Among the MAGA avant-garde

Donald Trump was to be sworn in as 47th President of the United States on Monday, 20th January 2025. “I hope someone shoots him,” said a friend of my mother’s, before adding: “as long as nobody else gets hurt.” When Trump announced on the Friday before the ceremony that his inauguration would be held indoors, cold weather was perhaps not the only concern.

That weekend, the centre of Washington was largely deserted, thanks to an elaborate “security bubble” around the White House and the Capitol. Other areas also seemed empty, possibly because the more enthusiastic Democrat voters decided that the best way to protest Trump’s inauguration was to leave town and avoid the incoming crowds. On Saturday night much of the city seemed to have been partly abandoned to visitors in bright-red “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” baseball caps, most of whom aimed to get roaring drunk.

Undercover Trump supporters in wealthy liberal areas like Georgetown decided that it was safe to come out of the closet. They have long signalled their unacceptable views by smoking certain brands of cigarette, or using nicotine pouches. But that night, you could see chubby young Republican men in glasses walking around the streets in MAGA caps, either in small groups or (occasionally) with dates. Many had just left victory parties, and were wearing evening dress. They tried their best to ingratiate themselves with their fellow Trump supporters from out of town, who might have voted for the same presidential candidate, but did not seem to be on the same team.

MAGA-cap men who didn’t live in or near Georgetown, or work in politics or media, or ostentatiously read books, adhered to a code of masculinity that had been established by 1980s action films, and professional wrestling of the Hulk Hogan era. By contrast, those who aspired to be their overlords in the Republican Party inclined towards a kind of nostalgic Anglophilia with literary pretensions. The relatively few women who could be seen in Georgetown that night were evidently more interested in the men who weren’t trying to impress them by quoting G. K. Chesterton.

In political terms, both the Hulk Hogans and the G. K. Chestertons can be ignored, except as groups that can be relied upon to vote for Republicans. A more important element in Trump’s coalition consists of eccentric social media addicts with pseudonyms like “Bronze Age Pervert”, “Raw Egg Nationalist” and “Fisted by Foucault”. They are among the most influential intellectuals in America today, it seems. One of their allies, the neo-monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin (“Mencius Moldbug”), was recently interviewed by the New York Times. His monarchist ideas are difficult to encapsulate; many are alarmed that Trump’s Vice President, J. D. Vance, finds writers like Yarvin intellectually stimulating.

This pro-Trump online right-wing free-for-all is tricky to navigate for those of us who don’t argue on social media for nine hours a day. A few noted scholars, including Matthew Rose (author of A World After Liberalism) and George Hawley (who wrote Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism) try valiantly to keep up with all of these people; but not many of them publish conventional books; also, they tend to encounter one another online, rather than in real life. To celebrate Trump’s inauguration, one of them decided to arrange a public gathering.

The social media figure known as “Lomez” (or “L0m3z”) was recently revealed to be Jonathan Keeperman, who once taught Creative Writing in California. Sohrab Ahmari, the Catholic journalist, has written extensively about Keeperman, most recently in the classical-liberal literary journal Liberties. Ahmari classifies Keeperman and his online allies as the leaders of the “barbarian right”, so it is a shock to discover that the real-life “L0m3z” looks like the grown-up version of a Mormon missionary or former child actor (the rare sort that never got molested, or ended up bankrupt or on drugs). 

Keeperman has tried over the past few years to harness the unruly energy of his online friends, and channel it from memes, jokes and blog posts into more conventional artistic forms. He began by founding “The Passage Prize”, a literary competition for people who spend too much time on what used to be known as Twitter. Now he has started a publisher known as The Passage Press, where his team has managed to produce an elaborate print edition of Yarvin’s Unqualified Reservations blog, which remains unreadable for normal people, but can now be consulted without risk of going blind or mad after hours of staring at a screen clicking on broken link after broken link. 

Keeperman compares Donald Trump to a mythical figure like Virgil’s Aeneas. Perhaps this poetic mythologisation is his way of avoiding non-stop circular discussions about policy issues, of the sort that the G. K. Chesterton-type conserva-dork Republicans find so addictive. As with all forms of self-abuse, such intellectual activities end in impotence. Instead of holding (say) a conference, Keeperman wanted to throw a victory party for Donald Trump. He called it “The Coronation Ball”, and held it on the eve of the inauguration ceremony at the Watergate Hotel.

The symbolism of the location was by no means accidental: at one point during the evening, an after-dinner speaker declared that Richard Nixon did nothing wrong. A cheer erupted from the crowd on the dance floor. It was hard to tell how much of this revisionist pro-Nixon stance was merely a tongue-in-cheek provocation, unless you spoke to one of the bestselling academic historians attending the ball who could patiently explain in detail that Nixon really was stitched up by “the Deep State”, and should never have resigned the presidency. How convincing all this was might have depended on your blood-alcohol level.

Although the dinner guests were polite, the event itself was not

Despite being a meeting of the “barbarian right”, the Coronation Ball seemed genteelly upper-middle class. All of the men wore black tie, except for the chap from Colorado who sported a George Washington costume, and the man in the strange robe who was thought variously to be a neo-Druid, a Star Trek fan or a renegade Anglican bishop. As always at right-wing political events, women were outnumbered by men, but the ones here seemed sane and pleasant as well as elegant. There were no “tradwife” lifestyle bloggers in sight — such women were no doubt attending parties in Georgetown, scolding the G. K. Chestertons for not yet having eight children apiece.

Six hundred guests attended the ball, not counting a journalist infiltrator who was swiftly thrown out. The evening began with a sit-down dinner for two hundred where it became clear that most of the “barbarian right” consisted, not of nude fascist bodybuilders, but polite mummy’s boys with PhDs (most of whom, to be fair, were indeed bodybuilders, if not nude fascists). The one known as “Raw Egg Nationalist” turns out to be a noted amateur Latinist with a doctorate in mediaeval church history from Oxford. Also striking was how Christian the room was, with Catholics and converts to Greek or Russian Orthodoxy in a slight majority even among the Silicon Valley types in attendance. One speaker, a Mormon, declared that Trump had been protected from assassination by the hand of God, and most of the crowd agreed.

Although the dinner guests were polite, the event itself was not. Trump’s former Chief Strategist, the legendarily dishevelled-looking Steve Bannon, bounded onto the stage during dinner dressed as though he had just woken up in a neighbour’s hedges with no idea of how he got there, and proceeded to announce, among other things, that Mark Zuckerberg ought to be in prison. The audience roared its approval despite not being that drunk yet. Once it was, during the fourth course (Baked Alaska), one speaker was forced to deliver his impassioned jeremiad against school shooters over the noise of schoolboy snickering. Later in the night, someone’s dog, an enormous and adorable St Bernard named Augustine, took a dump on the dance floor. The Watergate’s cleaning staff was, thank Heaven, efficient in ways that government never is. And the band played on.

Now that the dance has begun, who gets to lead, and who will follow

The after-party for the Coronation Ball went on until dawn; most of the guests ended up watching Trump’s inaugural address on Monday on an iPad screen whilst nursing a Bloody Mary and/or a hangover. But by Monday evening people were ready to party again, having been energised by Trump’s blunt, vengeful speech. The President has found God — evidently a militant Calvinist God, as represented in the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. What does this mean for the “barbarian right”, a fair few of whom are Nietzschean atheists?

Keeperman finds himself at the head of a new movement that has no clear intellectual, aesthetic or literary direction as yet. After all, most of its members have only just met in person. Now that the dance has begun, who gets to lead, and who will follow — and what does Trump himself think of all this?