectionism, saying, “When it comes to free markets, everything should be open, right?”
On her Instagram, where she maintains a humorous and at times intellectually self-deprecating persona, Debono posted a reel echoing the same sentiment: “When he’s mansplaining the stock market liberation day crash but all that I heard was that he lost to a Birkin bag.” Perhaps shocking to those who believe that all of MAGA is first and foremost an ideological cult, it seems that being a part of the New Right does not always entail support for tariffs.
Debono does not agree with abandoning Ukraine, and says, “We should all be aligning ourselves with other democracies like Israel, right? Like the student protests on campuses, saying, ‘What about the Palestinians?’ ‘What about this?’ ‘What about the children dying across the world?’ We can't save everyone. We just can't. The deficit is too large and too wide to save everyone. It is truly impossible; pick your battles, pick your fights, save the democracies.”
Just like its diverse views on economic policy, the New Right is not always opposed to American muscularity. More than anything else, the current Republican Party is a big tent. They are not always anti-neoliberal or anti-neoconservative. But they do take in those who are. My conversation with Debono demonstrated that the New Right, in spite of its members’ differences, is chiefly united in its opposition to the once-dominant woke social orthodoxy and incessant moral posturing of liberals.
However, as Janah Ganesh correctly stipulates in the Financial Times, Trump “approaches the world through personal relations, which are malleable, not ideas, which aren’t.” For the MAGA movement, this means that, at least for now, there can be no all-encompassing doctrine. Aesthetic projections of ideological reflex take precedence over any well-defined political ideology.
Being MAGA, Being Normal
I asked Debono whether she would call herself a centrist based on her more moderate social and economic views. She replied, “There’s a lot of issues that I'm very right on, right like when it comes to the cultural war and all the gender ideology stuff.” But she makes sure to mention, “I don't care if someone's trans. They can do what they want, as long as it's not in women's sports. So I think I have the normal American response to a lot of these issues.”
She says that she has trans friends, like Brock Colyar, a liberal reporter from New York Magazine, who wrote the front-page “Cruel Kids Table” article about the 2025 inauguration party. Debono frequently sends reels to them and has hosted them amicably on her podcast, during which they found more than a few commonalities with one another. In character, Debono’s Instagram bio reads, “hotness is a bipartisan issue.”
“That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to say that the average MAGA supporter doesn't look like this person they're describing on CNN,” Debono says, and that “the thing is, there are crazies on both sides. I will always say that there are crazies on every team. We don't claim everyone, but I think that we really have to look at this young generation of MAGA voters, and what they want. I think it's something the Democrats should be studying harder.”
Her advice to conservative Columbia students is as follows: They should be proud of their political beliefs and immerse themselves in MAGA culture; but they should also have liberal friends, not inject politics into every single conversation, and “maybe just be normal.”
At the Cruel Kids’ Party
A month after interviewing Debono, I decided it was time to play the part of a MAGA youth living “MAGA Summer” for himself (as a creature of horseshoe theory, it was not too hard to get into character).
I traveled to Washington to “celebrate the first MAGA summer in four years,” on July 5th. The dress code was “all white,” mocking Colyar’s observation that most of the patrons at the inauguration-celebration party were white. I dressed accordingly, donned American flag sunglasses, and wore the bold-typeface, Trumpian “Make America Party Again” hat I was handed at the entrance.
The event was held at the Pierce School Lofts on Capitol Hill, owned by Bitcoin billionaire Brock Pierce. In terms of race, this party was also mostly white, though there was a group of a dozen or so black conservatives. Almost everyone appeared to be under the age of forty. In my conversations with attendees, I found the same ideological diversity that I discovered from my conversation with Debono. Above all, they were happy to be in their MAGA and “Make America Party Again” hats, and comfortable in a cultural space that accepted their support of Trump.
Of all the party-goers, most men were elegantly attired in their white button-downs or polos and beige khaki trousers. The girls, too, who mostly appeared to be the men’s dates, were dressed à la country club, sporting open-toed heels and minidresses. I recall only one person wearing a Trump-themed shirt; it showed the president getting shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, doing his viral “fight fight fight” fist.
I spoke to various people, and only a few were explicitly, in-your-face “trad.” Some even ended up talking to me about the dangers of echo chambers on both the right and left. Occupationally, many individuals were lawyers or accountants. Others owned startups, were employees in the federal bureaucracy, or conservative social media personalities.
Halfway through the event, the organizer, Pearson, who is black and also co-chair of the Republican National Committee’s Youth Advisory Council, gave a speech deriding the “fake news” media for their reporting that they had previously thrown an all-white party, “So we threw an all-white party,” he said, referring to the dress code. After his speech, I heard Pearson say something to the effect of “Kash Patel,” only to see the FBI Director’s girlfriend, singer Alexis Wilkins, take the stage and sing “God Bless the U.S.A.” Soulja Boy then walked up the steps, joint in hand, and performed his featured act to the cheering crowd.
Among the revelers were Turning Point USA contributor Morgonn McMichael, influencer Lexi Lach, and model Megan Hawks.
Later, as the party headed to the roof amid the smell of cigar smoke and champagne, Xaviaer DuRousseau, a black gay conservative influencer and PragerU personality, told me that the purpose of these MAGA gatherings “is basically a celebration. It's almost like, you remember when COVID was starting to die down and suddenly everybody wanted to have a party or be outside. It's a similar sentiment here in the conservative movement, because for so long, we weren't able to celebrate. People were telling us that we weren't able to celebrate loving our country, being American First, loving capitalism, loving what American values stand for. But now there’s this explosion of okay, ‘We're not here to hide anymore. We want to be seen. We want you to see our red MAGA hats. We want you to see our American flag.’ That's the culture that's coming back. It's patriotism at its core.”
In New York, where wearing a MAGA hat was once totally taboo, I now see them being worn around in the subway, on the streets—and quite frequently so. DuRousseau said that, “When I first moved to L.A., I thought everybody was going to hate me because I was a public conservative. But what happened is all these different people and influencers, even celebrities, came up to me or DM’d me, saying that they love what I do, because I speak about everything they wish they could, but aren’t allowed to. So now we're seeing this culture change, where I'm seeing people wear their MAGA hat on a run in the Canyon, I'm seeing more people just repping Trump, repping 47, so it's this explosive culture in California where people are finally being more public.”
In the nation’s capital, it certainly was not hard to notice MAGA’s influence on the city, in a way not visible today in New York or Los Angeles, or even Washington itself during Trump 1.0. Billionaires seeking a good relationship with the administration are moving in. On the way back to my hotel, I noticed a large billboard for the right-wing commentator Tim Pool and the free speech streaming service Rumble. Later that night, I found myself at an Embassy Row townhouse for Mike Benz’s birthday party, where the drink list included right-coded cocktails such as “USAID,” “Operation le Mong-goose,” and “Moon-Pilled.” The drinks were offered next to none other than a painting of George Washington wearing a MAGA hat, and the first phase of the Epstein Files lying around on the coffee table. Counter-elite cultural domination, for sure.
Heading Downstream
In hindsight, “Brat Summer” appears as if it were the liberal-dominated culture’s last stand against MAGA’s decisive victory in November 2024. In the summer of 2017, there was no “MAGA Summer.” Trump had lost the popular vote, and many conservatives were still uneasy about him and his governing style. Within the administration, there was an appearance of everything being disorganized, of Trump frankly not knowing what he was doing.
Any illusions that Trump was an electoral fluke are now seemingly dispelled, and many young Americans find themselves, for COVID or cancel culture or the failures of the postwar status quo, pulled to the right. Six months into the Trump administration, there are still many prolific criticisms of the President, even from within the MAGAsphere; but the movement’s anti-woke, anti-elite, and explicitly nationalist agenda has nonetheless created a big tent and taken over the culture.
But what remains to be seen is which politics lie specifically downstream from this culture. Because if the first six months of this administration have shown us anything, it is that we still don't know.
Yet today, for the New Right, none of that seems to matter. For hurdles like the Epstein files, disagreements in economic and foreign policy, and the difficulty of maintaining such a broad coalition, the cruel kids are not tired of “winning,” not yet. It’s to the rigidly political mind, comically—almost insultingly—simple: dance, dance revolution.
Mr. Mohammadi is a rising sophomore at Columbia College majoring in American Studies. He is a staff editor for Sundial.
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Thank you for an interesting and insightful read.
With hindsight, the advent of the liberal-MAGA generation would have to be considered an inevitability after “queers for palestine”. And as you note, this political reshuffling in America is creating some hybrids that could end up heading in any number of directions. It is all so fascintaing and occasionally hopeful and a touch terrifying.
I hope to see more of your commentary on these developments going forward.
“We should all be aligning ourselves with other democracies like Israel, right? “
Wrong! Neoconservatism is about as democratic as a lynch mob.